Use it up banana flapjack

The bandwagon must be pretty full at the moment, with all those who have jumped on it to declare that we should use up our leftovers, prepare budget recipes, not waste food......don't they realise that some of that is just not new any more and that hundreds of thousands of people have been doing just that for generations? As for Jamie Oliver's new book, from what he said on The One Show tonight, it sounds just like a rehash of Economy Gastronomy which Allegra McEvedy and Paul Merrill did a few years ago now.  He said that most of his recipes cost no more than £1.30 per portion.  Compare that with the pennies that Jack Monroe costs out her recipes, or Frugaldom's blog, where she aims to feed herself and her house mates for about £1 a day or just slightly more, and you can see why the celebrity chefs have a way to go to get into their league.

We had a lovely supper tonight with only the sausages not produced here.  Roast potatoes, fresh runner beans and fried courgettes with sausages.  Just perfect for the two of us.  No leftovers either!

Our time is taken up with preserving our bounty at the moment - we have been gifted a large quantity of plums today and so we had to stone them, and then I stewed them before preparing them for the freezer.  The other option would have been to jam them, but we have years' worth of jam in the cupboard and no need to make more right now.  The FH loves stewed fruit with custard, so that will keep him happy through the winter.  We bought some tomatoes from a roadside stall today - nearly 5lbs of them for just £1.50, and so I can make more courgette chutney this weekend.  We have everything else that we need in the garden or store cupboard.  There is a lovely lady at the Craft Club at chapel who told me that she loves marrows so whenever I find an overgrown courgette in the patch which is masquerading as a marrow, it ends up on her doorstep.  She keeps wanting to pay me for the blinking things, and I just have to keep repeating that she is doing me a favour in taking them off my hands!

My own use-it-up recipe for the day was a banana flapjack which was posted on MSE forum today.  I had two bananas which were ready to flow out of their skins, so ripe were they, and so it seemed a useful alternative to the usual banana cake!  The recipe is here, and it worked really well, the FH declaring it "rather good!"  I will be adding that to my repertoire of cakes and bakes for sure.