Prawn Bisque

I had such a busy day on sunday, that all I could do after tea was go to bed. We had a hurried tea of stir fried garlic prawns, with sour cream dip and chips, followed by ice cream. A real cop-out tea!

The saving grace was that the prawns were unpeeled, which left me with a pile of shells to deal with today.

What? Didn't I throw the shells away? No chance! I put some oil in a pan and sweated a small onion in it, added some lemon grass and ginger to that, then tipped in all the shells, heads, eyes and all!!! After adding about a pint of water and bringing that mix to the boil, I strained it into a clean pan - THEN I threw the shells into my Bokashi bin ( a posh sort of compost bin). I added some carefully chopped, sliced, very fresh looking veg and simmered it all gently until the veg was JUST done. Take care not to cook it too much or you will lose the taste. The veg needs to be sliced very finely too, or you lose the freshness of it all. The veg I used today was spring onion, carrot batons, sweetcorn, peas and green beans (the last 3 came out of my freezer), you just need a small handful of each.

I did some garlic bread ( see meatless post) to go with that and even Finicky Keith ate the lot!

I think the whole meal cost less than £1 for both of us. Pudding I got from M&S - chocolate eclairs for 20p each!

I find the expensive shops like M&S and Waitrose seem to do HUGE 50 - 75% price cuts when the items are at their sell - by date, so it's worth trying them out at the end of the day to see what you can find. The Co-op by comparison only knocks a 1/3 off the price. Not good.