ENERGY LEVELS UP AND DOWN AND SUPPLIES RUNNING LOW

Had a brilliant start to the week; woke up at a reasonable time, garden was all frosty and beautiful and I felt I had some energy.  Garden was so pretty I rushed outside in pjs and bare feet just to get some photos. Needless to say that my tootsies were a bit ‘cold’ by the time I’d finished, so wrapped up in slipper socks and boot slippers under a blanket with first morning’s coffee.  Roasted off a whole pumpkin; cut it in half around the middle, rubbed with salt, pepper and oil and cooked in the oven for about an hour. Half of it was used for the pumpkin polenta and the other half will be made into a pumpkin and walnut loaf (I still have 1 very large and 2 medium pumpkins left from Halloween, but as I hadn’t cut them due to their decorative skin, they’ve kept perfectly fine in my chilly utility room).

Was a bit slower on the energy levels on Tuesday, but that was mainly due to having osteo the evening before.  Took an age for me to decide what to do for dinner as was slightly lacking in inspiration; yes it does happen to me!  So after ploughing through about half a dozen cookery books, not finding anything that totally grabbed my attention, I decided that a couple of recipes could work if I combined them and added my own flavours, so roasted roots with chickpeas, feta and Moroccan spice.

Still struggling for ideas on Wednesday; it’s the end of the month and the cupboards are getting a little bare and because I’m trying to eat as seasonable as possible I’m finding that I’m getting a little bored with the same old thing; time for spring!  Cleaned out the freezers (I have one large one that gets full quite quickly when we are harvesting, but remains half empty if I’m not filling it up with baked goods when garden isn’t over producing) and a small upright one in the kitchen which is used for open packets, breadcrumbs, leftover meals, etc.  Now I have two clean and tidy freezers and I know exactly what I have in them which should help a bit when planning meals.  I’ve also had a chat with partner and should be taking full control of food shopping again as of next week!  He took over the shopping nearly 10 years ago when I broke my leg and has been reluctant to let me take it back even though I’m constantly shopping as he only ever buys the basic boring stuff as he’s a meat and two veg kind of guy when it comes to cooking.  Ended up cooking six of the bubble and squeak patties I made before Xmas, grilled bacon, fried mushrooms and eggs and whizzing up my own version of baked beans (we didn’t have any; like a said, it’s the end of the month) using an inch of chopped chorizo, 2 finely chopped tomatoes (no tinned toms either), squirt of tomato paste and ketchup, splash of balsamic vinegar for sweetness and a tin of cannellini beans.  Actually I rather liked them and, although wouldn’t necessarily want to do them every time I used baked beans, I would definitely do them again.

Bubble & Squeak Patties

Thursday was mega busy with loads of online grocery shops, son’s trampolining group and then work, so slow cooker back in business with sweet and sour fish.  I’ve used the recipe for chicken before, but didn’t have any so thought ‘why not’ fish! As it was it worked!  Phew!

Biggest excitement of the week apart from Monday’s frosty garden was the fact that Alfred the spider isn’t dead as we first thought but very much alive and well! I hate spiders normally, but I’ve become quite attached and was slightly over excited by the fact that after spending 3 days curled up in the corner of the window with no new webs being built he was back in the middle of a brand new web and looking healthy again.  Hoorah!

Alfred the Spider (old picture)

Menu plan for the week is as follows:

Monday – Garlic chicken with pumpkin polenta and peas.

Tuesday – Oven roasted roots with chickpeas and feta

Wednesday – bubble & squeak patties, fried mushrooms, fried eggs, grilled bacon and home-made baked beans

Thursday – Sweet and sour fish

BONUS: GLUTEN/GRASS FREE PASTRY

My Gluten/Grass Free Pastry (because people keep asking)

200g plain flour (my flour mix is made from 1 cup each of gram, soya, buckwheat and potato starch and ½ cup of nut flour depending on what I have.  This is all placed in a large container and shaken until thoroughly mixed and obviously you can double/triple up if you have a bit enough container)

Pinch/grind of salt

100g marg/butter/dairy free spread OR 50g previous mentioned plus 50g white vegetable fat

2 tbsp cold water roughly

Sift flours and salt into a bowl.

Rub in the fat until breadcrumb looking

Bring the mixture together to form a dough adding a little water at a time.

Turn out and knead well and then wrap in clingfilm and chill for at least 30 mins in the fridge.

Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4

Roll out to thickness you desire before cutting and using as needed.

NOTE: This flour combination seems to produce the best pastry I’ve ever tried making as gluten free.  It’s light, crumbly and doesn’t tend to turn to ‘stone’ after a day.  I make it up in a large batch and then freeze down into usable portions (200g/8oz) and even once defrosted it still works.  Partner complains that it tastes a little sweet, but that is probably due to the nut flour (coconut flour or ground almonds), but it’s this nut flour that I think makes it stay moist and not turn into the normal ‘hard rock’ of a pastry that I’ve made before when using pre mixed flours like Doves Farm.  Nothing against Doves Farm, but I prefer my mix plus Doves Farm has rice flour in it and I'm cutting my rice intake down as much as possible.

Game Pies - cooked

Crumble topped mince pies - uncooked

FFS!!! SLEEPY HEAD AND THEN FEELING ROUGH

A bit higgledy-piggledy this week as shifts swapped at work so worked Wednesday and Thursday instead of Tuesday and Thursday and ended up feeling rough towards the end of the week.  Was rather nice to have a couple of days off at the beginning of the week and the plan was to spend some time in the kitchen getting ahead, but that didn’t happen as I’ve gone into hibernation mode and am struggling with sleep and then not waking up and then was ill from Thursday with stupid viral thingy which made me freezing cold and headachy.  Hopefully within the next few weeks this will all rectify itself and I’ll be full of the joys of Spring, haha.

Forgot to mention last week that we had snow!  Well, a few centimetres of snow anyway, but it did make everything sparkly and pretty for an evening and half a day.  Brought everything to a standstill as usual although have no idea why as it was hardly anything and other places manage to keep going through masses of it on a daily basis.  Come to the conclusion that we South Englanders are pretty naff when it comes to snow.

Snow in Gillingham. Picture: Alan Spoore

Kent Online

This week I had two boxes delivered as they had an offer on ‘pick me up’ foods (quite funny considering I had no ‘up’ to be ‘picked’ by Thursday) so took a nosey in the cupboard and what was available and did a little order which included my blood oranges (yay), watercress (mmmm, soup!), venison mince and pigeon breasts (both now in freezer) and yogurt (I get through rather a lot as have it with my gluten free oats for breakfast instead of milk/water).  The veg box was quite standard as it would be at this time of year but I was able to double up on the broccoli meaning we had a decent amount.

Menu plan for the week is as follows:

Monday – broccoli and butterbean bake.  Was a lot better than I was expecting as I’d chucked it all together and laid slices of emmental on top; got eaten though and there was enough left over for me to have at the weekend instead of chips.

Before the slices of Emmental were added

Tuesday – Game pie with mash potato, the remaining broccoli, Brussel sprouts and carrots. Luckily pie was already made and in the freezer, so just an easy job of removal and allow to defrost before ensuring heated through in the oven.

Luxury Game Pie

Wednesday – Teriyaki quorn chunks in the slow cooker.  Hmmm, must use less Tamari next time.  Used the same amount as the note said for soy sauce, but the tamari was quite strong, so probably will halve it next time.  They all ate it though, so can’t have been that bad.

Thursday – After shoving flour, oil, water, yeast, sugar and salt in the bread maker before going off to son’s trampolining class, I made pizza.  Dough was good and I covered it in tomato sauce (ketchup), chopped onions, sliced mushroom, pepperoni, ham and cheese.  Made two of the paninis in the fridge into garlic breads for them and a bowl of salad to go with it.  Unfortunately I was starting to feel pretty crap by the time I got back from work, so the couple of slices of pizza they had left me were enough.

Pizza before cooking

Spent Thursday night, all day Friday and Saturday wrapped up in layers of clothing and a blanket whilst drinking plenty of tea, water and vitamin C drinks and reading a book.  Partner cooked for them and I ate sarnies and the broccoli bake as really wasn’t that hungry.  Luckily Sunday morning I woke up feeling rather a lot better.

RECIPE:
Mixed Game Pie with Sausage meat-stuffing balls
Serves 4 or 3 if you're piglets, which we are.

Sunflower oil
knob of butter
approx 600g mixed game (mine was venison, pheasant and partridge)
about 4 rashers of smoked bacon cut into chunky strips
1 medium onion, chopped
thyme springs (I used 4, but this is to preference)
400ml of stock (I used veg)
A good glass of port
1 tbsp of redcurrant jelly (although I used my Hips and Haws jelly so you could use cranberry or any other jelly to be honest)
3 bay leaves
couple of carrots, diced
couple of celery stalks, sliced
heaped tbsp of flour for thickening

Brown the meat in batches in the oil and butter and set aside, then brown off the bacon and set that aside.
Cook the onions, added a glug more oil if needed, with the thyme until soft and lightly browned. Stir in the flour and gradually add the stock, port, jelly and bay leaves. Bring to the boil and return the meat and the bacon and allow to simmer, covered, for about an hour.
Gently sweat off the carrots and the celery in another glug of oil and butter and when browned add to the meat dish and simmer, again covered, for another 15 mins until veg is soft.

Meanwhile make the sausage meat balls:
150g sausage meat (mine was, of course, gluten free)
2 rashers of bacon, finely chopped
Approx 50g of nuts (could be walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts; I used hazelnuts), chopped
grated zest of a lemon
20g of breadcrumbs (mine obviously gluten free)
chopped thyme to taste
salt and pepper.
Squidge all of the ingredients together and form into walnut sized balls.
Fry them off until brown all over and set aside.

You will also need 250g of shortcrust pastry (either bought of homemade.  You could use puff if you can make it or find it gluten free or use normal if you aren't gluten free)

Transfer the meat and veg from the game mix into a pie dish and reduce the cooking liquid to approx 350ml or slightly under.  Pour this back over the meat and arrange the sausage meat balls on top and leave the whole thing to cool.

Roll out your pastry and cover your pie and if you have a pie funnel use it, but I don't and just made a couple of holes in the pastry top.  Cook this 30-35mins in an oven of 220C/Gas 7 until pastry brown and filling it bubbling.

NB: It's a long winded recipe and I've tweaked the original a fair bit. This isn't something I would do on a weekly basis, but would use for special occasions.

AAAAAH! NORMALITY HAS RETURNED!

Sorry, this is a couple of days late.

Well, it was rather satisfying to get back into the rhythm of things today with a clean out of the fridge, veg rack and fruit basket in preparation for the veg box order.  I was pleased to discover that the veg rack is finally empty apart from a half head of celery which was looking decidedly brown and unappetising, so was fed to the worms in the wormery and the rack wiped clean ready for new goodies.  The fridge had been emptied of all its mouldering items as well, so apart from jars of half eaten preserves, a bit of blue cheese and a quarter of an Xmas pudding there is now nothing left to betray that there was a festive season.  Salad trays contained a fresh box of mushrooms, 3 lemons, 2 Little Gem lettuces and about half a dozen baby plum tomatoes; all were ok, so the worms didn’t get any other treats today.

Blood Oranges - Yummy

Box arrived and after giving the fridge a final clean down I could empty the gorgeous fresh stuff into the respective areas.  Firstly, a fine bag of blood oranges; mine, all mine, I might add.  I patiently wait every year for January and the availability of organic blood oranges from Sicily and woe betide anyone who sneakily nicks one.  They are my favourite and only available for such a short time. They were added carefully to the fruit basket along with apples and satsumas.  The bananas were removed swiftly and put aside for banana bread later as they are beyond eating as a snack but will be wonderfully sweet and gooey for a cake. More cherry tomatoes, sweet bite tiny peppers and chestnut mushrooms were put in the fridge and 1 fennel, bag of Brussel sprouts (yeah I know you’re probably all sick of them, but we love them), 4 sweet potatoes, leeks and a bag of Cavolo Nero were housed in the veg rack.  I know that there are still leeks, curly kale, parsnips, swedes and turnips in the garden along with various herbs such as rosemary, sage, bay, thyme, marjoram and mint.

Menu plan for the week is as follows:

Monday – Quorn sausage, tomato, mushroom, pepper, garlic, onion, plenty of dried oregano, splash of gluten free Worcester sauce and big squirt of tomato puree cooked to form a sauce and served with pasta for the boys and buckwheat pasta for me.

Tuesday – slow cooker of quorn mince, mushroom, walnut and rice filled Cavolo leaves (apparently these parcel type things are called Dolmades and I’ve made them before with cabbage leaves).  Stock and lemon juice will be poured over to cook and keep them moist – this didn’t quite go to plan as the Cavolo leaves were so thin I couldn’t stuff them, so layered them with the quorn mince filling like a lasagne.  Clean plates again tonight.

Apologies for the quality of picture; it really did taste better than it looks

Wednesday – chicken and vegetable pie made with the leftover roast chicken & the remaining roasted veg from Sunday and mash potato.

Thursday – a layered potato, sweet potato, fennel and cream concoction with plenty of cheese including the last of the blue cheese; wasn’t as much cream left as I’d hoped so topped it up with milk.  As there was plenty of cheese I knew it wouldn’t matter and the potatoes easily soak up the liquid.  

White Orchard - a touch of beauty in the drabbest month

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy New Year to you all.  Hope you intend to have a fab 2017 in the kitchen and maybe the garden if you have one, although a few pots on a window sill would suffice :-D

We started the New Year with an old friend coming for dinner so no cooking for me again as it was Sunday!  Roast duck stuffed with clementines and a couple of halved lemons plus a bouquet garni which made the gravy have a hint of citrus to cut through the meat.  Roast tatties, carrots, broccoli from the garden, leeks also from garden in cheese sauce and a red cabbage cooked in apple juice and raisins.  Yum!

To be honest I’m getting rather sick of all the leftovers now and, as I don’t eat much meat normally, I’m also getting a bit sick of meat so beginning to crave fish and veggie food, haha. So Monday was going to be, hopefully, the last whack it all together leftover meal. In this case I added together the remaining mashed potato from Saturday’s fish pie with the leeks in cheese sauce and the odd bits of leftover cooked carrots and broccoli from yesterday and heated it through in the oven until bubbling; this was served with cold cooked ham and the remaining duck and a choice of pickles.  Even after that I’ve still got cold ham left, but, at least, it can be used up in sandwiches.

Tuesday I awoke with a chronic stomach ache and a rash on my elbow which normally indicates I’ve eaten gluten (would also account for stomach ache) but unless the gravy had had flour added or stock granules which partner swears he didn’t do or the so called gluten free crackers weren’t as gluten free as they indicated I can’t think of where the suspicious gluten has come from.  Oh well I suffered for the day and did a much more ‘normal’ dinner of frozen bought pies for them with mashed potato and celeriac with peas on the side and the gravy from Sunday as there is never enough gravy in the pies.  Stomach felt even more swollen afterwards even though I, obviously, didn’t have pie, but I did pour gravy over the mash and peas.  Hmmmm, me thinks partner may be telling a porky which I’m not too happy about, but if he does ever admit to it it’ll be ‘but it was only a tiny bit to thicken it up’.  Not the point mate.  Anyway, son came down and was ecstatic to have a ‘normal’ meal and even stated that it looked yummy!!!  I have to admit, I’m definitely now craving veg and salad and soup even more.

Luckily I’d had the aforethought to order some sustainable trout for Wednesday night and after the past week of rich food and leftover mishmashes I can safely say that the trout was very much appreciated and not just by me. I wrapped it in foil with a bed of onions and a cover of lemon slices and dill seed and then cooked in the oven for about 15mins.  Was rather proud of myself as I managed to debone the fillets of the pin bones so no-one got any; I think I can safely say that my knife skills are obviously improving.  Did a stir fry of mushrooms, courgette, carrot, ginger, red pepper and a handful of salad leaves plus a sorry looking and lonely Little Gem lettuce was finely sliced and whacked in with some lime juice and tamari for flavour; the whole lot was served up with noodles for the boys ( I just had the veg and trout).  Yum!!  And my stomach is now singing songs of light and healthy food again.

Thursday was back to work so slow cooker was back in business with a chickpea and root vegetable curry which served us three nicely and gave me a small bowlful left for Friday so I didn’t pig out on chips which is normal Friday fare as Friday is the first day of partner cooking.  I do have to admit, however, that his chips are homemade and he’s got the crispy chips down to a fine art.  I can never be bothered to do chips from scratch so if I ever feel the need to do them they are frozen oven ones which are nowhere near as nice, but a damn sight easier.

Weekend has been his shepherd’s pie and another roast dinner as he never feels like it’s a Sunday unless there is a roast, even in summer which I hate.

Plus we celebrated Twelfth Night by going to a Wassailing Event at our local fort, so plenty of Morris Dancing to watch, a Mummer’s play, storytelling, cannons being fired and raising of glasses of cider with a shout of ‘Wassail, Drink Hail’ and a bumping into old friends.

'Wassail; Drink Hail'

Mummer's Play with a modern twist

 

Photos courtesy of local Moot member/s