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Cooking on a Budget
Welcome to this regular cookery post for residents, service users, Ashram staff and anyone else who wants to know about eating and cooking great food with minimal cost. Sahdaish Pall, who's worked with service users for years, was inspired by the families she works with to create this great book. Every month we'll post a new recipe. Below is Sahdaish's introduction to what inspires her and why she's doing it.
I started cooking from a very young age, experimenting from about the age of 7 and by the time I was 11, I was cooking for the whole family.
My inspiration and teacher has always been my mum who taught me how to cook so many different types of Indian food, with such ease. She always said that I had to learn how to cook because it was traditional for Indian girls to be able to cook, (Bend it like Beckham ring a bell) but I didn’t mind learning because I loved cooking so much anyway. Even at Secondary school I took up cookery lessons and always got top marks in my tests and exams.
I’ve always enjoyed entertaining my friends and family and from the age of about 16, I would often invite them round and I would experiment with lots of different dishes.
Now I often get asked to help out at parties and dinners to cook for large numbers of people and it’s great when people compliment my culinary delights.
For the last 10 years I have been working with people who have become homeless due to abuse and mental ill health. In my day time job I manage services for women and children that have had to leave their home due to domestic abuse and they will come and live in a refuge where I work. I started out as a volunteer for Ashram Housing Association and I have worked my way up to this position. Whilst working for Ashram I have covered a number of roles, but when I worked as a support worker I would often hold cookery sessions and introduce new recipes to the women. I knew that many of them were on a tight budget because of their circumstances, so I would teach them to cook great healthy wholesome meals on a budget. We always cooked something new, and I would blend different cultural cooking to introduce new foods to the service users. I often got asked for the recipes afterwards.
I started to write down my recipes because I wanted to help other people to cook good, wholesome, healthy foods no matter what their circumstances. Your diet is very important for good health, physical and mental health.
People ask me how I manage to hold a full time job, go home and cook for the family. I always tell them that actually it’s not that difficult and it’s great when you include your children and your partner in the cooking: it’s an opportunity to talk about what’s been happening in that day, and it's special time for bonding. I want both my kids to learn about cooking and if I can show them how easy and cheap it is to cook, then it will make life easier for them when they get older and become more independent.
When I go out shopping for my weekly groceries, I plan for the whole week. I just can’t afford to buy food ad hoc like I used to. I used to just go to 1 supermarket and buy everything from there, because it made life easier but now I research where the best deals are, the internet is a wonderful thing.
You have to be careful on where you spend your money and look out for offers in supermarkets and now I’m really strict, if it’s not on offer, it’s not going in my shopping trolley. If I get a good deal, I bulk buy where I can from the supermarkets, so you don’t have to compromise on quality and you end up saving some money in your pocket as well.
Recently at a house warming at the new Ashram Refuge many staff members were able to taste some of my cooking skills, and every person that tried my curried goat or Thai prawn curry asked for a copy of the recipe.
So Ashram has decided to profile some of my recipes on its website for all staff to try out and you will be seeing a new recipe here every month. Give it a go and let me know how you get on, and if there’s anything that you would like the recipe for, and I know it, I will help you out.