Category Archives: Food

Veg box

For some time, I’ve been vaguely wondering about getting a veg box each week as a sort of minimum “you must eat this much veg” pushy thing.

Then last week a co-incidence: Abel & Cole put a leaflet through my door saying “we’re on your street on Fridays” at roundabout the same time I read Duncan’s post extolling their virtues.

So, I signed up and selected a regular box, and for the first order got carried away and ordered a crate of organic beer as well, and some squash for P.

It arrived today, the boxes so well hidden by the delivery guy (Ron, according to the bumf) that we entirely overlooked them at first.

But I’ve unpacked the stuff now and put it away. This weeks box…

  • Chard  (??? what is that?)
  • Celery  (slightly disappointing – very leafy, not much eating bits)
  • 5 kiwi fruit
  • 4 blood oranges
  • 4 “Spartan” apples
  • 5 or so potatoes
  • 3 long, utterly filthy  parsnips

Straight away, I sampled one of the beers…

Then for my tea, as I was late home, I had a complete toast-fest, but topped it up with a kiwi fruit, an apple, and a banana (from a previous shop).

The box also had a flyer for http://www.abel-cole.co.uk/brainfood – an idea of theirs that suggests having a box of fruit delivered to your office every week.  Something I might suggest in the office.  It is quite expensive – but the volunteers might like it…?

Sunday night feast

I was wandering around the supermarket at about 6pm wandering what to have for dinner.  Sherwood’s Co-op supermarket somehow has permission to be open until 6pm, and the Spa is 24 hours, including Sunday night. The newly opened Somerfield is 10-4 on Sundays.

Time to cook, and I needed fresh fruit and veg.  It was too late for Somerfield and the Spa doesn’t seem to have anything fresh at all. Wandering around looking at what was on the shelves, and the meal I came up with was bloody Mary, an oven baked fish steak with a cheese sauce, with carrots, broccoli and bulghar wheat pilaf, and apple crumble.  So, the “5-a-day” portion count?  One for the tomato juice, one for the celery stick.  One for each of the carrots, broccoli and the pepper/onion combo in the pilaf. One for the crumble, and possibly also one for the bulghar wheat itself.

I do like interesting alternatives to the usual staples of rice, potatoes and pasta. The bulghar wheat is one we’ve started having.  I must get around to cooking the couscous we have in the cupboard.
Not too far from home tomorrow, so I may be able to cook again, but it’ll be pizzas and curries by Friday.

My vague, food-related New Years resolutions are:

  • Shop for more than one meal.
  • Eat more fruit and veg – salad especially.
  • Don’t buy F+V then let it rot. (If I am going to let it rot: don’t leave it on the floor or the table where it damages the wood.)
  • Actually eat leftovers instead of finding them in the fridge or freezer long after they have stopped being safe to eat.
  • Take putrescibles to the compost before the putresce.
  • Go to the bottle bank more often

An eventful dinner

Last night, both of us got in from various different things at gone 11pm, me from work, himself from a panto, having not yet eaten.

So, something fast and nutritious was required. I almost had an omelette, but couldn’t be arsed to clear enough space in the kitchen to chop an onion. We settled for beans and scrambled eggs on toast. Can’t go wrong with that?

Our cats have very strong associations between tins being opened and getting fed, even though we feed them almost exclusively on dry biscuit out of a two kilo sack. The tins we open most often are tomatoes, beans and olives, none of which the cats will eat (I’ve tried!). I suppose the occasional tin of tuna makes it worth their while winding themselves around our legs whenever they hear a ringpull or a can opener.

So, two slices in the toaster, tin of beans decanted to a mug and microwaved (we have hundreds of mugs but only fifteen bowls, so the chances of there being a clean mug are higher than the chances of there being a clean bowl – roll on the dishwasher) and two eggs scrambled in one of the remaining non-stick saucepans.

In under five minutes, dinner is ready.

P likes the smell, so I divvy up the eggs and leave some in the pan for him, get another tin of beans and let him reuse the beany mug, and go and sit down to watch the awful Katherine Tate show when P shouts “Alex, help!”

Now I am often rude about P’s cooking skills, but somehow this time, he’s managed to set fire to the toaster. Which takes the biscuit.

It’s quite a serious fire, too, flames leaping out of the toaster. By the time I’ve managed to set down my dinner and get out of the chair, he’s managed to open the two back doors (no mean feat, what with misfitting locks) and I clear recycling bottles away from the toaster. He grabs it, unplugs it and takes it out to the patio.

After he sets it down, flames continue to lick out of the toast slots for about 10 minutes. Peering in from above, it does look like the orange and blue flames are coming from actual pieces of burnt toast in the bottom of the machine. I had no idea that discarded toast fragments contained such a vital source of energy. There’s the answer to Britain’s generating requirements: door-to-door collections of toaster debris.

P still eats the piece of toast that was in the toaster.

And I now have an excuse to replace the toaster as well as the decades-old-kettle that no longer switches itself off. I can have new ones to go in my new kitchen.

Chris Huhne's biscuits and my poor diet

Oh dear. My diet has been so poor this week. Last Friday, the office sourced some really excellent biscuits and cakes for a Macmillan Coffee Morning.

Some of the cakes and biscuits survived until Chris Huhne’s visit the following Monday. In addition to the tour and the official meetings, and photographs, we invited local party members to come in and speak informally to our environment spokesman, so we put the biscuits and cakes out again.

They didn’t all get eaten then, either, so they sat on the desk in the office for Tuesday. I didn’t eat anything else that day.

Or Wednesday. Lots of cake and biscuits and no vegetables Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or Friday. By then, the cakes and biscuits were a little past their best: the cakes dry and the biscuits soggy. But still, they were there. And they were cheaper than the excellent Italian deli, which is excellently priced, but not free.

So, now it’s Saturday. I just cooked. To my horror, it’s the first time I’ve cooked since before the Brighton conference. That’s weeks and weeks.

My diet when I cook is not too bad. We always have lots of veg, sometimes I cook meat free, it’s not too high fat. Tonight was olives and breadsticks (Crespo green olives stuffed with almonds – I love olives with a crunchy stuffing) roast sausage with baked potatoes and carrots and cumin, plus gravy made with onions and mushrooms. Later, when that goes down, it’ll be fresh pineapple for dessert.

Since we’re both home for the whole weekend (a rare event), I have a lamb joint to roast tomorrow as well, with broccoli, mange touts, and new potatoes. At some point, I have tomatoes, Greek olives and feta for a Greek salad, either for starter for the roast meal, or for lunch.

So, not too unhealthy.

However, Monday is Full Council. There will be a buffet for lunch and a catered tea. With evil pudding. I will stuff up on cake again and pour cream on my pudding, and probably go back for cheese.

I might cook again on Tuesday, but for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I’ll be in the office again. Downstairs from the office is a chippy, where we have lunch, ahem, occasionally, KFC, a Chinese. The Italian deli turns into pizzeria at night, and two doors further up in the other direction is a curry house. And with my strange working hours, it’s so much easier to go for a take-away than it is to drive home then cook.

Chris Huhne’s biscuits and my poor diet

Oh dear. My diet has been so poor this week. Last Friday, the office sourced some really excellent biscuits and cakes for a Macmillan Coffee Morning.

Some of the cakes and biscuits survived until Chris Huhne’s visit the following Monday. In addition to the tour and the official meetings, and photographs, we invited local party members to come in and speak informally to our environment spokesman, so we put the biscuits and cakes out again.

They didn’t all get eaten then, either, so they sat on the desk in the office for Tuesday. I didn’t eat anything else that day.

Or Wednesday. Lots of cake and biscuits and no vegetables Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or Friday. By then, the cakes and biscuits were a little past their best: the cakes dry and the biscuits soggy. But still, they were there. And they were cheaper than the excellent Italian deli, which is excellently priced, but not free.

So, now it’s Saturday. I just cooked. To my horror, it’s the first time I’ve cooked since before the Brighton conference. That’s weeks and weeks.

My diet when I cook is not too bad. We always have lots of veg, sometimes I cook meat free, it’s not too high fat. Tonight was olives and breadsticks (Crespo green olives stuffed with almonds – I love olives with a crunchy stuffing) roast sausage with baked potatoes and carrots and cumin, plus gravy made with onions and mushrooms. Later, when that goes down, it’ll be fresh pineapple for dessert.

Since we’re both home for the whole weekend (a rare event), I have a lamb joint to roast tomorrow as well, with broccoli, mange touts, and new potatoes. At some point, I have tomatoes, Greek olives and feta for a Greek salad, either for starter for the roast meal, or for lunch.

So, not too unhealthy.

However, Monday is Full Council. There will be a buffet for lunch and a catered tea. With evil pudding. I will stuff up on cake again and pour cream on my pudding, and probably go back for cheese.

I might cook again on Tuesday, but for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I’ll be in the office again. Downstairs from the office is a chippy, where we have lunch, ahem, occasionally, KFC, a Chinese. The Italian deli turns into pizzeria at night, and two doors further up in the other direction is a curry house. And with my strange working hours, it’s so much easier to go for a take-away than it is to drive home then cook.

Culinary/cultivation bulletin

I haven’t had a chance to cook much at all recently, what with being away, but here’s a few gems:

One birthday present was a book on cooking with coffee and chocolate. Greatly appreciated: I love coffee flavoured things, so can’t wait for opportunities to make things out of it. P not a consumer of caffeine at all, so we may have to wait until we next have guests. Since the early part of next year will be devoted to electioneering, and since we’ve been here nearly a year and not had a housewarming party or even had many of our friends round, we plan on doing as much entertaining as possible in the next few months. Once we’ve tidied up. It’s CHAOS here – Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome.

I had an attempt at making watermelon sorbet before I went away: puréed most of a watermelon left over from a picnic and froze it with a mugful of sugar syrup. I didn’t stir it enough so it froze rock solid, and is rather difficult to eat. I’m having to attack it with knives every so often and pretend I meant it to be a granita. Perhaps that’s what ice grinders are meant for. I’m also attempting using it to flavour cocktails. It’s currently sharing a glass with a gin and tonic. I overdid the the gin a bit as the bottle was nearly empty so I can’t actualy tell whether or not it tastes nice. I think it would also work quite well in a champagne punch. We have some very cheap fizz from France. Must try! Have been very tempted to throw a garden party of our own, but we’ve probably missed the best of the weather now and our garden is hardly tidier than our house.

I roasted a chicken last weekend to check whether I still could. I can. The cats go crazy for hours once they start smelling the chicken and frenzied begging ensues when I actually start to carve the thing. The chicken did four human meals (fricaséed the remainder into a sweet and sour sauce the following day) and kept the cats fed for a couple of days as well. Bargain.

Kimbo has been pruning her bay tree and rather than compost or chuck the trimmings, she offered spare leaves to all takers in UMRA. I waved my little hand, eventually managed to get my address through her spamtrap, and when I returned from my holiday I had a jiffy bag full of bay leaves to add to my recipes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many. For a couple of quid, the spice vendors at the supermarket will offer maybe ten leaves. I got a jiffybagful out of the goodness of Kimbo’s heart. I must send her a postcard to say thanks. The first bayleaf helped stuff last weekend’s chicken. I’m sure it was thrilled.

Don’t think it will be a struggle to find blackberries this year. Just one bramble poking over the fence has already yielded over half a pound of blackberries, with plenty more unripened on the bramble, and still more out of reach until I take a chair into the garden. Not sure if I should make jam, since we brought an unfeasibly large collection of obscure Bonne Maman flavours back with us from Normandy earlier in the year, and we still haven’t eaten all of last year’s homemade jam, some of which is lurking in the cupboard. But I really must get some strawberries before it’s too late. I should have gone picking whilst I was in Herefordshire.

My chilli plants don’t look like they’re going to flower in time. Nights are drawing in already, and although they look healthy and bushy, there is no sign of any flowers, and without the flowers, there aren’t going to be any fruits. The lean-to is ideal for them – the max-min thermometer says it’s been nearly 40degC in there at times – but still no flowers.

Asking a friend of P’s what we could plant in the garden now for eating overwinter resulted in her coming around with a pot of leek seedlings, so I’ve planted those out and am hoping for better results with them than with the attempts at peas and beans earlier in the year that just simply never came up. P’s friend also brought us some packets of seeds for rocket, lettuce and spinach, but there just isn’t any bare earth to put them in. I shall try harder at clearing some space tomorrow, but until we get the fence fixed, the best flowerbeds are overshadowed by collapsing fence panels.

The mystery fruit in the garden is still unidentified, but they’re getting bigger and bigger and starting to turn blue when they ripen. Damsons? Sloes? If they’re sloes, then archdruid has some interesting ideas about putting them in with an anise spirit like pernod, vanilla pods and coffee beans and making a liqueur called Patxaran. I don’t think they can be sloes — they started red, and then turned blue. Cut them in half and they have pips like apples not a stone. I think they’re also too big.

Who's for…

… Hedgehog Carbonara?

Hedgehog spaghetti carbonara (serves four)

500g spaghetti, 30ml olive oil, 250g lean hedgehog, 1 medium onion (chopped), 125ml water, 60ml dry white wine, 4 eggs, 60ml double cream, 100g grated parmesan cheese

· chop hedgehog into small chunks

· beat eggs and cream together in a bowl. Add half the parmesan cheese

· put pasta in boiling water

· put onions and hedgehog chunks in pan with olive oil on medium heat until onions are almost clear

· add wine and reduce heat

· drain pasta when cooked, combine it with egg, cream and cheese mix

· add meat, onions and wine without draining fat and mix thoroughly

· garnish with remaining parmesan. Serve immediately

Who’s for…

… Hedgehog Carbonara?

Hedgehog spaghetti carbonara (serves four)

500g spaghetti, 30ml olive oil, 250g lean hedgehog, 1 medium onion (chopped), 125ml water, 60ml dry white wine, 4 eggs, 60ml double cream, 100g grated parmesan cheese

· chop hedgehog into small chunks

· beat eggs and cream together in a bowl. Add half the parmesan cheese

· put pasta in boiling water

· put onions and hedgehog chunks in pan with olive oil on medium heat until onions are almost clear

· add wine and reduce heat

· drain pasta when cooked, combine it with egg, cream and cheese mix

· add meat, onions and wine without draining fat and mix thoroughly

· garnish with remaining parmesan. Serve immediately

Butter-bean whip

I thought I’d make a hummous-alike using butter beans instead of chick peas. The beans are boiling now.

As an aside, the only links on Google I can find to “butter-bean whip” are Kitty talking about the end of season buffet.

We all mucked in on the nosh; I did my butter-bean whip – it’s over there in a bucket. And the director did us a quiche. I suppose it’s his acne but I definitely detected a tang of Clearasil.

Impromptu jam-making

Apple JellyI’ve just been browsing through Nibblous, the cooking website run by cix friends, and found MYM’s 24-hour apple terrine. I didn’t have any woodruff, or lemons, or 16 granny smith apples, or even a 10″ loaf tin but I did have 6 or so coxes that needed using up — that were already too soft for normal eating — and a tiny half-pound loaf tin.

So I set to work. Once peeled, you can run the apples up and down the cucumber slicer on the box grater much quicker than you slice them finely manually. Making caramel is always exciting. (Washing up afterwards, much less so…)

What with my computer upstairs and the kitchen downstairs, I always read through a recipe, commit the vital parts to memory, and then recreate in front of the cooker. I almost never get a recipe exactly right first time. Over the weekend, I was discussing this with a friend — he thinks the first time, you should make it exactly as per the recipe, and then adapt it to your tastes later. I just muck about with what’s in front of me, omitting things I just don’t plain like, adapting the quantities to suit how I like things.

This apple terrine probably has vastly too much ground cinnamon in, on coming back upstairs to check the recipe.

After completing the terrine part of things, double-wrapping it and putting it in the larder to chill until tomorrow, I saw the forlorn-looking square apple cores and peelings in a heap waiting to go in the compost, and thought it was rather a waste.

An Announcement in the newsgroup uk.media.radio.archers earlier this evening told me that the UMRA Cookbook had recently been updated, and so I had spent some time there. There was a onion marinade recipe attributed to me that I have no recollection of at all, and when I was reading that, I noticed Vicky’s Apple Jelly recipe calling for cores, peelings and windfalls, and thought I could make jelly out of my remains.

I boiled up the six cores and associated peelings with a cinnamon stick snapped into small pieces, and managed about a third of a pint of cloudy pink apple juice. Hunting around the kitchen for the sieve and the pack of muslin squares, neither turned up. I vaguely recall that we threw the sieve away because it was in the sink when we were broken into last Christmas, and we couldn’t be sure we’d got all the bits of glass out. The muslin squares — who knows? I’ve not used them since we moved in December, so they may not yet be unpacked.

So, I strained the apple pulp through the colander, using the potato masher to get more out of the pulp. Considering that, the resultant third of a pint of juice was fairly clear. Added to 5oz of jam sugar, boiled until setting point satisfactory, it made just under a small-jarful. Tastes wonderful, going by the cooled scrapings eaten from the pan with the wooden spoon.

I never set out to make jam tonight.

And it never ceases to amaze me how quickly the kitchen goes from more-or-less clean to cluttered with dirty pans on every conceivable surface.