WEATHER IMPROVES! HOORAH!

Rogue raspberry from under fence

Well it's been a week of hit and miss; some days have been brilliant and others have been, shall we say, a little stressful.  But the Wing It kitchen has been reasonably busy along with the Wing It garden.

Monday was last of the frozen pumpkin, last of the carrots from last week and chopped swede, coconut curry.  Problem was I thought I had some coconut milk in the cupboard which I didn't; whoops! I did, however, have desiccated coconut, so I stuck a couple of handfuls in a bowl and poured on boiling water and left for half an hour.  This I then drained and squeezed which gave me a very watery, but coconut flavoured liquid which I used to cook the veggies in before adding the curry spices and the coconut at the end.  Good flavour, but wouldn't recommend swede in a curry unless a tomato based one.

Tuesday was eventful to say the least as I had a hospital appointment to check my ears as I suffered from a dose of tinitus a few months ago and my ears felt blocked, but there was no wax or infection. On the way up to the hospital I get a phone call from a job I'd applied for many months ago asking if I was still interested and would I like to come along for an 'interview/chat' the next day.  Eeek!  Anyway, ears all fine, no hearing loss; probably just a dose of blocked sinus/ear canal and that is now drained.  Phew! So nice and easy dinner of spaghetti bolognese made with quorn mince and my oven roasted and slow cooked tomato sauce with added sliced mushrooms and a splash of balsamic vinegar.  Again I had the buckwheat pasta which I am definitely liking.

Weds arrived and I walked son up to his course, popped into docs for results of blood test and all now fine!  Eh???  So one week they are fine, two weeks later they are borderline diabetic and two weeks after that they are fine again!  Osteo after a quick Aldi shop and I can finally walk without feeling like an old lady.  Getting older sucks!  Haha.  Interview in the afternoon and I'm offered the job!!! Double EEEEEEEKKKKK!!!  So two evenings a week as of next week I'm a working woman again after many, many years.

Dinner was a disaster!  Yep, I have those days too.  Wanted to do a stir fry noodle dish and try out my new gluten free noodle find which are made with sweet potatos.

White haddock fillets were marinaded in the morning in a curried spice mix with a tsp of sugar, pinch of salt, crushed garlic and a tablespoon of olive oil and then cooked in a dryish pan until cooked through.  Then stir fried pak choi, baby corn, spring onion, sugar snap peas and mushrooms, with chopped ginger, coriander and a splash each of water, tamari sauce and fish sauce.  Noodles were soaked and then tipped into veggies to finish cooking as per instructions!  Yuck!  They looked like see through worms and tasted like plastic and acted like elastic bands.  I ended up attempting, and exceeding pretty well, picking the lot out of the stir fry and spiralising some courgette instead.  Meant the fish ended up cold, although nice flavour and my son refused to eat the stir fry as there were a few remaining 'plastic worms' left. He made himself toast! Never again!!

Thursday and I'm having doubts!  What the hell am I doing?  Am sure I'll be fine!  Ached like hell all day and brain was all over the place so it was an easy dinner of slow cooked chicken, butter beans, chickpeas and sweetcorn with leeks and plenty of freshly chopped parsley to have as a soup bowl dinner with bread for dunking.

No dinner cooking over weekend again as that's partners job so out in the garden to start putting things to bed.  Ie, chopping back herbs and seeing what's left to harvest.  And I made a banana bread using up the, now browning, bananas and some candied cut peel I had in the cupboard.

Chillis

Weird chilli

Chilli plants from seeds of a chilli are ready for picking.  As are the tomatos that were also grown from tomatos cut into halves and planted.  And the butternut squash seeds I planted (also from veg seed not packet) have gone a bit rampant.

Butternut squashes

Row of tomato plants from cut tomatoes

 MY BANANA BREAD

200g plain flour (I use a mix of soya, buckwheat, gram and potato starch, but any plain flour will do)

2.25tsp baking powder

0.5tsp of salt

0.75tsp of cinnamon

75g butter or marg

115g caster sugar (mine is sugar beet sugar not sugar cane)

3 ripe bananas

2 eggs beaten

2 tbsp chopped candied peel.

In a bowl sieve flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and sugar and then add marg and beaten eggs. Thoroughly beat the mixture together using a hand mixer if you have one or plenty of muscle and a wooden spoon.  In a separate bowl mash the bananas and then add these to the cake mix and beat again.  Fold in the candied peel and bake for 50mins to an hour in a greased and lined 2lb loaf tin at 180C.  It's cooked when knife or skewer (whichever you prefer) comes out clean and the cake is coming away from the sides a little.  Turn out and cool.

FREEBIES, FORAGING AND PRESERVING

Last week started off rather fabulous! Had a lovely day out with a fab friend of mine who also happens to be a brilliant forager and after a quick nosey around some charity shops in Faversham and a drinkie in the pub, we headed off to Brogdale to see what we could find for free in the car park.

Loads of nuts; but I don’t need those as still got some from last year and haven’t picked my crop from this year yet in the garden.  However, there were crab apple trees!!  So picked a hell of a lot of those (after weighing was approx. 41b of ruby red crabbies) and around the corner was a cooking apple tree with windfalls, so picked up a far few of those too. On the way home we found roadside plums and managed to grab approx 2lb of those as well.

After I'd removed the crab apples for pectin, this was what remained.

Dinner was veggie and chickpea chilli with oven cooked paprika potato wedges and a side of cooked broccoli just so there was some colour as otherwise it was a bit brown, shall we say.  Don’t normally use chilli powder as I prefer either fresh chillies or dried;  underestimated the strength as, even for me, it was a bit tongue zingy (although I rather enjoyed it).

Tuesday wasn’t a good day as I woke with chronic back ache and could hardly move, so ice pack and feet up for the day and an easy dinner of roasted pepper, tomato, garlic and red onion pasta sauce with pasta (of course); normal for them and new buckwheat pasta for me.  Was impressed with the buckwheat as the flour is quite bitter in taste, but in the pasta it was not only bearable but gave a good extra flavour.

Wednesday I was back on my feet, if a little slow and time to tackle the plums which were, by now, beginning to go over and a few had gone a bit mouldy.  However, with no vinegar and very little sugar it was destone, blitz, add lemon juice and sugar and shove in the dehydrator in the hope that after it’s dried out I’ll have plum fruit leathers. Then 2lb of Crab Apples were cut into quarters, boiled and strained, then re-boiled and strained ready to make liquid pectin.  Once I had the strained liquid I poured into an old ice-cream tub and placed in the fridge to be dealt with another day.

Pectin (non heat treated)

Dinner was an oven cooked kedgeree which was made by layering halved mushrooms, sliced onions, a cup of rice, spices, frozen peas and frozen smoked haddock and then covered with 2 cups of boiling water and covered with foil.  This was placed in a preheated oven, 180C, and cooked for an hour, stirring approx. half way through and checking on the rice.  Also boiled some eggs in a saucepan and once rice cooked and water pretty much absorbed, halved the eggs and added them to the mix.  Have to admit to eating the rice as was not in the mood to faff making up something separate for me.  Felt bloated for rest of the evening, but at least I know it will pass by morning.

Thursday I was out most of the day, so easy dinner of sausages, carrot and potato mash and green beans for them and a frozen low fat curry and mash for me.

Onion 'marmalade'

Friday, achy back, but nowhere near as bad as Tuesday.  Partner delivered sugar and cider vinegar so I can get on with preserving. Finished the pectin liquid by boiling until reduced to almost half and poured in sterilised bottles.  Will heat treat over the weekend as I need to go and get some corks, so at the moment bottles are sealed with their original metal lids and they are being kept in the fridge.  As well as that, onion marmalade made; we were given a bag of red onions for free from our local farm shop as they were going over and he couldn’t sell them.  After picking them over we managed to have enough to make the marmalade and have bagged of pre-diced onions in the freezer.

5kg Beet Sugar (It's preserving time again)

Cider Vinegar (It's preserving time after all)

NEW REGIME AND THE MORAL DIFFICULTIES WITHIN

Hiya

I am going to attempt to do a weekly blog instead of daily updates on Facebook and then share on my page plus any interesting bits and bobs I might find on the internet.

www.facebook.com/TheWingItCook

So the past week:
Interesting appointment with doctor on Tuesday means that I'm now on a low fat diet (not a dieting diet I might add, but if that happens it's a bonus, haha) as my cholesterol is a little high; not worryingly high, but I need to bring it down.  Waaaah!  No more cakes, chocolate or crisps for me then.  Although.......fatless cake might be an option and I'm sure I can adapt something else to make it less 'fatty'.  Also my blood results are a bit odd.  One week they were fine after not needing to fast and now, two weeks later and after fasting, they are borderline.  So I'm off for another damn blood test this week; again non fast.  Good job I don't mind needles, hehe

Luckily I have followed a diet like this before which had to be incredibly strict.  I had gallstones and whilst awaiting the operation had to follow a low fat diet which needed to be no more than 2g fat (not just saturated, but total fat) per 100g.  Regardless of how strict this was I ate really well, was never hungry and still could have treats as jelly sweets, jam and marmalade, marshmallows, yogurts were all within parametres.  I'm not going that strict as it meant no eggs, no cheese, no meat and I lived on fish and veg which is fine, but I do rather like the odd egg.  Currently going for less than 2g saturated fat per 100g.

So onto Sainsbury, partly because we have a nectar card, and an order of quorn products, low fat yogurt (use a lot of that anyway) and an attempt to find a cereal I could eat that was gluten free and rice free as I also find that rice bloats me and I'd rather not eat it.  This is where the moral difficulties come into the blog as the only cereal I could find online was cornflakes by...NESTLE!!!  I don't like buying Nestle unless I really, really have to due to the baby scandal and the palm oil problem.

Baby Milk Scandal

INDONESIAN PALM OIL

But, as in this case, I felt I had no choice or at least very little choice.  Doves farm do cornflakes, although they weren't on the sainsbury site, but they contain rice syrup as do their other cereals so no good to me.  Kellogg's don't even do a gluten free range as their cornflakes are flavoured with barley malt!!  Why?  They are cornflakes; they should be just corn!  But, hey ho, what do I know?  So I've relented and bought Nestle *sad face* so I have a choice to have at breakfast between cornflakes and oats (gluten free oats I might add) and I can rotate those with toast or cooked breakie or I can combine if I'm that hungry.

Lunches will be easy as I can have tuna, quorn, cottage cheese, plain cooked chicken or homemade bean paste sarnies, I can also have homemade soups and salads.  And dinners are practically the same, I just need to reduce the oil content and swap ingredients for me when I'm doing meat for the rest of the family.  Puddings and snacks of fruit, yogurt, and any of the above treats should indulge my sweet tooth.  Fingers crossed!

My only problem is my other half who is a big meat and two veg eater and although in the past he's been "if you want to lose weight, it's up to you to do it", he's now tutting and moaning whenever it's his turn to cook and I ask him to do/omit something just for me, ie, cutting the fat off the bacon or not putting butter in the mash; it's not difficult, you mash the potato with milk first, take out mine and then you can shove as much butter as you like into what's left! Pfft!  And, of course, I'm getting the "if it's a 100% beef burger, why can't you have it? It's natural!"  However, a good beef burger will contain approx 5g of saturated fat per 100g and a total of 13g fat per 100g so not really condusive to a low fat diet as this is classified as medium level and only to be eaten occasionally.  So I could eat, but then I'd have to watch everything else in the day and then that becomes a diet diet!

I'm lazy!  I don't want to watch every little morsel or weigh or limit, so if I go completely low fat, or at least as low as I can without starving, I won't need to worry too much and, as I've done it before, I already have the experience of eating that way with the addition of the odd bit of chicken or egg when I fancy.

Anyway, six days on and I'm managing so far.  I've had the odd day when I've had the munchies and have eaten jam on toast or had some marshmallows, but all in all, it's not been too bad.  Hope I can keep it up and not get too bored as I've got to do this for at least six months!!  And, of course, after that, if I've managed to get cholesterol down, I'll have to stay pretty good with maybe the odd relapse for a day if a special occasion.

Eeeek!  Just realised this six month period covers Xmas!  Oh well, jelly sweets for me then when others are munching on chocolate.

Cya