A little while ago I started to share my meal plans over on my meal planning blog – Meal Planning Made Easy but it felt a bit boring just writing our my meal plan on a Monday as a list so last week I decided I was going to do things a different way. So for the last week or so, I’ve been posting a picture of our tea along with a recipe or some pointers on how to make your own version!
I’m going to keep doing that this week but I wanted to post on here to tell you about it in advance because this week’s meals have a bit of a theme going on – they’re all going to be made using the ‘by Sainsbury’s’ range of food. I was initially asked to post just one recipe made using these ingredients and I’d planned to make it today but I woke up feeling a bit bleugh so I asked Mr Frugal to pop to Sainsburys for me before he went to work and buy some key ingredients.
The problem was that I’d just woken up and as I said, wasn’t feeling great so when he asked what I needed I just said to him to use his common sense and buy me some things that I could make a meal out of. He came back half an hour later with four carrier bags of ‘by Sainsburys’ goodies and a smile in his face as he had bought so much! 😉
So, when I got up this morning I found a kitchen counter filled with everything from pasta to couscous and from chickpeas to passata and a fridge filled with gammon, chicken and bacon! He’d even bought things like eggs, cheese and breadcrumbs which is great for me when I’m trying to come up with a recipe but honestly, he’s not usually this enthusiastic when he shops.
So I have now have more than enough food to cook meals for us for most of the week so be ready for lots of pictures on Instagram and over on Meal Planning Made Easy.
For today though, I’m going to share what we had for tea – Tomato and Chickpea Cous Cous with Gammons Steaks.
Ingredients
250g Cous Cous
300g Vegetable Stock (made using stock cubes and boiling water)
2 tablespoons tomato puree (we bought the tomato puree with chilli in for 30p)
1 tin of chickpeas
1 green chilli, finely chopped (the fresh ones were reduced to 19p so we used one of those and froze the rest)
1 carton passata
Gammon steaks
- Pour the vegetable stock over the cous cous, quickly stir in the tomato puree and leave for five minutes.
- Pop your gammon steak under the grill and start cooking that – the cous cous will be ready by the time this is done.
- Gently heat the chickpeas in a pan (or the microwave) while you wait for the cous cous.
- Run a fork through the cous cous to ‘fluff’ it up a bit and then add in the chickpeas and chilli and pour into a large pan.
- Pour in the passata and gently heat it up while stirring the passata thouroughly into the cous cous.
- Don’t forget to turn your gammon over!
- Serve up the cous cous and when the gammon’s cooked, add the gammon steaks on the top of the cous cous.
You could miss out the passata stage if you’d prefer which would mean that the cous cous would be ready to serve after you add the chickpeas and chilli. I add it in because the kids used to say cous cous felt quite ‘dry’ when they were eating it and actually, it tastes lovely so I’ve just kept on making it this way ever since!
Now, what am I going to make using breadcrumbs this week?
Answers on the back of a postcard please….
Disclosure – I was sent a gift card for Sainsburys to buy my ingredients.
