Happy New Year! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. I’ve spent most of the last week eating, sleeping, and watching TV by the fire, punctuated by the occasional social gathering and repressed bout of guilt: January 4th would soon arrive and normal service would resume. The day has arrived and the snow and [...]

When I buy myself lunch in town now, it is usually because I’ve been very disorganised in the morning and not had a ton of porridge or made myself a healthy, nutritious packed lunch. This happens to me all the time, because while my intentions are recessionarily pure, the reality is a frantic mess punctuated [...]

Consumed by Consommé On the way to pick up free tickets to an Elvis Presley and The Beatles reunion gig in the Olympia last week I started to thinking about making an Asian broth. So I went into the Asia market on Drury St and I picked up some ingredients what for to make some [...]

Although there are good lunchtime deals on offer these days, it is still a fact that packing your own lunch will save you money; even my cat knows that. By spending €2 on a morning coffee and €5 on lunch, you could potentially spend €1,800 a year. That’s €9,000 over five years and a possible [...]

Shorbet adas Lentil soup I’ve never been a big lentil fan, but this soup is brought to life with the distinctive cumin and tangy lemon combination. It tastes of holidays. Serves six. Ingredients 200g split red lentils 50g butter 1 medium onion, chopped salt 1 tablespoon ground cumin, plus extra for garnish Lemon wedges, to [...]

In my potentially never-ending quest to use up a large amount of mint, I prepared this Split Pea and Mint soup. I was on holiday in California a few years ago and this soup seemed to be bizarrely popular. “Yes, we have split pea soup!” declared the enthusiastic signs. Since then, I always have a [...]

Learning how to cook, Step One: Find a cook book with easy recipes and pick something, the ingredients for which you recognise and can locate. This cold cold week, easing into things, I thought I’d give Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Foods a go, given that it’s meant for people like me and the recipes satisfy [...]

When cooking purists give you recipes that include spinach, they will always tell you to buy fresh spinach and wilt it down. This is one area where I tend to cheat, as I find that frozen spinach works just as well and is much cheaper. Fresh spinach is delicious in salads, but I wouldn’t bother [...]

Thanks to CheapEats reader Sinead Gibney, who  recommends M&S tinned soups. I wouldn’t normally be a fan of tinned soup, but I have to agree with Sinead that these are very tasty, great value at 59c (compared to €1.15 for Baxter’s Cream of Tomato soup in Tesco and Superquinn) and, overall, much better than most [...]

I needed to make something for dinner that would help soothe the agony of my aforementioned filthy cold, and remembered that French Onion Soup is delicious, soothing and surprisingly cheap to make. This is just my version of a classic recipe; the idea for roasting the onions came from Nigel Slater. This will make either [...]