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.

Sunday's experimental dumplings

Today saw the sad demise of the sandwich toaster. Probably inspired by the delicious fried bread I had enjoyed at breakfast, I felt inspired to make some cheese and tomato toasties for lunch. This included the slightly taxing task of purchasing tomatoes. Available were 2 packs (of 5) for £2 or loose for £1.99 per kilo. But the packs didn’t have a weight on them. And I’m dreadful at estimating weights. Having found some scales, weighed the loose ones and worked out that I could get five for just about £1 I went for this option. I don’t know why I bought five as the toasties would only need one.

But upon opening the sandwich toaster (which had lain dormant for at least 2 years), the inners appeared to have decayed. So toasties were off and reheat soup was on. This is always a bit of a gamble as I make soup in big batches and freeze in smaller portions which are invariably unlabelled. Today I extracted a tub at random, reheated and we enjoyed parsnip and apple soup, accompanied by toast with my favourite yeast extract spread. The soup was an improvement on its first consumption when I had failed to add enough water and it was more like eating runny apple sauce fragranced with parsnip. I don’t know why I didn’t think it out previously.

Suitably fuelled for an afternoon swim I left Matt with his skirting boards. My exercise was impeded (quite literally if this word comes from ”ped” which I think means to do with feet) by my blistered feet. Having enjoyed 2 night’s dancing in Torquay (hence the cooked breakfast) my feet were rather the worse for wear. Blisters the size of a 50 pence piece on the ball of my left foot and a 20 pence piece on the right, and on both little and big toes. Which resulted in diminished pushing off from the ends and discomfort from the turbulence of the water flowing around my feet.

And then it was time to think about tea. We had a butternut squash which I’d been intending on cooking today and when I inspected it there was a suspicious looking blemish suggesting that it needed using. We had both eaten butternut squash yesterday – Matt as a soup and me in a pasta dish. So the pressure was on to do something creative. Also present was somewhat of a glut of vegetable suet (due Matt’s supermarket enthusiasm a number of weeks ago) and he was keen for some dumplings today. So I decided to go for a vegetable stew. And I decided that as well as the butternut squash I’d use red peppers and mushrooms.

I set the stew off with some onion, celery and garlic. And when I went to vegetable drawer I was confronted with some rather sorry looking courgettes. So one went into the stew. And then I thought I might be putting too many vegetables into the pot. Hence the idea of putting the red pepper into the dumplings.

Once the veggies were sautéed off a bit I had to think about liquid. I would usually chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes but thought this might be too overpowering for the other relatively subtle veg. So opted instead just for vegetable stock. And then thought I’d add some sherry. This wasn’t totally random. I have made a lovely soup recently with squash and sherry so was this was an extension of that concept. It simmered away, smelling lovely, but not happy leaving well alone I threw in a couple of cups of red lentils.

And so to the dumplings. This was high risk. I am not an experienced dumpling cook but have had relative success when I have done them before so was prepared to be a bit adventurous. I chopped up the red pepper really small and fried it up in the little fried egg pan before adding to the dumpling mixture with some salt and mixed herbs. And then it was just a matter of hoping that the whole thing worked out ok.

Which it did. Not the most attractive looking of dinners but really tasty and the dumplings were lovely.

I’m looking forward to more adventures in dumpling land but first have two dodgy courgettes in urgent need of consumption.

Red pepper dumplings (will make 8 large / 16 small dumplings)

• 45g (vegetable) suet
• 100g self-raising flour½ a red pepper, chopped up as small as you can & fried so it’s soft 
• Sprinkle of dried mixed herbs
• Bit of salt (which is about as descriptive as “pinch”) 
• 70ml cold water

Mix it all up and form into dumplings. Cook in your stew for about 20 minutes, just before serving.