Thinking Outside The Spice Box.

Now you know me. I like to make my wonga stretch as far as possible without reaching for the old hair shirt. It's all about having a good quality of life with treats but done on a shoe string. Saint I ain't! Over the years I've enjoyed working out different ways of meeting challenges and finely honing my lateral thinking skills for it's taken me down all sorts of unexpected avenues and a fair few blind alleys if I am being honest. This is the latest little experiment.

Mr GBT has being doing the 5:2 diet of late and Monday and Thursday are his fasting days. In reality he does eat but much, much less and I try to support him by producing a tasty vegetarian meal that still comes within my GBT grocery budget. The following recipe came to me via a friend but I'll just put the link up http://www.healthy-diet-recipes.co.uk/2011/04/moroccan-rice-and-chickpeas/ My version only differs in that it says use 2tsp of ras el hanout rub. Never having heard of it I rummaged around for in the supermarket aisle. Eventually I found it only to discover that a tiny box was priced at £2.40 and that was on offer! Scrub that I thought....my supermarket site here I come. A quick check proved that it was that expensive elsewhere so by now I could only conclude that it must have pure gold dust in it.

Out of curiousity I googled to find out just what was in this fabled Moroccan spice mix and happened across this
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Ras-El-Hanout-Spice-Blend Now I buy my herbs and spices for low prices at a couple of discount places in town never from the supermarket and I have a reasonable range. As you will see there's nothing particularly racy in there and a quick check proved that I already had everything in stock. It took me a matter of moments to dry fry the seeds and bash them up in my pestle and mortar. I now have my very own little pot of ras el hanout and yes, I used it in the recipe for supper tonight.

Shall be trying that little wheeze again I think!

Arilx