Old fashioned and a budget beater, but tasty

Gosh, its been ages since I cooked some of these more old fashioned meals, first there was the meatloaf, then the leftover fritters and now for heavens sake Rissoles, not only rissoles, but gravy, dried peas and plain mashed potatoes.

The Darling does like dried peas, his Mum used to cook them, I have a tendency to burn the poor little blighters, in fact we lost a perfectly good coffee table after one effort.

The only concession to anything a little more up to date food wise is the caramelised sweet balsamic onions on top and no there isn't a recipe, just slice up as many red onions as you think you will need and then slice up a bit more.

Cook them slowly in a heavy based fry pan with a little olive oil and just a tad of butter until they are nicely caramelised, add a good splash of balsamic vinegar and let sit over a low heat for a few minutes. Rather yum if do say so myself.

Ohh and the coffee table? well the family was home for dinner and there was a tad of wine involved, so judgement was a little skewed, .......you understand.

So after filling the kitchen with burnt pea smoke, I removed gently, well o.k., chucked, the saucepan into the sink and filled the pan with water,

Mistake!

Big mistake!

The steam smelled worse than the smoke, so I slapped a lid on the pot and just left it to moulder.

Someone helpful came alone, smelled the burnt pea smell, and immediately knowing what I had done - past experience you know - and to be really helpful removed the saucepan to the back deck, where the only place to put the pan down was the coffee table, oh and did I mention that the top of the table was glass??

Someone helpful was barely back in the kitchen when there was this rather explosive bang, followed by the tinkling sound of glass raining down from the verandah to the concrete below.

DDIL was not happy, it was her Coffee Table.