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.

Tuesday's muffins

Having thus far failed in my social obligation to provide sweet treats to my colleagues following my return from holiday over a week ago I had vowed to make amends for this yesterday. Normally people bring back something from wherever they’ve been but despite visiting quite a few places I didn’t see anything inspiring in terms of locally produced goodies (or at least not that I would be able to get back to the UK without being devoured first) so decided to make muffins.

I popped into my favoured local supermarket on the way home from work to get eggs as I’d used a whole box in the weekend’s lemon meringue pie. Seeing that that was all I went in for I did rather well and also got:

• a loaf of sliced bread – cue toasted sandwiches in the new sandwich toaster which I’d got at a bargain price at my favourite continental style discount supermarket last week 
• 4 tins of strawberries in syrup
• 2 snack packs of premium raisins – ideal as emergency rations in my car

All for under £5, which was good as that was all I had in my purse. I have never bought tins of strawberries before but at 25p each they seemed too bargainous to leave behind. I thought that I would probably be able to adapt a recipe to turn some of them into muffins.

Muffin making would have the bonus effect of keeping me out from under the feet of Matt, my husband, whilst he continued with his DIY project.

I found a recipe for summer fruit muffins. This called for fresh or frozen summer berries but surely the tinned strawberries could be put to good use here. So where the recipe stated 240ml milk I used 240ml of the syrup from the tin. Then I added the fruit that I had chopped up using my favourite method of scissors inserted into the tin. There was a little bit of syrup and a little bit of fruit left over and rather than have these go to waste I mixed them in too. My main concerns were over-sweetness and over-wetness, but I thought that this was a risk worth taking.

I baked them for a little longer than the recipe suggested, hoping to mitigate the risk of over-wetness. They came out of the oven and appeared to be muffin formed rather than one soggy mess. My muffin recipe book is one of the most reliable that I have but since this was an improvised creation the strawberry muffin would need testing. Fortunately Matt was only too happy to help. The feedback was not overwhelming. Adequate but not overwhelming, so these muffins would have to be improved with icing.

In the meantime I moved onto the next batch of muffins: carrot at the special request of my colleague Jan. This is a tried and tested recipe, enhanced by the addition of lots of cinnamon and raisins.

And then the next batch: lemon. Also tried and tested and one of my personal favourites. I find the given recipe not to be lemony enough so I added so lemon juice to the mixture as well as the zest. It suggests that you use lemon essence but since you have to denigrate a lemon to get the zest and then use some of the juice for icing it seemed only logical to use the rest of the juice in the muffins. These have to be iced as soon as they are out of the oven. It’s a simple lemon glacé icing, but I frequently mess it up. This is because when I start to mix it looks like there’s too much icing sugar, so I add more lemon juice, and then it gets too liquid and I lose patience and I just end up pouring this runny lemony syrup all over the muffins. But yesterday I showed an uncommon level of patience and/ or skill and they were rather successfully iced. The only slight problem was that there wasn’t quite enough icing so there were 2 un-iced ones. I didn’t see this as too much of a problem as there are always some people who don’t like icing.

And then the next batch. I went for the relatively safe option of chocolate (for any fussier eaters) but jazzed them up a bit by adding some experimental orange.  Since I’d not done this combination before I used just the zest but I was informed after some more testing (again, Matt didn’t need any encouragement) that they could be more orangey so will add some juice next time. Or maybe make an orangey icing.

At this point I should have got on with making some dinner (well, toasting some sandwiches) but was in the baking frame of mind and wanted to do more icing. I decided that the best thing for the strawberry muffins would be some vanilla icing so had a bit of a trawl on the interweb and found one that looked likely. Determined not to mess this up (icing is not a strong skill) I applied some of the things that I have learnt from previous efforts (this could almost be a CPD entry). The recipe told me to whisk the stuff together. Rather than make a cloud of icing sugar all over the kitchen I mostly blended with a spoon and gave it a quick whisk by hand at the end – I got a nice smooth icing. The recipe told me to use 2 tablespoons of milk. Not wanting to end up with a runny vanilla mess I used only 1 tablespoon – I got a suitably stiff icing. In fact it was of such a consistency that I even ventured to use my icing set. This was only the second time ever that I had used this. On the first occasion it was an absolute disaster so I was a bit nervous but kind of excited at the same time. I chose my nozzle from the selection of 8, loaded the icing bag and then went for it. Even if I say so myself, it was much more successful than the first occasion and I feel rather try rather encouraged to practise a bit more. Maybe I might even use some food colouring. I enhanced the decoration further on a few of the muffins by adding some freeze-dried strawberries.

 

But the icing bag was an absolute mess and I was not in the mood for cleaning it last night so the icing for the carrot cake muffins would have to be spooned on. This was a classic carrot cake icing with cream cheese and is really yummy. I should have made it even better by putting a bit of orange zest into it. But it was still really yummy – I know this because I personally cleaned out the bowl.

That should have been it for the evening. The sandwich toaster had still not been deployed. But Matt emerged from his DIY and suggested that I could make a batch of muffins with some chocolate caramel sweets. We have quite a few packets of these as Matt’s grandad gives them to him when he cuts his toe-nails. So I chopped up the chocolate caramel sweets (easier said than done even with a really sharp knife), added these to a mixture of “basic” muffin, reheated the oven and located another packet of muffin cases. It was pretty obvious that these would taste okay but by the time they were cooked I was hungry (sandwiches still untoasted) and tired so thought it perfectly acceptable to test one myself. It was good.

I was too tired though to risk any more icing. So I sort of cleaned up. Matt made the toasted sandwiches – they were delicious. Much more delicious than if I had made them because he was very generous with the cheese.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the whole exercise was packing all the muffins into boxes for transfer to mine and Matt’s places of work. This required extraction and redeployment of the camping box (the big plastic box with miniature supplies of tea, coffee, sugar, salt, ketchup etc. from hotels, motorway services etc.).

We divvied up the muffins between us and took them off to work this morning. And the results of this multi-centre, non-placebo controlled, non-blinded muffin trial?:

• our colleagues like muffins
• one participant described the strawberry muffin as “a mouthful of loveliness”
• the chocolate caramel sweet muffins could have done with more chocolate caramel sweets
• the carrot cake muffins were the most popular in all locations. Matt informed me that they had been met with “great acclaim”

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.

Monday's medley of soup

After a leisurely start to the day it was all systems go to equip the garden. The leisurely start included reading an old book – I’m sure I’m enjoying it more because it smells old.

The equipping of the garden first involved removal of junk from the boot of my car at the dump. This included:

1. An enormous and cute, but slightly mouldy teddy bear, that had been freed from our loft by my cousin, Alastair, in January. It had been sat around in a black sack in various locations since as I had been intending to fettle it up with a trip to the launderette but finally thought better of it.
2. A whole load of VHS tapes which I had discovered whilst spring re-arranging (more enjoyable than spring cleaning) yesterday. Both mine and Matt’s and none of them viewed in at least the last 7 years.
3. My condemned sandwich toaster.

Items 1 and 2 disposed of according to plan. Item 3 disposed of causing Matt great hilarity. Today I was fulfilling the role of dumping whilst Matt watched from the car. This is often beneficial as the men at the dump are generally quite keen to help ladies with their dumping. I was duly assisted with items 1 and 2 but today the electrical waste was unmanned.

Taking health and safety seriously I called out before throwing the sandwich toaster into the skip to check that there was no-one inside it. There was no response so I went ahead with the launch of the sandwich toaster. Unfortunately I didn’t launch with quite enough force and the sandwich toaster rebounded from the side of skip, plug flailing and narrowly avoiding my head. It was whilst I was picking up the bits that Matt wound down the car window and told me, between fits of laughter, to walk round the other side of the skip. Where the side was down and I could just place in the sandwich toaster with no risk of head injury.

A successful trip to the garden centre ensued and 8 terracotta, mosaic encrusted pots later we began the return journey. Matt had seat belted the larger pots into the back seats with the rest in the boot so there was limited capacity for shopping from a “luxury” supermarket. One of the best things about said luxury supermarket is that when they reduce things they do really good reductions. Today’s best bargain was watercress and I picked up 4 packets. I also picked up a packet of reduced salad which when put together with some reduced beetroot, the remaining salmon & prawn leftovers and a homemade dressing made a very nice lunch.

After lunch it was back out to another garden centre where we successfully equipped ourselves with garden tables (that sort of match the pots) and a hose. And what appears to me to be an extravagant hose attachment but Matt assures me that we will not regret it.

Once home I needed to turn the watercress into soup while it was still nice. I think that potato is the traditional thickening to go with this but I prefer lentils to add some protein.

Realising that we’d had watercress in the lunchtime salad I thought that I should mix up the day’s flavours, I decided to make another sort of soup too. I got a leek and potato one on the go. 

Then I thought: why stop at two? We had eaten the last portion of frozen soup yesterday (the parsnip and apple one) so there was scope for restocking.

One of my other luxury supermarket bargains was a pot of sun ripened tomatoes and I thought I’d try these with some slightly wrinkling peppers. Having started to heat some olive oil to sauté an onion I noticed that there was quite a bit of oil in the tomato pot and not wanting to waste this I got out another pan and heated that instead.

So now I had a spare pan with olive oil and the only logical thing was to use this to make another soup. I had used up nearly all of the fresh vegetables in the house but there were still some carrots. And I had a little knobble of ginger so decided to try carrot and ginger. To improve the flavour I oven roasted the carrots before adding to the onion and ginger. Whilst the carrots were roasting and I was pondering this creation I felt inspired to add orange juice. This would be the perfect opportunity to use up the oranges and satsumas etc that had been sat, unloved, for a good long while (some I fear since 2012) in the fruit bowl. This is because I love nice citrus and am often tempted to buy. But if I buy a pack, eat one and it’s disappointing then it puts me off the rest. But I hate wasting food so the citrus stay there. (If it’s nice the whole lot may well get devoured in one sitting.) Matt can usually be counted on to help consume food but he isn’t keen on oranges due to the peeling issue (not that I’ve ever perceived that as a particular issue). So I was pleased to be able to squeeze some semi-decent juice out of my languishing fruits, which I added with some stock and red lentils to the other ingredients.

The tomatoey-peppery soup was looking rather insubstantial so I added a tin of tomatoes to that. And some red lentils.

Once all the soups were blended up (separately) we faced the dilemma of which to eat tonight. Matt went for the watercress (with a dollop of crème fraiche) – I am told it was scrumptious. I went for the carrot / ginger / orange. It too was scrumptious. I think that I’ll call it velvet carrot soup as the lentils gave it a gorgeous texture (although I did miss a few bits of carrot in the blending process).

Now I’ve just got to find enough containers to freeze it all. And replenish the lentils. 

Friday's fishy and lemony dinner

I do find bank holiday weekends rather disconcerting. Having been confused by the days all week I’ve been convinced since I woke up that today is Saturday. When a “weekday” radio show has come on, rather than re-orientating me to (Good) Friday, it only goes to make me feel even more bewildered that that they are not airing Saturday’s programmes.

One benefit of the bank holiday is that I felt unusually enthusiastic for cleaning the kitchen. By about 2pm it was looking lovely and shiny (I had been doing other things in the course of the morning) and therefore I didn’t feel like messing it up. So I grabbed a quick lunch of my mum’s carrot cake and headed off for a swim. And 180 lengths later I think that I must have burnt off said carrot cake and most of last night’s rice and lentils. The main challenge of this swim was the paradoxical one of needing the loo and also being very thirsty.

Lucy and Barbara, my sister- and mother-in-law, were to be joining us for dinner this evening. Last weekend, whilst at my mum and dad’s, I had hastily purchased a whole salmon. Mum had said that it was fine to invite some friends round for dinner but that we’d need a bit more fish. When I got to the fish counter whole salmon were on a special offer just too good to leave behind. So mum cooked the whole fish, we ate about half of it last weekend and she sent me home with the rest.

So this morning, with a view to constructing a fish pie, I extracted the salmon, along with some pollack and prawns from the freezer. I’d assumed that there’d be some smoked fish there too but that was not the case but since I was going to have to visit the shop anyway it wasn’t too much of a problem.

After my swim the insufficiency of my lunch hit home. Firstly I missed the turning for the nearest supermarket. So I had to detour around one of my least favourite roundabouts.

Whilst trying to select broccoli I observed the man who was refilling this on the shelf cough all over it. Rather than go for the time sensible option of selecting some of the pre-packed stuff I decided that I would leave said supermarket and head to a different one with hopefully better food hygiene standards. Or at least I wouldn’t know otherwise. The main disadvantage in this course of action was that the supermarket that I was about to leave has the advantage of selling French set yoghurts with a lemon flavour in the pack.

I was then hit with indecision. Should I go to the slightly more distant but larger supermarket that would definitely have everything that I needed? Or should I go to the smaller but nearer supermarket which offers a more pleasant shopping experience with less risk of unnecessary purchases but a higher risk of not having everything I needed. I could tolerate almost anything else on my list not being available but without the smoked fish the pie would just not be right.  

When I got to the junction where I had to make a decision I took the gamble on the smaller supermarket. It was obviously my lucky day. Not only did I get the last pack of smoked haddock it was also reduced. Not only did they have French set yoghurts, these included “new” lemon flavour (replacing I think the slightly peculiar pineapple). Not only did they have broccoli, it was 50% extra free.

I made the fish pie with leeks and mushrooms. I used some bay leaves from our garden in the white sauce which I think I found disproportionately exciting. And chives from the pot that my mum had sent back with me last weekend in the mashed potato.

My mashed potato is slightly unconventional as I choose not to peel the potatoes – all the goodness is in the skins surely. I omitted to pre-warn our visitors but Barbara hadn’t noticed until I pointed it out and Lucy had noticed but seemed to think it was ok.

Whenever I eat with Matt’s family I am struck by how slowly I eat. Today everyone else had finished but I had only eaten my veg and had my whole portion of fish pie left. I always eat my vegetables first because I can’t stand them cold.

And then on to pudding. Lucy had asked for something fruity. I needed to use up a couple of lemons. I identified something that fitted the bill: “lemon layer pudding”. This is one of those recipes where you mix everything together and when it cooks it divides into a spongy layer (although in this instance more sponge-soufflé) and a sauce layer. Having cleaned the kitchen earlier I took extra care to avoid splattering the mixture all over the worktop with the electric whisk.

Barbara declared the pudding to be one of the nicest ever – and I don’t think she was just being kind.  Lucy and Matt demolished it swiftly. I feel suitable inspired to try it with different flavours.

We finished off the evening with some (more) wine (always a risk when Matt’s female relations are around) and a board game. I love games!