Spicy burgers and jazzed up courgettes

Tonight for I had to !make burgers with my minced beef so they could get frozen. I brought the beef reduced, it's only supposed to be 12% fat so I chose to make burgers from it thinking they'd appreciate the taste more than a chilli...

So I mixed 400grams of beef (£1.75 from Morrison's) with one onion (from a 5kg bag Morrison's), a tablespoon of mustard and another of ketchup, a sprinkle of garlic, oregano, chilli powder and black pepper.
I made 12 altogether, then put 4 back as one and mixed in one chopped up green chili (from a medium bag of loose ones, reduced to 25p from Morrison's)...

Stuck it in the frying pan with one tablespoon oil and surrounded by sliced courgette.... Cue a hot and spicy party!

Yummy!!

Homemade Bread in a Bread Machine

We own a Panasonic bread maker SD206....

It was given to us by a relative who no longer uses it and though we might. although we've had it a while we haven't made much, 2 basic loaves (1 on rapid & 1 on normal setting) and 1 cheese and bacon loaf.

We did get an instruction manual with the machine but its half English half German and has a major lack of recipes. I think there may have been another manual. Anyway some searching on google lead me to this blog and a option to download a scanned in copy. Result :-)

Although I like the taste of homemade bread I find it goes stale quite quickly. The last loaf made was a plain and we ended up with both crusts at the end. They had started going stale so I chopped them into small cubes and stuck them in the over to go crispy - wahoo croutons for our salad! 

This is the ingredients list for the basic loaf (medium size I think) including what it cost me to make :

1 TSP yeast (5g)                                3p
425g Flour.                                       23p
1 tablespoon  Sugar (15g).              1p
1 tsp Salt (5g).                                    1p
15g Butter.                                          3p
1.5 tablespoons Dry milk (22g).    13p

Water 310ml

Total cost - 44p

The next thing I want to try is making bread in the slow cooker...