Devising a new household budget

We've finally bought a house so the finances are under scrutiny. I've been analysing the joint account transactions from the last year with a view to generating a new budget plan for this year and have discovered the following:

• ~43% of our spending goes on food (food + eating out + veg box)
• We spend more on TV licence than broadband (I know which I get better value from)
• Our veg box costs more than our water rates

The categorisation was only done roughly so I'm sure the "Food" category contains plenty which isn't but it was easiest to just mark all Sainos and M&S spending as food.

We're also switching the joint account from Cahoot (who don't do faster payments, still!) to A&L so this data was all extracted from Cahoot. Alas they have no nice export tools, so this is all derived from a lot of cut & pasting and Google Spreadsheets.

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How to cook a perfect poached egg (the easy way)

Eggs are amazing, and undeniably poached eggs are the finest of all the eggs. However, they're fiddly to do well and getting the cooking time right can be tricky. Most of the recommended cooking methods involve making a vortex in the boiling water and adding some vinegar, but having used this method for a number of years, I found it produced unpredictable results and made for a washing up is a nightmare.

It sounds pretty weird, but I suggest you try poaching your eggs using cling film. This is a cooking tip that I picked up from b3ta a couple of years ago, and have spent a while perfecting.

You will need:

• A fresh egg
• A mug, or glass
• A square piece of cling film
• A little oil

Start by tearing off a square of cling film and laying it over your mug/glass to create a shallow plastic well. Ensure that the centre of the cling film is in the middle of your receptacle. Grease the inside of the well by adding a drop of oil and running it around the with your finger (this makes for easier egg removal).

Next, crack your egg into the ready-greased well, then carefully gather the corners of the cling film together - I usually pick a starting corner, grab the opposite corner and move around until I have all the corners neatly together. Next, seal the egg in by twisting the cling film round. Make sure you remove all the air from the cling film pouch when you do this as air bubbles prevent perfect cooking.

Finally, loosely tie the top of the cling film and your egg is ready to cook. If you're doing a batch, you can pop it on the side now while you wrap your other eggs.

To cook, bring a saucepan containing enough water to cover the eggs to a fast bubbling boil, and then drop your eggs into the pan. Set a timer for 4 minutes and then use the cooking time to get on with making your toast/beans/tea/coffee etc.

Once 4 minutes is up, fish the eggs out of the water and pop them on the side.

To serve, cut the knot off the top of the parcel and gently pull the cling film apart to release the egg. I usually go straight from the cling film to the top of the toast.

Voila! A lovely poached egg, cooked on the outside and runny in the middle with no messy washing up. Give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Please note that the example is quite a long way from my normal standard. I was so caught up in taking the photos that I ignored the timer for a bit too long and also burnt the bacon. May was not impressed.

Heston's Little Chef

I don't know if you caught "Big Chef takes on Little Chef" on Channel 4 as part of their "Great British Food Fight" season at the beginning of the year? If you didn't, my summary is that the ailing Little Chef roadside restaurant chain agreed to have Heston Blumenthal come and give them a complete overhaul to try and get them turning a profit and keep them in business. A more in-depth summary can be found here.

As soon as we discovered that the Little Chef chosen to pilot Heston's new menu was the Popham branch, just up the road on the A303 near Junction 8 of the M3, we headed on over to give it a whirl. This was a few weeks ago and shortly after the final TV show, and when we arrived there was a six car queue to get into the car park and a minimum 1.5 hour wait for a table. This was at about 2.30pm on a Sunday afternoon, and as we hadn't eaten we decided to give it a miss. 

We had another go tonight with our friends Kev & Dean, on a Wednesday night at 8:45pm and found the restaurant much quieter. We had a bit of excitement on arrival when we spotted a bald chap that looked like a bit like Heston, especially given that Kev's sister had been earlier in the day and seen a film crew. The new décor is smart and crisp, with a painted sky, modern tiles and chairs, plush booths and dangling butterflies. They now serve alcohol, and the classic orange lollies have been replaced by delicious jelly beans.

We each had three courses, with me opting for mushroom soup, sausage and mash and then waffle with ice cream. Whereas I was a little pedestrian, Kev went classic style with the Olympic breakfast (“Best black pudding I've ever had”), and Dean braved the braised ox cheeks (“Very nice, very tender”). I was initially a little bit disappointed with the food, as given Heston's reputation, I was expecting amazing quality and incredible attention to detail. May's mussels were beautifully presented, but small and my sausage and mash although tasty was not mind blowing.

I guess you could say that the food was less overtly amazing than perhaps I had expected, but then I remembered that the sausage and mash I was eating was costing me £6.25, and May's mussels were £4.95. I then really appreciated the dichotomy of getting Heston to rework the place – his focus on high quality ingredients and innovation is clearly at odds with the Little Chef's price bracket. Having realised this though and having modified my perceptions to fit that fact that I was in a competitively priced roadside restaurant, I became very impressed with what Heston has achieved at Popham.

If all Little Chefs offered the same quality and menu as Heston's trial restaurant, I'd certainly make more effort to stop at them when travelling. I believe then I'd be in line with the Little Chef idea that travellers on long journeys will make multiple stops at Little Chefs as they traverse the country.

It's going to be very interesting to see the final TV programme and discover whether or not Popham has turned a profit. I hope that Heston is successful, as it would be a real shame to lose a brand as iconic as the Little Chef in amongst all the other casualties of the economic crisis. Either way, I'm pleased to have experienced it as it will either form the blueprint for all Little Chefs across the country, or it will revert back to the current mediocre menu but keep its decoration and perhaps become a bizarre curio of Hampshire roadside eating. “Hey, do you remember when?...”

Hotel du Vin, Winchester

Yesterday, for May's birthday, we went to the Hotel du Vin in Winchester for dinner, taking advantage of their ridiculously good value "This 2009, think 2000 and wine" deal. The deal is on until the end of March at all Hotel du Vin, and offers 2 courses, a bottle of wine and coffee for 2 people for a jaw droppingly cheap £29. Hotel du Vin is owned by Malmaison (if you haven't stayed in one, make the effort, they're truly great hotels) and it's worth noting that Mal are running the same great deal.

As an ex-fussy eater, I'm still not a massive fan of overly complicated food, or overly formal dining and I'd always had the impression that I wouldn't enjoy eating at the Hotel du Vin as it's something of a Winchester institution, in an historic building and with formal and slightly imposing decor. My mind was put at rest when I discovered that they were owned by Mal, and I have to say that based on our recent experience my fears were totally unfounded.

The service was impeccable and effortless, without being formal, intimidating or intrusive. When I "gracefully" dropped a spoon, someone was on hand in about 5 seconds to pick it up, closely followed by someone else with a new spoon for me on a tray. Obviously I dropped the spoon because I was testing them, not at all through mal-coordination. On the waitress’s advice, we had a main each and a starter and dessert to share. We ordered one side dish and stuck to the house wine, but the sommelier did successfully upsell us two glasses of champagne otherwise we'd have paid just a little over £30 for the whole lot. 

We had gnocchi with provencal sauce to start, then I had confit duck and May had lamb neck plus our side of green beans with pine nuts, and we finished with an excellent crème brulée. The food was consistently excellent and the overall experience comes with a high recommend, especially on the current £29 deal – book your local HdV now!  We particularly enjoyed checking out our fellow diners in the Winchester bistro, who were mostly a bit stuffy and occasionally lolarious irritating, although I think that’s probably just Winchester for you.

The only two things that could have been done better were: 1) on arrival, the girl on the front desk was on the phone and remained so for about 5 minutes while we waited and no other member of staff took care of us. 2) the bill could have been brought quicker, I much prefer the American style of bringing the bill early and saying “take as long as you want”.

Cookalong-a-curry

Last night May and I did week 6 of Gordon Ramsay's Cookalong. We skipped the first course (lamb kebabs), but cooked the chicken tikka masala and bombay oranges. Overall it was very enjoyable, but I don't think we'd have managed it without Tivo and the ability to pause the show. Gordon goes very quickly and doesn't give the best of instructions. I also didn't rate his "roll the chilli between your fingers, chop the top off and shake out the seeds" technique, as lots of seeds got left behind resulting in a rather hot curry!