Tuesday's mushroom rejuvenation

I was thwarted in my intention to come home for lunch today due to never predicted but often occurrent Tuesday busy-ness. So lunch was a sugary drink from my favourite bargain supermarket and a just-about-enjoyable cheese scone from a local chain bakery.

So my planned lunch was to become dinner. Which in itself was a modification of Sunday’s dinner. Which had been substantially modified yesterday morning, further modified (unsuccessfully in my opinion) by Matt, my husband, yesterday evening and served up in its final guise tonight, after Matt had made another (successful this time) modification.

Sunday’s dinner was a mushroom stew with dumplings. We have a large store of  vegetable suet due to a misadventure a couple of months ago. I can’t think of much to do with suet except for dumplings and Christmas pudding. I have investigated the Christmas pudding option but it seems that I’m 6 months too early. That also gives me 6 months to get some breadcrumbs.

Normally I would put celery in the stew but our weekend visitor, Glen, makes no secret of his dislike of celery so it consisted of mushrooms, onion, carrot, garlic, thyme from the garden (still disproportionately exciting) and stock. And more mushrooms. To make it really mushroomy you use some normal mushrooms and some of those preserved mushrooms. The dumplings were a tiny bit mustardy (I was careful with the mustard powder but will be more liberal next time). The stew was served with veggie sausages and lots of brocolli (Glen likes brocolli almost as much as I do), which soaked up the juices in a most delightful way (to paraphrase a song from one of my favourite Disney® films).

The first modification was the addition of a load of (green) lentils to the stew leftovers (all the dumplings had been eaten), all simmered up until they were soft (approximately the time it takes to do a load of non-dishwashable washing up and then all blended up. This did not look very nice, but did smell very nice. I was looking forward to having some later in the day.

Matt offered to get the dinner ready – the modification being the addition of enough hot water to turn the mixture from mush to soup and then salt / peppering it. Unfortunately he was perhaps too liberal with the salt for my liking (and I am a bit of a salt fiend). Fortunately he had only modified a enough for a bowl each (about a quarter of the mush). So after a few mouthfuls mine went back in with the rest of the mush.

I now had 30 minutes to get dressed, put on some make-up, tweak my instant fake tan (an impulse buy from earlier in the day – I do not usually “do” fake tan but was pleasantly surprised and it even smelled quite nice) and get my stuff ready to go out to a wedding reception. A wedding reception is a strange thing to go out to on a Monday night, but it was one of the most enjoyable Monday nights I’ve spent in a long while. There was no capacity for further soup preparation prior to the anticipated arrival of our lift. Instead I jammed up a scone (leftover from Sunday afternoon’s tearoom visit) and managed to eat this in the back of my friend’s car with minimal (although not absent) crumb-age.

Tonight Matt did the same modification but this time without the salt. I added my own. As I said I’m quite a salt fiend so I added quite a lot but it still tasted of delicious mushrooms rather than the sea, so I dread to think how much went into last night’s bowl.

A bowl of soup seemed somehow insufficient following the day’s busy-ness. So I put some peppers in the oven to roast up while we were slurping with some vague idea that I’d put them into a wrap (a lot of wraps have somehow appeared in the bread bin).  The idea matured while I slurped and I was aiming to assemble something featuring tomatoes, feta and sweetcorn as well as the peppers (basically all the things that needed using up). I was aiming to assemble them into something resembling a quesedilla. I put all the fillings between two wraps and pan fried in the griddle pan (a rare outing for the griddle pan and it may have actually been more of a toasting since I didn’t actually put any oil in the pan).

The serious flaw here was that quesedillas generally rely on being held together with lots of stringy cheese, versus tonight’s creation which was relatively cheese light. And feta is not renowned for its adhesive properties. So after a few accidents with bits of filling falling out whilst turning the creation (fortunately I had fairly recently cleaned the hob so they could be safely reinserted) it really ended up being more like a toasted sandwich with really thin bread. I cut it into triangles. I’m sure serving food in triangles makes it taste better but it was good whatever. And because we had to use knives and forks to eat it (due to the risk of filling loss) it felt more like a meal than a sandwich.