BUSY WEEK AND A TON OF BOXES AND TOMATOES

Oooops!  I missed a week.  Sorry about that but it was a pretty uneventful week on all fronts anyway.

This week a lovely pile of boxes arrived from my veggie delivery although as you can see from the contains I probably didn’t need that many boxes just as you never need the amount of carrier bags that they put things into when you get a supermarket delivery unless you shop with one that gives you the option to be carrier bag free.  Bonus for my delivery is that all the boxes and 90% of the packaging can be returned and reused, even the string.  Must admit I tend to keep the string as it’s handy for tying up plants in the garden and some of the plastic trays are useful as seed trays or pot holders, haha.

A pile of boxes and their contains

It’s been an odd week of ‘in and out’ the house, so dinners have been as quick and as simple as they can be with the exception of Monday when I felt like doing a full on curry using left over chicken from Sunday to make a korma and the left over pumpkin to make a dahl.  I still marinated the cooked chicken in the spices and yogurt and I replaced the lentils in the recipe for the smashed up pumpkin.  No-one died of food poisoning and there were clean plates all round.  And before you ask; no I did not make the poppadums!  They were bought and are gluten and grass free; I checked. 

Chicken Korma, Pumpkin Dahl and Poppadums

Tuesday’s slow cooker recipe was a huge tomato sauce as I appear to receive a ton of tomatoes this week and still had some left from last.  Red onion, courgettes (yes Abel & Cole had some), the last of last week’s mushrooms, balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper, oregano and thyme were added and set on high for about 5 hours.  Then served with pasta and grated cheese on top!

Weds I went all Asian again and did stir fry fish with lime, leek, remaining cooked carrot and green beans from Sunday, Aldi mangetout and baby sweetcorn.  I sloshed in some fish sauce, rice wine, spattering of sugar, ground cloves, fennel, coriander and sesame seeds, then served with mushroom, egg fried rice.

Mushroom, egg fried rice with spring onion

Fish with Lime, Carrots, Green Beans, Mangetout and Baby Sweetcorn

Apologies for photos; it was a bit steamy, haha

Yes I know! I had rice! I only normally eat rice about once a fortnight, if that, as it bloats my stomach and I feel awful, but I needed something a bit more exotic this week and rice just happened to be in the cupboard and I’d run out of my noodles. L

Thursday, as always, was busy backwards and forwarding to trampoline centre with an extra lengthy session in the afternoon as son had group lesson followed straight away by private session.  So time was short and having prepped Tuesday night’s dinner on Monday night and sticking it in the fridge to shove in slow cooker in the morning, I did the same on Weds night by prepping layers of sliced potato, Jerusalem artichoke, celeriac, leek, chopped ham and grated cheese.  In the morning I poured over a combination of cream and milk and switched it on and walked away.  Next time I won’t add equal quantities of milk to cream as it did produce quite a lot of liquid.  However, it tasted fab!

Alfred on the move!

In other news; the bulbs I hastily planted a couple of weeks ago are growing rather well.  The potatoes that The Potato Council sent us are chitting away nicely on the window sill and Alfred, after moving about and deciding to stop on the ceiling right above the kettle and abseiling up and down with the inevitability of eventually landing on someone’s head and thus causing panic and death, was carefully removed into the garden to find a new home.  I’ll miss him, but hopefully he’ll find a comfy spot and a decent mate.