Saturday's curry

You might have noticed that it's been a bit quiet on the slack lasagne front recently. That's for two reasons:

1. We've been on holiday – to France. We ate out a lot, and self constructed meals consisted mainly of bread and cheese and a bit of salad.

2. Other than being on holiday I've been eating a lot of jacket potatoes. These have mostly been consumed with cottage cheese, beans and cheese, or tinned sardines; as you can appreciate there's little blog material there.

On return from our holiday we ordered a big top-up from an online retailer. This was mainly successful but resulted in an extreme over supply of mushrooms. I had selected two packs of the cheapest own brand fresh mushrooms and one pack of dried mushrooms. The delivery driver informed me that the mushrooms had been substituted with premium own brand fresh mushrooms and even showed me what I was now getting. I was initially delighted as this appeared to be a £1 bonus in the mushroom stakes for us. However on further unpacking it transpired that we had been sent the premium fresh mushrooms instead of the dried mushrooms and I was now in possession of 4 punnets of fresh mushrooms.

Now I like mushrooms (and apparently they are very nutritious), but I was going to have my work cut out to use all these up before they turned into a horrible slimy mess. The first punnet (cheap ones) went into a sausage casserole. I hadn't planned to make a sausage casserole because I was catering for a visiting German friend. She's not a typical German so I thought that she might not want sausages. But she did (they were veggie sausages though which I think might be a blasphemy to many Germans), and this was a great use of 350g mushrooms. The next punnet (posh ones) were the main feature of a risotto. Half of the next punnet (posh ones) went onto a pizza (courtesy of Matt, my husband). Which left us with half a punnet of posh mushrooms and a whole punnet of cheap ones. Having eaten mushrooms for 4 days consecutively I wasn't particularly fancying more, but they had to be used or I would risk the slimy mess.

The solution would be curry. I love mushrooms in a curry. The usual would be mushroom,sweet potato and chickpea but I was going to try something slightly different: mushroom, sweet potato and vegetarian “chicken style” pieces. (I don't usually go for meat replacement options much (apart from the mince which I think is fab) but had a few lapses into carnivorism in France (they can just about cater for vegetarians these days but not yet pregnant vegetarians) and since then have found myself fancying that sort of “meaty” taste.)

As usual I started by sweating off a couple of onions (although I heard on the TV that they don't always use onions in India because it displeases the Gods). Usually one onion might do but one of these onions was slightly old and had a slight pickled aroma about it until I peeled off a good few layers and the other had that weird thing where you get a second layer of onion skin a few layers in. At the same time I also added a good lot of fresh ginger that I had finely chopped (maybe about an inch off the piece of ginger root) and a tablespoon of special curry powder. Sometimes I make up my own spice mixture but we have recently replenished with a fantastic product called “Magic Mix”. This is a big pot of a blend of spices which we discovered at a market in Cornwall a few years ago, where we had a taster and met the lady who runs the company. Since then it's become almost as much of a staple beside our hob as a pot of vegetable stock powder. It has no chilli or ginger in it so you add those (and anything else you fancy) to taste.

Next I added chopped sweet potato. Sometimes I chop it big but today I chopped it small. That cooked for as long as it took me to prepare the mushrooms. The remainder of the posh punnet (they were already going slimy) and half of a cheap punnet (still in perfect nick – and they have the same expiry as the posh ones). I added them to the pan along with the “chicken style” pieces. I was a bit concerned as I could smell burning but on closer inspection this turned out to be some grime on the hob ring rather than anything bad happening in my cooking. Once that had cooked down a bit (usually signified by juice release from the mushrooms) I would usually add a tin or two of chopped tomatoes. Today this would be impossible because the pan was already at capacity. So I just added enough boiling water to cover the contents – essential to ensure adequate cooking of the potato – along with a spoonful of branded yeast extract and then left it on a low heat while I got on with other things.

The problem with adding water is that it ended up a bit too liquidy so after a while (once the potato seemed soft) I chucked in a handful of lentils, mainly for the purpose of thickening but with the added benefit of protein and fibre, and left it on a low heat again. Unfortunately I forgot to turn the hob off when we went out for a swim, we could take a gamble and leave it but this would risk a horrible mush on our return. Fortunately Matt was in a chivalrous mood and dropped me off at the pool while he headed back to rescue the dinner. (He joined me about after about a quarter of an hour and as I'm a bit slow at the moment we did the same number of lengths.)

Upon our return it was already time to think about eating (it's the season for my favourite TV dancing programme so I didn't want to be faffing about in the kitchen while that was on). To me it didn't look like we had much rice left (Matt was cooking the rice) so I got it in my head that we should have something else to go with the curry. I had a quick look at recipes for typical “Indian” breads and decided that chapatis were significantly more achievable than naan in the available time. Even then it would be cutting it fine and I would have to take some short cuts, this was risky as I had never made chapatis before but at least I had nothing to compare them against.

So I mixed 115g wholemeal plain flour with 90ml lukewarm water (in which I dissolved a pinch of salt) and then kneaded. I skipped the “resting” phase and went straight to the forming phase – rolling out to 4 very thin discs (I rolled some cumin seeds into two of them). Then I cooked them in a hot frying pan (no oil required) until they started to get bubbles in them.

It was all ready in the nick of time (and it was a treat of Saturday night dancing). The curry itself was rich and spicy, possibly better for the absence of tomatoes. In the absence of chilli I “hotted” mine up with some lime pickle and we both enjoyed some mango chutney and some of our brother-in-law's delicious home made runner bean chutney. The chapatis were a great success – I can't believe I've never made them before.

Monday's potato dumplings

My mum and I had shared the vegetarian sharing plate at a local restaurant for lunch but another dish on the menu inspired me for the evening meal: gnocchi. I had planned to make a lasagne for us all (me, mum and dad, Matt – my husband – and my mother-in-law) but I thought that gnocchi would be no more complicated and a bit unusual. The pressure was on because Matt needed to eat before 7pm. Normally this wouldn't happen on a school night, but I had the day off work so with a bit of planning and the assistance of my mum as sous chef it should be possible.

I've made gnocchi once before (or maybe twice), and they were slightly gloopy so I decided to try a different recipe. My thoughts were that the sauce(s) would be easy (and slack) so I concentrated my initial efforts on the gnocchi. We debated for sometime whether the potatoes should be peeled before or after cooking, the recipe said afterwards but this would increase the time because:

1. They'd take longer to cook if whole rather than chopped

2. They'd have to cool down before peeling

So I put mum to work peeling the potatoes. And then boiling them.

Then I thought I may as well start the sauce. This would be the ideal opportunity to use up the leftover butternut squash. I started off by chopping a red onion and some sticks of celery and putting them in a big pan to sweat. Then I peeled off the skin and chopped up the squash. This was looking more and more like a reprise of the risotto flavours from last week. And it was such a good flavour I added mushrooms to complete. I mixed thing up a little bit by changing the seasoning, obviously some veg stock and black pepper but I also added some thyme from the garden. According to my mum I need to give my thyme plant a hair cut. I also set off a very easy pepper and tomato sauce by chopping a load of peppers and putting them in the oven to roast with a couple of sprigs of rosemary from the garden. I don't think that needs a hair cut.

Once that was all under way, I returned to the gnocchi. The potatoes were cooked and now needed mashing. I don't really like mashing potato (which is a shame because I love eating mashed potato), but this wasn't so bad as you're actually supposed to leave it a little bit lumpy. Once that's done you add an egg, flour, cheese, salt and pepper. On this occasion I used a hard goat's cheese – mum had already displayed her sous chef skills in grating this. It looks really dodgy when you first start to mix it up but comes together fine and then you tip it out and kneed it a little bit. This is very messy – wear an apron and remove hand jewellery. When it looks a bit less messy you have to roll it out into long thin sausages (about 1.5-2cm diameter) and then chop into pieces 2-3cm long. Maybe you could roll it all into little balls, but maybe this risks “over-handling” (if this is possible with gnocchi).

When it comes to cooking the gnocchi use the biggest pan of boiling water that you have but they need to be able to move around freely – I did mine in 4 batches. They're done when they float to the top and you need to remove with as little water as possible – I used a slotted spoon. In retrospect a chip pan would have been ideal but I don't have a chip pan. You can keep them warm in a buttered dish in a warmish oven (not the same oven that you're roasting peppers and by now tomatoes too in).

I finished off the butternut squash and mushroom sauce with a load of crème fraiche, and removed the sprigs of thyme. This was a good tea from the point of view that I could put everything in dishes on the table for people to help themselves. As well as the gnocchi and sauces there were some green beans that my sous chef had brought from her garden and prepared for me. It all seemed to go down very well. An improvement on my previous gnocchi, although they would probably have benefited from even more cheese (but what doesn't). No-one had any space for pudding which was a good job because there wasn't any. And we were nearly done by 7pm.

Thursday's risotto

In the lead up to dinner today I had consumed only a small apple and a few dried apricots in terms of fruit and veg, so I was feeling a bit low on vitamins. I needed to cook something that would go a decent way to making up this deficit. We were also both quite hungry so needed to fill up on some carbohydrates too. Pasta and potato have already featured heavily this week and I didn't fancy them again. I was going to take a risk and go for rice. I was going to mediate the risk by making risotto. I rarely have success with rice on its own, but usually in a risotto it turns out better.

Matt had done the shopping last week so we had a large butternut squash. I like butternut squash but am yet to find a great range of good applications for it, but risotto is a great application for it. After spending years honing my butternut squash handling skills I think that I have finally decided that the best way is to stick it in a hot oven for a while before you want to do anything with it. This is superior to trying to:

1) Cut it up whilst raw – butternut squash is surely one of the hardest of all vegetables and its girth makes this supremely difficulty and leaves you in constant fear of losing one or more fingers

2) Peel it – the under-skin layer of the butternut squash is remarkably slippery and again the vegetable's girth makes this task both challenging and hazardous (a butternut squash inadvertently propelled at the foot is quite painful).

So the squash went in the oven. I couldn't tell you how long for exactly, but long enough for me to have a shower and take a walk around the local shops to gather some celery (and ready salted crisps). The butternut squash is probably manageable when it's looking a bit golden and the skin has started to blister up. Taking a walk to the shops is not really a very slack thing to do but a risotto without celery is unlikely to be as pleasurable as one with. Plus it was a nice evening for a stroll.

One of the tricks I have found with risotto is to use a big pan. Into my big pan (where I had already heated a little bit of olive oil) went a chopped red onion and two chopped sticks of my newly gathered celery. They need to cook until quite soft. Then I added some mushrooms. I would have used the whole pack but wanted to save a few for the pizza we have planned for tomorrow. Those few are now considerably less as Matt decided that he wanted to eat a few raw – so it might be a less mushroomy pizza.

While that was all cooking I returned to my butternut squash. It was still pretty hot, but easy enough to remove the skin and then chop. I only used half the squash as I didn't want to overdo it comparison to the other ingredients – mainly I was concerned about overbearing the mushrooms. My chopped squash went into the pan too. The veggies sizzled for a while I got the washing in (this is a really got recipe for when you've got other things to do at the same time) and then I added some risotto rice. The amount of rice can be really flexible depending on the rice / vegetable ratio that you're after, I like to aim for 50:50 but it's difficult to tell because of the way the rice swells once you've added the water. I think that it's good to cook the rice for a couple of minutes before adding the water. I add water from a boiled kettle (I'm sure sometimes it's recommended that you use cold water but that seems too time consuming for me – plus you can make a cup of tea at the same time if you boil the kettle), enough to just about cover the contents of the pan. And at the same time I put in a good dollop of vegetable stock powder (I'm coming to the end of the kilo that I brought at about this time last year), a couple of bay leaves from the garden and lots of grinds of black pepper.

I can never remember whether you're supposed to stir risotto constantly or not at all. Therefore I go for somewhere in the middle and stir it occasionally. The method I use to tell when it's ready is when most of the water has disappeared (either through evaporation or absorption) and it looks kind of gooey, but not so dry that any of it starts to crisp up. At this point I added a bit of crème fraiche – it helps to add both a bit of creaminess and a bit of sharpness. You can always add more crème fraiche later but I put some in now so that it doesn't have too much of a cooling effect.

Normally I would finish a risotto off with a bit of grated parmesan for a good salty kick. But we don't have any parmesan in the fridge at the moment (we're particularly depleted on the cheese front at the moment, just some cheddar, cream cheese and mozzarella) so instead I decided to reconstitute some dehydrated sun dried tomatoes (another use for some kettle boiled water). Here's a slack tip: once the tomatoes are rehydrated and drained, leave them in the bowl and chop with sharp scissors, rather than faffing around with a chopping board and a knife. And then I just sprinkled them on top of our portions.

It was a really tasty way of topping up on our carbohydrates and vitamins. So tasty in fact that we both had seconds. And there's still enough for tomorrow's lunch – as long as we're careful with the old rice reheating thing.

As for the leftover butternut squash, I think we might have some soup coming along.

Wednesday's gratin

We had ended up with another high veg situation in the fridge. This included:

• Courgettes – bargain in the shop the other day.
• Mushrooms – seemed like a good idea at the time but I haven't had a chance to use them yet and they were almost getting to that horrible slimy stage.
• Spinach – I have no recollection of acquiring this. On questioning Matt said he picked this up some time ago when I was away and he didn't think there was enough green stuff in the house. On further questioning he didn't have any particular plan for it.
• Broccoli – because broccoli is really good.

We were talking about what we might have for tea whilst in the changing rooms at the swimming pool. But in terms of other useful ingredients we were somewhat depleted. When I say other useful ingredients I mean cheese – the last 60g having gone into some scones at the weekend. We did have some branded cheese triangles but these have limited culinary application. I suggested that with a bit of cheese I could do anything. Fortunately Matt had to take a trip out to the sorting office so was able to tag on a trip to the shop.

In the meantime I got on with cutting up the courgettes. I still had no idea what I was going to cook. A pasta dish would have been the obvious choice but I didn't really fancy pasta.

I put the courgettes in a large oven proof dish (I actually chopped up more courgette than needed to line the bottom of the dish – the rest will keep in the fridge for another day).

And then in a moment of inspiration decided to cook some sort of gratin. This not only provided the potential to use a lot of the vegetables but also:

• sour cream – purchased as a bargain at the same time as the mushrooms and surely not going to last in a healthy manner much longer
• bread crumbs – finally a use for the vast quantity we have in the freezer following the purchase some months ago of some extremely cut price sliced bread.

The question mark remaining over the meal now was protein. It would be quite acceptable to have some fish fingers or veggie sausages on the side but I didn't really fancy that. I decided to integrate some butter beans into the gratin. We have lots of tins of beans and pulses in our cupboards, most commonly they go in casseroles or curries and I was rather excited about using them for something different.

I narrowly avoided making a significant omission. Fortunately Matt called to ask if we needed onions. We didn't, but this did remind me to chop an onion up and put that in. I used a red onion, which I have subsequently learnt contain more quercetin than other types of onion (although how scientific this fact is I'm not sure and what the benefit of quercetin is I'm not sure). And for good measure I added some cloves of garlic too.

By the time I had layered up all the veggies (and beans and sour cream, intermittently adorned with black pepper and herbs from the new herb grinder that Matt's mum had brought us back from her holiday), Matt returned with the cheese. I grated a generous amount and mixed it up with the bread crumbs (and some more black pepper) and then poured this over the top of everything else.

I had no idea what temperature to cook this at, so I went for the default of 180ºC. I had no idea how long it would take, but long enough at least that I could hang up pretty much our whole household's worth of underwear and socks. I decided it was done after about an hour when it the top was starting to look a bit crispy (I love crispy things) and then put the broccoli on (I decided that would be better as a side than in the main dish).

I was a bit worried that it would be a bit soggy (I had poured over just a little bit of hot stock before it went in the oven) so got bowls out just in case. But it held together remarkably well. It tasted great, although I'm not sure what the sour cream added, but then I don't know what it would have been like without the sour cream. Maybe it would even have benefited from more sour cream. I had cooked vastly more than was needed to feed the two of us – probably more like enough for 6. So we both had some for lunch today (leaving it in a lunch box in a hot car is actually a rather effective (and free) re-heating method) and there's some more for picnic tomorrow.

Wednesday's boozy mushrooms

I got excited when I got a text from Matt, my husband, the other day asking me what I'd like for dinner. The reason that this is exciting is that when he cooks it often involves cheese and I was in the mood for cheese. Nonetheless I responded suggesting potato (jacket) or pasta as we needed to be pretty swift about getting out of the house.

So I was surprised when I got home to be greeted not by the smell of cooking, but by the smell of burning timber. Apparently Matt had only asked my dinner preferences in case he needed to buy anything, by the time I replied it was too late, and he had busied himself with the skirting board project. Still, I was pleased that the skirting board project was progressing and was sure that I could concoct something for us with what we had.

It would be pasta and it would probably be mushrooms. Although there were some other possible ingredients the mushrooms looked most in need of consumption.

I had brought a 600g "family" pack of mushrooms at the supermarket a few days previously after using a little bit of algebra to calculate that this was the most economical way. I'd guesstimated that this was the case but felt the need to do the maths as usually it's better to buy things loose.

How these got named a "family" pack defeats me. An important lesson in mushroom cuisine is that that they cook down to hardly anything so this 600g would serve just Matt and me (and only for one meal). They were clearly not a family themselves (being all of approximately the same size and age) and the only family I could imagine them feeding would be one that doesn't like mushrooms very much. I suppose technically you could call a married couple who occasionally borrow a dog a family, in which case the pack description is not so misleading.

Anyway, I quartered approximately half of the mushrooms and sliced the rest (I've found this to give the best consistency to the finished product).

Prepared mushrooms

I added these to some onions and celery that had been sweating (if only there was a nicer word to use there, but I suppose it does describe the process accurately), along with some of that slack pre-chopped garlic that comes in a jar preserved in vinegar (we were out of proper garlic and this is just fine). And then you can leave it until the juices have come out of the mushrooms & they have, as predicted, cooked down to a fraction of their original volume.

So I pottered about for 20 minutes or so and then added the finishing touches:

• Some herbs from the garden - I'm pretty sure it was thyme

• Some vegetable stock powder

• Some tomato puree - a tip from my mum when I first started cooking with mushrooms

• Some crème fraiche - at least that was the plan. But what I thought was a whole pot in the fridge was less than a dollop so I augmented this with some low fat cream cheese.

• Some sherry - this wasn't the plan. I would probably have used white wine but the sherry was open.

And at the same time as the sauce was being completed I boiled the pasta. We went for the fun pasta again. There was a little less fun pasta than originally planned because I lost some in the sink in the draining process.

Sphinx passa

When it came to the eating I found a penguin and a koala in my pasta shapes, as well as a reappearance of the sphinx and some less fun shapes like apples and bows.

Penguin pasta

Koala pasta

Based on the boozy aroma coming from the pan I was a bit worried that I might have taken the finishing touches a splosh too far but it was too late to worry about that now.

 It turned out that the sherry wasn't a splosh too far. I think it turned what might have been a rather ordinary mushroom sauce into something rather more sophisticated.

 

Sherry mushroom stroganoff with fun pasta

And it was all done quickly enough that we didn't too much of our samba lesson.

Thursday's quick curry

Until today, most of this week’s meals have been of the x-on-toast variety: beans, cheese, sardines, more beans. I branched out and tried out a different type of sardine (my usual is the sort in tomato sauce): picante. This was mainly because there were none in tomato sauce in the cupboard. Picante turns out to be oil with a 2 whole chillies. It was a good job that Matt, my husband, didn’t try these – they made my nose run so I dread to think what they would have done to his delicate taste buds.

The x-on-toast meals were a result of there not being anything much else at home: yesterday’s “big shop” was well overdue. Mostly this involved me doing the shopping while Matt was on the phone. I replenished the oily fish supplies, reverting to form with the tomato sauced type and also got a good selection of fresh food. We shopped after our dancing class. This has the benefit of the shop being quite empty and there usually being quite a few reductions but the drawback of being hungry whilst shopping (the cha cha cha is particularly energy consuming). So, unchecked by Matt (we usually put the brakes on each other’s retail impulses), I was unable to resist the super-reduced bakery products. I saw the super-reduced stickers but didn’t really think about what I would do with a packet of sesame seed bagels, 6 finger rolls, 6 granary rolls (I am at least partially prepared for barbeque season now) and a full-sized loaf of sliced bread when I got them home.

The other drawback of the late evening visit to the supermarket is the lack of checkout staff – necessitating the use of the self-checkout. These were initially a source of great amusement to me and reminded me of my days working in a large stationery shop. They’re still fine if you just want a few simple (i.e. not age restricted or security tagged) items but for a trolley load of stuff they are not optimal. My usual supermarket bagging system is ruined. Anyway, last night I let Matt deal with the self-checkout on his own while I then talked on the phone.

As well as all the refined carbohydrate I had picked up sufficient provisions to make a curry tonight. This actually only required only the addition of an onion and some mushrooms to a few things we already had but psychologically the restocking of the fridge restored my cooking motivation. Usually I like to cook curry very slowly but today we wanted to swim before dinner and I thought better than to leave the gas on while we were out.

After a quick fuel up on half a bagel with my favourite yeast extract we headed out to the pool.

The pool seemed rather busy so I asked the lifeguard if all of the lanes were for general public lengths. Despite being a lovely new facility they have yet to devise a system of indicating where I should swim at any particular time that I turn up. I was told that none of the lanes were for the public as it was “The University”. I think he must have noticed a disappointed look on my face as he then said that it would be ok to swim in one of the lanes. Clearly my physique did not give away the elite swimmer that I am becoming (haha!) as he suggested that I go in the lane with all the people doing breast-stroke with their heads out of the water. I explained my training and that I would be going fast (haha!) and was redirected to the “fast of the fast lanes” (haha!). Whilst I was preparing to enter the water (positioning of goggles) the lifeguard commented that I must be an open water swimmer (haha!), I’m not sure if that might relate to my physique too – maybe I looked well insulated! I started off going quite fast and was keeping pace with the “fastest of the fast” but reverted to my usual pace as they emptied out of the pool. Eventually I had the lane to myself. This struck me as the perfect opportunity to practice my tumble turns. Believe it or not the tumble turn has been recommended to me by a doctor as a good exercise for my back. Usually they aren’t possible because either there are too many people hanging around at the end of the lane and I can’t judge my tumbling that accurately to avoid them, or there are swimmers behind me and I worry about getting disorientated during my tumbling and crashing into them (or them into me). Allegedly the tumble turn is supposed to be an efficient way of getting from one length to the next but I think that I’m missing this benefit by coming to a standstill before executing it. It is a very non-automatic motion and it’s never until I’m upside down that my brain realises that it’s going to have to twist my body to get out of it.

I had a sesame seed (from the pre-swim half-bagel) stuck in my teeth for most of my swim which distracted me from my length counting.

We got home at 9pm after a reasonable swim (it was cut short because some club people turned up to use the section of the pool I was in and I was insufficiently motivated to move to another part once my rhythm had been interrupted). This was already too late to be eating but I had been thinking about curry all day and if it wasn’t this then it would be another x-on-toast. I was very hungry so filled the immediate gap with a mini cheese in red wax which one of Matt’s friends had left behind at the weekend.

The curry is a tried and tested one first created by Matt and replicated on many occasions since; sometimes by him but tonight by me since time was of the essence and speed chopping does not feature on Matt’s CV. The curry consists of local curry powder, chilli (not too much), onion, garlic, sweet potato, mushrooms, chickpeas, tinned tomatoes, a bit of stock and some coconut milk.

While this was all brewing up I had to deal with yesterday’s bread. Matt managed to rearrange the freezer to make space for the rolls. This required the removal of some soup which will have to be eaten this weekend and some pistachio ice-cream which would not last so long. There was still a full sized loaf of sliced bread. I decided that the best thing would be to turn it into bread crumbs. I intended to package this in 200g and 100g bags which would fit into small spaces in the freezer. I was 30g short for my final 100g bag. I suppose that is accounted for by all the crumbs that Fred, my mother-in-law’s Yorkshire terrier, helpfully cleared up.

The curry was delicious, despite the quick cook. Matt had his with naan bread (also removed from the freezer to make way for the new things). I had mine with lime pickle to spice it up a bit. We both had mango chutney. Desert was the pistachio ice-cream with some unnecessary spray cream. Now I’m thinking of things to do with 770g of bread crumbs. All I can think of at the moment is Christmas pudding.

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.

Thursday's slack lasagne

I’ve taken to posting pics of my culinary creations on the internet and one of my friends suggested that I write a cookery blog as I’m "a domestic goddess".

Well, if you could see the state of our kitchen (or indeed any other room in our house) that goddess bit falls down. But I’ve been thinking about writing something for a while (I have a job that doesn’t permit for much creative expression!) so here goes….

I think that you’re supposed to come up with an amusing name for your blog but that eludes me at the mo, so for now it will be called "slack lasagne" after this first entry. I suppose the “theme” will be loosely around my exploits in the kitchen but this is liable to tangentalise into other topics, as is my habit.

I am yet to develop the advanced skill of planning meals in advance thus much of my cooking is based on what we happen to have in the cupboards and fridge, and this was just one of those occasions. And after my husband Matt announced to me this morning that he had found some lasagne sheets next to his porridge there was no other option in my mind.

So I spent my day off buying tea cups and glasses in charity shops, knitting a swan-a-swimming and doing some swimming myself (before I was interrupted by the lifeguard requesting that I get out because someone had been sick in the pool – which put pay to my plan of 100 lengths today!). And before you know it’s time to make dinner.

I had stopped on my way back from the pool to pick up some crème fraiche which quite often comes to the rescue in my cooking but that was the extent of my planning. I have a box full of recipes which I’ve pulled out of magazines over the last 5 years or so, most of which I will probably never make but which I feel compelled to sift through every time I’m making something new. Just in case there’s a good recipe. There wasn’t. So then I browse through the indexes of my recipe books for the keywords.

Today these were spinach and / or mushroom and I was led to “spinach lasagne”. Checking the list of ingredients I was pleasantly surprised to see that mushrooms also featured – albeit the “wild” variety rather than my budget supermarket box. I didn’t have any cheshire cheese but there’s been half a packet of feta sat in the fridge for the last couple of weeks and some pecorino, which would join some cheddar in a happy trio of cheese and recipe adulteration. I didn’t have the stated amount of spinach (who seriously ever keeps more than 1 bag at a time?) but an excess of mushrooms would surely make up for this along with a generous quantity of white onions (instead of the suggested tiny amount of spring onions which I always find a bit awkward anyway). Sadly the recipe didn’t call for crème fraiche but I found half a pot in the fridge which needed using up so that went into the white sauce. The new pot will be put to use another day.

And 2 hours later, after minimal adherence to the original recipe and using more utensils than I generally like to, we tucked in to a delicious cheesy dinner. It took less than 10 minutes for us each to polish off a portion. Fortunately there’s seconds for tomorrow.

Slack lasagne

•  Lasagne sheets
• About 750g of vegetabley stuff all cooked up - today this was onions, garlic, spinach and mushrooms mixed up with feta and cheddar and a bit of nutmeg
• White / cheese sauce made with 600ml milk - today this had crème fraiche and pecorino in it

In a large oven proof dish put half of the veg stuff, then a layer of lasagne sheets, then half of the white sauce, then a layer of lasagne sheets, then the rest of the veg stuff, another layer of lasagne sheets, then the rest of the white sauce. Finish with a generous sprinkling of cheese. Bake at about 200°C for about half an hour (until the cheese on top is cooked up nicely).