More gardening / household stuff, this time in Aldi. If you’re green-fingered and actually have the time to garden on top of working more hours for less money, dive right in, it appears to be your month at the discounters.
On the food front, however, the bargains are about quality not quantity this week; the 79c fresh fruit and veg offerings are excellent, including Asparagus, Pears, Mixed Peppers, Green Apples, Kerr Pink Potatoes and Carrot & Parsnip trays. That really is an excellent basis for dinners and snacks for the whole week, totalling just €4.74. These are available until next Saturday, the 26th, so if I were you I’d be thinking Roasted Red Pepper Soup, Proscuitto-wrapped asparagus, Irish Stew or Potato Dauphinois. Nyum and cheap.
The meat offers include Beef Stir-Fry strips for €2.99, but I find you have to be careful with this – I don’t know what end of cow this offer comes from, but some cuts such as round meat won’t work with the high-heat flash cooking of a stir-fry, but will mellow beautifully when slow-cooked. Personally, I prefer to buy sirloin on offer, then I can be 
sure I won’t be chewing on little brown rubber erasers in my meal. The chicken breast joint for €3.99 is a good buy if you don’t like brown meat – there isn’t half the waste that you’d get when buying a whole chicken.
There are two very weird pasta specials this week; ‘Both in One Pasta’ which sounds to me like a very dodgy translation rather than a market-grabbing product name. Oddly, this is white pasta which supposedly contains the fibre of 
wholewheat pasta. Mmm, jury’s out on that one. Then there’s chilli pasta, which has taken care of the oh-so-difficult job of sprinkling chilli flakes onto your pasta and added it to the mix. You have been warned.
Finally, there are a few pieces of kitchen equipment on sale this week, some more useful than others; while I’m not a fan of deep fat frying anything, I can see the use in having a mini deep fat fryer (€19.99) on hand in the kitchen, for fiddly little things which require deep-frying, but aren’t worth the huge danger of filling a pot with oil. Possibly a good buy if your kitchen is bigger mine and can devote counter-space to yet another contraption.