Budget friendly recipes

Yesterday I came across a blog by A Girl Called Jack who started out writing recipes she could make on a really really low budget in England. Not only did I find her blog articles moving, I realised that many of her cheap recipes suited a VSO budget down to the ground. I figured that I could probably make quite a few of them based on what I could source here in The Gambia. When living on a low budget and / or being limited to just a few ingredients (in my case tomato, aubergine and onion!) it's nice to look for some culinary inspiration once in a while. 

I found a recipe for aubergine and kidney bean burgers, which I made last night. Ms Jack costs everything up as she goes, so some of my costs are included as well - although I halved the aubergine and kidney beans to use for my dinner tonight so they will make two meals for me.

Ingredients:

1 tin of kidney beans (30 dalasi / 60 pence)
1 Aubergine (25 dalasi / 50 pence)
1 onion (about 3 dalasi / 6 pence)
A little fresh chilli (1 dalasi / 2 pence)
Teaspoon of tikka masala powder - should be cumin but I made do with what I had... tikka masala powder sent to me in a food parcel from my bestest.
Some flour (from my store cupboard)  

Served with 1/2 cup of rice (4 dalasi / 8 pence) and tomato and onion sauce (approx 8 dalasi / 16 pence)

The original recipe is here. I softened one onion, half the aubergine, chilli and the tikka masala powder in a frying pan while boiling half the tin of kidney beans to make them soft, as the recipe recommended. Once the onion / aubergine mix was soft and nicely fried I added it to the drained kidney beans with some salt and pepper, and mashed the mix up. I stirred in some flour and left it to rest for a while. 

I decided to serve my burgers with rice and a homemade tomato sauce, so I prepared the sauce and cooked the rice while the burger mix rested. Next I shaped two burgers from the mixture and fried them for a few minutes on each side, until crisp and brown. 

At this point the light went out, so the rest of my cooking and photo taking was done in the dark - but here are the results:

Aubergine and kidney bean burger with rice
and tomato sauce

It was a good meal, and nice to eat something different!