Mid-afternoon, I established that P did want feeding today (often at weekends, he prefers to eat very little meals), and took a bit of a stock-take of what was available, then went back to the computer to do a bit more work on a current project.

By 8pm, I was trudging back from the Co-op with a small amount of supplementary ingredients. By 9.30pm, we’d eaten the three-course meal I’d made, and the kitchen was
approaching normal again. Or as normal as it ever gets around here these days.

We had:

warm salad with melon (the one with orange flesh – very very ripe and gorgeous) and bacon, lettuce, cucumber and mini-plumb tomatoes with an elderflower vinaigrette

oOo

salmon parcels with onion, red pepper carrot and lemon juice, served with fresh potato wedges and runner beans

oOo

apple tart

Cooking it all was a mad nonstop frenzy in this sort of order

• make pastry (foodprocessor) and put pastry in fridge
• put bottle wine in freezer
• peel and chop Bramley apple for base for tart
• start simmering apple with a little water
• preheat oven
• chop potatoes into wedges, put in bowl, add olive oil, paprika, herbs, sesame seeds, mix, leave to steep
• chop onions, carrots into cubes, slice red pepper into attractive slivers. Juice lemon. Mix together in bowl with herbs, salt and pepper
• Make foil parcels with bit of frozen salmon, veg mix, bit of butter. Spoon in spare juice after partially closing parcels
• Put wedges and salmon in oven
• assemble apple tart: press pastry into buttered flan case, spoon Bramble apple purée over the top, slice 2 dessert apples and arrange over the top. Sieve icing sugar on top, pop in oven
• chop and fry bacon, prepare runner beans
• chop cucumber, tomatoes, and melon, wash salad leaves
• make vinaigrette: equal parts cider vinegar, hazelnut oil, elderflower cordial shaken together in an old jam jar
• mix vinaigrette with salad, place on leaves, start runner beans boiling
• serve/eat salad
• take tart out to cool, wine out of freezer
• unwrap parcels onto plate, arrange with runner beans and potato wedges, pour wine, serve, eat
• serve tart

Now all that remains…

Does it count towards your 5-a-day if you eat them all together after midnight in a desperate attempt to get your numbers up? Or if they’re (almost) all fruit? Carrot, apple, kiwi, banana, melon.

According to a bit of paper I was sent while I was in Switzerland, only 1 in 5 adults in Nottingham eats healthily.

That’s shockingly low. And it’s probably right. It certainly includes me.

Garage sandwiches and takeaway food feature all too highly in the food I eat in the average week. And although I understand nutrition pretty well, I still can’t convince myself to eat an apple rather than toast. 5-a-day shouldn’t be a hard thing to achieve, and yet the days in which I do it are fewer and further between than they should be.

UPDATE: I’ve just eaten a raw carrot, an apple and a banana, so I’m feeling slightly more virtuous now. But I’m having to throw away most of the last two weeks’ veg boxes because it’s quietly rotting in the fridge.

I didn’t log-in to Abel&Cole early enough this week to tell them I didn’t want what was going in my veg box.

So, we have MORE CARROTS. Carrots come every week. We haven’t yet eaten them all in any given week. I am mostly grating them and eating them raw, either as plain grated carrot, or as coleslaw, or as a carrot salad with cheese, pine nuts and raisins. Coleslaw is dead easy to make by hand for just two – just pushing blocks of cabbage and carrot through a hand grater and adding commercial mayo. It would be more of a pain to make in larger numbers. Have a vague idea to try it with fennel instead of cabbage next time I have that in the box. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that the kitchen is a little bit spattered with renegade carrot shards.

We have BROAD BEANS which I don’t like at all.

And we have THE WRONG KIND OF MANGO. Not the lovely juicy bright orange ones that fall off the stone and are only available at certain times of year, but the rock hard green and red ones such as you see at a supermarket. The sort that never seems to ripen, and I have no idea what to do with. I don’t think you can even make hedgehogs with them!

Last night’s dinner was salmon parcels made with blanched fennel and carrot and accompanied by vegan supergrain quinoa.

And it was a bit disappointing.

It feels like all of Abel & Cole’s fennel recipes are there to mask the actual taste of fennel.  Or maybe cooking it at all destroys the aniseedy flavour that I really like (It comes raw in Lambarelli’s “Italian Salad” boxes)  Even blanching the chopped fennel for a few minutes was enough to take away most of the flavour, so whilst the salmon could really have taken on the flavour, it was a little disappointing.

And the quinoa.  I have previously thought of this as “kwin-oh-uh”, but the box informs me that it should be pronounced “keen-wah”.  It was a bit boring, so I will have to look at more interesting ways of cooking it in future – this bulghar pilaf recipe would probably work just as well with quinoa as bulghar wheat.

We’ve had a glut of pears that came in veg boxes over the last few weeks, just sitting on the side looking faintly unappetising. Then more pears came last week, and I finally got around to investigating Abel & Cole’s system for editing what comes in your box and excluded things we really didn’t want.

So, this evening, when it came to preparing a pud to take with us to a party evening, I looked at the pears and tried to decide what to do. This pear and almond tart looked fantastic, but I feared not being able to present it quite that well. Plus it seemed awfully fiddly, and basically seems to need you to start two days ahead of time.

In the end, I plumped for this pear crumble, and it was delicious! I think the lemon juice on the pears made a real difference in deepening the flavour. If I’d known it was that good, we wouldn’t have had a pear surplus in the first place!

The third veg box arrived today.  The first week, we were good, and ate all the veg that came.  Last week, less good, and there was still courgette, mandarins, pears, potatoes and onions left over.  It’s almost as if we ate nothing last week at all, which isn’t true.

This weeks veg includes some absolutely massive jonagold apples, bigger than a hand, but strangely light, and some fennel, which I am looking foward to.

It’s probably just as well we had fresh food delivered.  Getting out of the house is tricky right now: it’s very hard indeed to walk down the steep hill because the snow is incredibly slippery.  Looks like the Ron, the delivery guy, got here at an opportune point between the melt this morning and the fresh snow fall this evening.

It being Sunday, I’ve been cooking. We had Veggie Nite tonight – not for the fst time, but the first time for ages.

Today, I cut open my first avocado. I have eaten it before, but never started from scratch before. The stone in the middle is rather cute. Very smooth, with a finish like wood.

Then, I made my first guacamole, which came out rather spicier than I anticipated. I have never actually eaten guacamole before, so I didn’t know what to expect, and slavishly followed the recipe. Well, more or less. I had the wrong quantities, and kind of made it up a bit. Maybe there was too much raw garlic, giving it a heartburn-tastic kind of an edge.

Then I moved onto things in my Abel & Cole box for the first time, starting with the celery to go with the guacamole. This was much leafier and much limper than the celery I get from the co-op, but was rather nice. It certainly smelled fantastic while I was cleaning the mud off and stripping off the leaves.

Then, I cooked chard for the first time too: discarding the leaves, frying chopped cleaned chard stems with onion and and the rest of the can of tomatoes to make a version of Chard and Tomato Pie on the A&C website, which turned out more like quiche than pie in my book.

In making the quiche, I also had to try making the pastry with olive oil instead of butter for the first time, since we had nearly run out of butter, but had a full bottle of oil. It worked rather well – cooked off to a lovely crispy finish and went well with the veggie tart I was making.