Rick Stein

Most TV chefs, even the blessed Delia, I find hard to watch. I want to move Nigel Slater's fringe out of the way and tell him to get a bloody move on; cannot stomach the egos of Gordon Ramsay and Nigel Rhodes (have yet to hear a good word said about the latter by anyone who has met him either); Jamie Oliver has too many annoying mannerisms to list, plus I learned how to fry stuff ages ago anyway; and the popularity of the Two Fat Bikers and the surviving Hairy Lady defies my comprehension.

And finally the 'but'. I find HFW very watchable, and likewise Rick Stein. Maybe it's a cultural thing, they are both well educated for a start (but then so is Nigella Lawson, and I can't stand her cream and cleavage frenzies). Or the fact that green issues are at the forefront of their thinking. Anyway, I watched Rick Stein's programme on Mumbai this week and was inspired to cook a curry. Now the house has an all-pervading smell of curry spices (especially fenugreek).

Unsurprisingly given that it is the food of more than a billion people, most very poor, the curry is a great weapon in the austerity cook's armoury. Last night's was actually a prawn curry, so £2.50 for the king prawns, but the plentiful rice was for pennies, I bought the tin of coconut milk for 50p from the exotic shelves at Sainsbury's, added a basics red pepper and a couple of chopped onions, so pennies there too, made quickfire dal with a 79p tin of lentils and some garlicky spiced butter, and we had our fill for not very much. The spices again came from the 'ethnic' shelves, good-sized bags a fraction of the price of pretty Schwarz bottles, and JS naan breads at 80p were about half the price of Sharwood's.

The inspiring thing about Mr Stein's curry was that it was made quickly without in any way being thrown together. I didn't follow his recipe, though I did take his tip of frying my spices more than I would normally have done, with some liquid to hand to prevent burning. No complaints, and next to nothing left, so I think it was a success. When we are in Cornwall this summer if I bump into him in Padstow - we will definitely eat at one of his places - I will shake him by the hand.

A note of praise for Sainsbury's: a week ago I tried to make dal from yellow split peas. Soaked for 32 not 24 hours, they were boiled for the requisite 10 minutes, then simmered for 30 more; then another 30; then another 20, by which time we had waited for the rest of the meal long enough. The peas were bullets, utterly useless. I took the pack and some evidence next day as I was so annoyed, and they gave me my money back and a £5 voucher for the inconvenience.

Shopping Diversity

I have written previously about the money to be saved buying stuff from the 'ethnic' aisles in supermarkets, one example of where this makes sense being coconut milk, about half the price of the posher tin elsewhere. I have started looking at the similar freezer section, and found a couple of bargains there.

The first is frozen okra, cut into short pieces, the bag I think 99p containing enough for three meals' worth (I'd guess 500g). We had some in last night's curry, still tasty, easily prepared (stewed in a homemade, tomato-rich sauce), and a bit of a change. That curry btw was served with rice from a mega bag also in the Asian shelves, better quality than the 'normal' white rice we had previously and pound-for-pound much cheaper.

The other is much dearer, but on the bang-for-your-buck scale is still value for money - large freshwater prawns, raw, prepared with heads off and the body split beneath so they open out nicely in cooking, and are easy to peel. There is no comparison in terms of flavour with the very disappointing Taste the Difference king prawns 3m along the freezer, the freshwater ones reminding me of superb meals in Indonesia and the Philippines. A large bag is more than £6, but there's lots of meat (more than in the BOGOF bags that would cost £5) and tons of taste. Defrosted slowly then simply fried with salt and garlic they need nothing else to make a finger-licking starter - an occasional treat but a genuine one, and genuinely big.