OK I have a confession to make –  the ragu sauce I made recently wasn’t made with Italian pancetta. It wasn’t even some British bacon lardons. I bought the 60p cooking bacon from Tesco (I’m sure the other supermarkets have an equivalent). Money is tight at the moment and I thought to myself ‘ lets give this a go’. A housemate of mine way back in the 90s brought this stuff to my attention, with his student friendly throw-it-all-in chilli recipe, where pretty much everything came out of tins and he threw in this cooking bacon. Now I’m sure this is not going to be winning any sustainable farming awards, but at 60p for 500g of bacon, if you’re strapped for cash and looking to add some protein to a meal this can’t really be beaten – it’s cheaper even than liver and this is BACON! More

I had this half baguette hanging around for about a week. One advantage of good bread is that it goes stale, rather than mouldy and the more stale the bread, the better it is at soaking up the custard.

Dried fruit can be a bit of a marmite thing for some people, but catering to those tastes wasn’t my reason for doing a chocolate bread and butter pudding, I just fancied a change, particularly as I done the traditional bread and butter pudding for the house a few weeks earlier. More

I came across this simple Spanish dish, Patatas Riojanas, the week that Jamie Oliver blew up on social media for committing crimes again Spanish cooking by adding chorizo to a paella. I was mooching about on the internet having a laugh at all the outrage when I discovered that Jamie Oliver’s own Food Tube channel has a video of an authentic Valencian paella, the same chef, Omar Allibhoy also has a video for this simple Riojan dish of chorizo and potatoes and I felt like it would be appropriate to cook a Spanish dish that is supposed to have chorizo in it. More

Everyone in the house got one of these absolutely gargantuan courgettes from a friend’s allotment, seriously they were the size of my forearm. It seemed a shame if they weren’t made the centre of their own dish, so a good stuffing was on the cards.

There wasn’t really a plan with this one. At first I pondered going Middle Eastern but that would involve getting more spices for the cupboard, so in the interest of keeping it cheap and simple I stuck to Italian flavours. I didn’t want to just make a ragu as I’d done that quite a lot recently.

The idea of meatballs appealed a lot, and with the courgettes being so big, several meatballs would be able to nestle in the scooped out middle no problem. I went for some sausagemeat meatballs and fried aubergine, covered in tomato sauce and topped with mozzarella. More