Cook's economy

Elizabeth Hurley's cooking again. Today she says she can use up the slightly stale bread with an excellent French recipe for pain perdu. This involves a pack of butter, sugar, more eggs, a vanilla pod, milk, mixed spice and star anise, plus a couple of mangos. There is the slight excuse of eight slices of stale bread, which I've found lurking at the bottom of the bread basket.

Actually, the cost of the slightly stale bread is nothing against the ripe mangos, vanilla pod and the star anise. Since the bottom of the value wok I bought some time ago at Tesco is now irrevocably burned, I could add the cost of that in too. Thus this recipe to economically use up eight slices of stale bread on a mid-afternoon snack has cost the equivalent of eleven loaves of posh fresh French bread from Waitrose.

Not that I am complaining. Dig, who has not yet had his choppers round either the lime tart or the pain perdu, says that providing a tenner for Elizabeth Hurley to go shopping with Shark to Tesco everytime she says it is time to make a snack will increase the weekly expenditure on food by a further £140 a week. Dig has capped her next snack budget at £3.