highlyeccentric | Entries tagged with cooking

My box was delivered while I was out today. Fortunately the entry door was open, and it was left inside. Unfortunately it contained over-ripe tomatoes that had asploded along the way, so all but one of them had to be discarded, and everything else needed tomato-ness washed off it.

Last box was exactly four weeks ago, and guess what? I STILL hadn't used up everything from it!

( What was in order 1, box 4 )

What Box 4 made:

( Many things )

Left over, I still had: four or five carrots, some potatoes, one wrinkly apple, two lemons

Meanwhile, what was in order 2, box 1:

- About five tomatoes, of which only one had enough structural integrity to be held in my hand and subsequently added to curry sauce
- Two fennel, one huge and one tiny
- two zucchini
- another prodigious amount of carrots
- three bulbs of dried garlic
- a baggie of potatoes
- a generous handful of green beans
- a purpleish letuce
- two green capsicum
- two more lemons
- quite a lot of plums
- another probably-rockmelon

I have already been cooking: made spiced potatoes and carrots for tonight's dinner / tomorrow's lunch, along with a curry that got the one sad tomato in it. I'm having J to lunch on Saturday, so I pre-made spiced carrots and fennel for a salad, and then in a fit of enthusiasm (how do impress girl? Garlic. Garlic good) set out to make toum. My food processor seems too big for this job: I had to add about 2.5 times as much garlic as recommended, and still couldn't get it to a creamy paste. Couldn't get it to paste at all without more liquid than the recipe suggests, and then it ended up too runny. I set some aside, and with the rest blended in mint (blended well) and cucumber (chunky) to make a sort of tzatziki inspired relish. It's still got Quite A Bite too it, but I think it will work as a thin salad dressing, and perhaps with poppadoms (certainly it would work to top a curry).

Probably because I didn't see anyone, and didn't go anywhere except around my neighbourhood looking for naminals. Admittedly today that was a 2hr mini-hike, but hey. I did call Shiny TWICE, and K once. Shiny has sewn masks. K has new feline housemates, and videos of said nosy ginger boys trying to get into Stellacat's food tray are a great amusement to me.

Work: Listened to MF's segment on BBC Word Service 'The Forum' last night while making dinner. She did very well, but I know some stuff she wanted to get in didn't make the final cut.

Language: I've now had two more lessons on acc/dat prepositions, and I now *understand* the difference when I read and can use the correct w-question words. Producing the correct case and indeed gender when speaking is still a bit hit and miss. I was trying to figure out why this is so HARD, when it was a cakewalk in OE and fairly easy in Latin, and then I realised: in OE I never had to do production exercises, and in Latin, only fill-in-the-gap written ones and i think some tiny 'write a sentence' exercises later on. That's wildly different from having to assemble all the moving parts of a sentence.

Fortuitously, I have been doing these wo/wohin lessons, and the topic is moving house. Fortuitous, for I am to go help J move house next weekend, and while I think her partner speaks English, her flatmates do not (they speak Russian, Arabic, some French and some German). Anyway, I will have an amusing story to tell come mid-august when I have a private lesson booked for the speaking-wrap-up of the 'moving house' unit.

I have a Dr appt this week with a doctor who speaks EITHER english or french but I don't know which. I don't have German class tomorrow, but i shall be doing language work: prepping speaking notes for My Medical History in French, with a rudimentary gloss in German (in case the doctor speaks on English and German). Do I go as far as trying to explain The Family Genetic Bag of Doom, I wonder? I haven't before, in Switzerland, but I might need to for the psych evaluation the week AFTER so perhaps I might as well prep it anyway.

Foods: I made a gratin yesterday and it was disappointing. The potatoes didn't cook through, and I put too much stock in so it was sloppy, and a lot of cheese stuck to the tinfoil.

Once again I have Too Many Leftovers and need to embark on several days of eating down the leftovers. This despite the fact that I still have fresh veg. At least I've eaten up all the peaches and only one had gone too manky to eat before I got to it.

Garten: I repotted the lavender; it has responded by drooping. Silly lavender. I have... faded the daisies? They WERE a rich red and now they're a dusty umber. Actually colour faded, not 'faded blooms' faded, which (I assume?) means wilted. I've hacked at the herbs to cut them back a bit; there are now boquets of herbs in my house. Also hacked back some of the little orange flowers to give the yellow possibly-lantana more space. All fairly tedious, but absorbing. Although I did not know when I took up flower gardening that I would spend so much time giving haircuts to plants.

Naminals: Yesterday I went on a short walk to look for goats (I had heard them on Firday); it turned out they were sheep (video evidence of sheep). I then meandered back to the Baumgarten complex, tried to read more of the signs about the Roman villa, and observed the chickens. I also met a very self-possessed tuxedo cat, who was staring down a poodle and winning. I believe this cat is the genius locorum.

Today I set off over the hills to Oberbottigen, via Niederbottigen and Buch. I did not see any farm cats, but I did see the emus from a distance. I tramped along a path through sugarbeet, which was helpfully so labelled by a big placard advertising the benefits of pesticide in sugarbeet production (I guess someone is proposing an anti-pesticide bill, because this farm had signs on its fields and its piggery explaining why a law against pesticide would be bad). Thence across some grassy fields of unknown purpose, and into a cornfield, where I excelled myself by falling flat on my face three times in 200 metres of grassed and rutted track. Eventually I made it into the wood, where I found a Good Stick. I came out above a tiny village called Buch, and turned for Oberbottigen on the road, and then home along the main road. I have kept the Good Stick, though; I intend to wash it down, dry it, and then sand it back, and take it with me on further expotitions, to reduce the number of times I fall flat on my face on even slightly uneven surfaces.

All up this took about two hours. As well as the emus I saw some cows, the pigs in the piggery, some horsies in the equestrian stables, and a llama in someone's side yard.

Internets: Instagram has locked both my accounts from liking or commenting or even putting captions on my own photos - but it seems like only when I use the mobile app? Turning on VPN on the phone didn't help, but switching to my desktop browser EVEN THOUGH IT'S USING MOBILE DATA did. Extremely weird.

I assume, since this isn't IP linked, it has something to do with my IFTTT scripts, which are all playing up anyway because gmail changed its rules again. Given the latest tumblr update ate some xkit functionalities I rely on AND since about a week before the latest update tumblr no longer recognises the 'show this photo in portrait' metadata from my camera, I have decided that my photo tumblr is now a dead blog. Spent some time twiddling email posting settings and

speculumannorum will now be getting direct posts, via email. Annoyingly, one can't schedule emails when composing in gmail on one's phone, but one CAN at least post more than one photo at a time. And the weird line breaks that used to happen with gmail post-by-email seem to have gone away.

I've got a fair bit of instagram crossposting to catch up, which might take a while, but there's photos from the camera scheduled for every day of this week.

This has been a mundane update.

My accumulating leftovers, both amount-left-over from previous box and leftovers of cooked meals, lead me to log a 'holiday' with the service, so I got a three week gap between deliveries instead of two.

( What was in box 3 )

What that all went into:

- Endives and lettuce (box 2) and half a pack of beets (box 3) into endive, beet and brie salad. The endives roasted in balsamic vinegar and olive oil; the beets precooked, and the whole thing assembled cold.
- Celery leaves, the older garlic stem, and assorted veg-ends went into making another 1.5 L of stock.
- A number of kiwis were eaten mixed with créme vanille
- The bananas went on breakfasts
- half a zucchini from box 2 was diced and fried with mushroom and capsicum and garlic powder, to make Vegetable Content For Tortilla Wraps
- The melon was in fact a rockmelon, and provided a. morning tea and b. great enjoyment to the fruit flies that haunt the compost bin on my balcony
- Half the garlic, the fresher garlic stem, the remaining flat beans, and some celery went into a garlic and pepper chicken stir-fry, along with some capsicum I had purchased
- some of the tomatoes joined some supermarket tomatoes in roast tomato gnocchi (this time with bacon and feta cheese)
- The broccoli florets, rubbed in olive oil and paprika, were baked along with merguez sausage and some potato balls with gruyère cheese
- Some of the stock made a batch of french-style lentils, which then joined some beets in two servings of beet and feta salad
- The fennel, some tinned chickpeas, the end of the celery, and one of the zuchinis, along with stock, made a pilaf
- some of the cucumber made tzatziki
- Potatoes, carrot and zucchini joined sweet potato that I had bought in spiced vegetable bake, without the couscous accompaniment. Ate it with pilaf, topped with feta, and some of it was also served with merguez sausage
- The last of the beets, some carrot, the remaining garlic, and two potatoes went into lentil borscht. That made so much that I had to freeze some, undoing all my good freezer-emptying work.

I also made pan-fried gnocchi with leek, mushroom, and brown-butter sage, but nothing in that one came from the veggie box. Along the way I consumed two frozen ziplock baggies of Mystery Curry, one of which was nicer than the other.

What is in Box 4
- About eight flat white peaches
- four bananas
- two lemons
- a probably-rockmelon
- Five tomatoes
- a bunch of small radishes
- three ... green onions? the long green ones but with a bulb at the end
- a lot of potatoes
- a PRODIGOUS amount of carrots
- five or six stalks of swiss chard (ooh, swiss chard! Never actually cooked with it before)
- another cucumber

Plus, left over from Box 3, I still have half a cucumber, and from boxes 2 AND 3, many potatoes. And some apples, and I think one orange.

Clearly I need to prioritise potato consumption! And carrots. Carrot cake, and a potato bake/gratin thing with chard in it, will clearly have to happen.

That was the end of my four-box subcription. I'm going to give this box three weeks, as well, and order another subscription for delivery starting either on the 6th or the 11th - either way, testing out what happens if I'm not home, as I have Other City commitments those days.

Is there some kind of law that says the postman will ring the doorbell JUST as you sit down on the loo?

( What was in Box 2 )

Box 2(+carry over) turned into:

- The oranges from box 1 became orange juice, after I bought a citrus juicer
- The bananas mostly went on breakfast, allowing the older bananas I already had to become Jack Monroe's Banana ketchup (minus the peel).
- Endives: I still have two (friday's box contains beetroot, and I have a cunning plan for endive and beetroot salad), but one got sliced and mixed into a mash made of potatoes left over from the previous week's slow-cooked beef and vegetables, and eaten with the last of said beef
- Other leftover roast vegetables: got pureed, and mixed with gluten-free panko crumbs and parmesan, to make sort of vegetarian rissole things. These fed me for a few lunches, with sweet chili sauce and guacamole.
- The celery, stock, some green beans and frozen spinach got turned into a pilaf with halloumi. I added more spices than I normally do with pilaf, and a mint-yoghurt dressing, and it was pretty great.
- One broccoli, half the lettuce, an apple, half the kiwi fruit plus a handful of cashews went into a salad that was vaguely based on this one crossed with the delicious magazine warm spinach and apple salad. No cheese, though.
- One fennel, half the garlic, and some of the long peas ('haricots coco'... whatever that is in English), onion i had from the store, some not-salami but similar sausage rounds, and some feta cheese went into a risotto
- The tomatoes, along with some mushrooms I had and the last of the halloumi became a variation on my roast tomato pasta
- I attempted to make fruit custard tart, with pre-made shortcrust, kiwifruit, and crème vanille. Conclusion was: kiwis muddled with crème vanille would be better and easier, the pastry was not sufficiently sweet. I could try the puff pastry, I guess, it wasn't very puffy and might blind-bake down. Or I could just eat fruit muddled with crème vanille forever.
- another tomato (I ended up purchasing more), and 2/3 of a zucchini, became a pizza with a creamy white base sauce.
- the rest of that zuchini, and about a quarter of the capsicum, got diced up and fried with mushrooms to make additions to brunch "burritos" (i don't bother putting rice in them) of banana ketchup, guacamole, vegetable mix, cheese, and egg.
- Two zucchini and two potatoes went into a curry with chickpeas, working from this as a base recipe (modified by a good year of habit now...). Another handful of the flat pea things got cut up and fried with mustard and cumin seeds to go with.

Left over:
1 orange
4 apples
8 kiwi fruit
Half a banana
2 endives
1 fennel
1 zucchini
A handful of the long flat peas
Half a lettuce
The garlic stem
Most of the potatoes

Plus the extra tomatoes I bought, and a handful of apricots. One thing that surprised me was that I was able to shop on the day I received the box, and then only needed a quick duck into the station grocery store for milk, tomatoes, and the apricots (I think I wanted to mix them with kiwi? I didn't, whatever it is I wanted to do with them) the following weekend. I didn't notice a dimunition in my grocery expenditure during box 1, but I definitely did for box 2.

Box 3 arrived today (Friday) and I don't think I'm quite so in love with it, but it provides some good staples.

Contains:

A small head of celery
3-4 zucchini
A cucumber
Another lettuce of some sort
A fresh garlic
More potatoes
Two shrink-wrapped packs of precooked beets
4-5 tomatoes
About six carrots
About 4 apples
Quite a lot of rhubarb
Something that looks like a rockmelon from the outside but might not be inside (melons are weird here)

I am currently roasting the endive with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, with a view to endive, beet and brie salad tonight. I also cut the tops off the celery, and fished out the bag of veggie ends from the freezer and herbs from the balcony garden, and slowcooker stock is underway.

Looking at this, I will probably make lentil borscht, and a stir fry of some kind. Possibly roast carrots and fennel make some variation on this salad. Mixed spiced roast carrot/zucchini/potatoes with chickpeas and not-couscous might also be in order, especially if i make a big patch of tzatziki to go with.

Today I got my second veggie box! Much excite was had.

( What was in Box 1 (29 May) )

Cooked from box one (with, of course, other stuff I already had or bought along the way):

Roast Tomato Pasta
A fairly boring leftover soup (leftover curried veg, with the leek and garlic and some celery)
Leek and zucchini pasta with lemon-yoghurt sauce (and the fresh garlic)
Red leaf salad with lemon viniagrette, which also accounted for half the radishes
Red leaf salad with sweet potato and green beans
A spicy lamb stir fry, which used another third of the beans
Any Fruit Galette with one of the apples and some strawberries I had to hand
Risotto with sautéed mushrooms in brown butter with balsamic vinegar, and brown butter radishes (this was delicious, do recommend)
Mustard beef in red wine (adapted from Clarissa Dickson-Wright's Beef in Brown Ale), using up some of the celery, and the stock I had made from the odds and ends
Over a litre of stock from the celery ends, leek ends, and other cut bits and pieces.

I still have: about three small celery stalks, an apple, and a few oranges.

( What's in box 2 (12 June) )

I'm pretty pleased with this delivery: I had been tempted to buy broccoli in last weekend's shop, and I can always use zucchini and snow peas. Fennel was a nice surprise I didn't expect at this time of year.

I was surprised to get capsicum and banana at all - the premise of the subscription service (Ugly Fruits) is that you get items that weren't sold to supermarkets. It doesn't specifically say locally grown, though, now that I look at it: perhaps the bananas and capsicums are excess from a bigger distributor. They also say they buy the morning of delivery, but a. my box definitely gets sorted at 11pm at night the night before, I can track it on the post office site, and b. What I got was exactly what was in the description for 8 June. And they already have the list for 15 June up. It's possible their workflow (and supply chain) has recently changed thanks to COVID - they did a big ad campaign around the start of shutdown and may now have a LOT more boxes to process than they used to.

[Ed: ah. I note the bananas are marked fairtrade, and the kiwis 'from Italy', likewise the oranges. So I'm guessing the company buys stock of popular warm-climate fruits, at least.]

The challenges in this box are:
1. More lettuce
2. Endives. All previous experiments with endives have not been great. I'm going to try sautéeing with balsamic butter, but my previous efforts involved things like bacon and maple syrup, so. May be a lost cause.
3. THAT MANY kiwifruit. What does one do with MANY MANY KIWIFRUIT, other than... make pavlova?

Plans I have for this coming week/fortnight:
- Avocado pasta with... something. I wonder if tomatoes might go nicely on it?
- Pilaf with halloumi, and perhaps some of the broccoli
- pizza, probably with capsicum and zuchini
- Probably another stir-fry
- Sautée endives; undecided what I should accompany them with.

This time NEXT week I'll take stock of what's left and end up with a targeted shopping list to the tune of 'buy things to cook with the remaining veggie box things'.

Suggestions for endive preparation (nb: i like mashed potato but hate MAKING mashed potato, so endives-in-mash as per the dutch is a last resort... although i have a stack of roast potato and sweet potato leftovers right now from the roast...) welcome! Ditto things to do with a lot of kiwifruit...

Right now I'm going to make a roast beef sandwich. With onion jam.

Saturday: I didn't do much of substance, other than finishing the Good Omens readthrough organised by

wildeabandon. I was a bit zonked after having had a minor emotional WHATEVER on Friday night; I postponed the work I had planned to do that morning, and snuggled on the couch with a blankie and wearing my new, extremely soothing, Underworks compression tank. Made roast tomato pasta in the evening and made some navel-gazing locked posts with a view to sorting out the previous day's Whatever.

Sunday: Spent most of it calling people. Called Mum, family are all doing fine. Called K, got updates on the doings of cat and the progress of family history research. Called Shiny, had a mixture of very banal conversation as they were extremely sleepy and some accidentally quite meaningful and useful stuff. Read some more of The Mercies.

Got out the yellow fabric for a tablecloth, and assessed it; no point measuring it and cutting it down, but I had to cut the top and bottom straight. Started zig-zag stitching around the edges. Stopped with time to make tea and a snackerel before German class, but despite this blood sugar boost had an inexplicable and tedious mood slump. German class went fine, and then I retreated to bed and hide under my stripey crochet rug for a while.

Eventually coaxed self back up again, and made soup for dinner with the leek and celery from the vegetable box, and some leftover aloo gobi and some baby corn. It is neither the best nor the worst soup I have ever made. More process on The Mercies. I should have been able to finish it this weekend, but... guess not. I've got a long train trip the day before book club, so if all else fails that'll do it.

Friday night's bread, which was okay for the first few slices, turns out to be not fully cooked in the middle - while having a HUGE air bubble in the top. Ugh. Call that one a failure, i guess.

I have not done anything that marks the deconfinement s2, although i did walk past a local shoe/sports store and noted their first tactic was to do a massive e-bike sale (makes sense: public transport is operating, but many people would prefer not to use it, for obvious reasons).

Done Saturday:
- Talked to Shiny for a bit. They had been to an in-person (permitted) gathering *and* a jitsi party, and were thus in good, if tipsy, spirits.
- Laundry
- ??? Genuinely no idea what else. I had defrosted soup for dinner. I guess the afternoon went on recuperating from the previous two day's conferencing

Done Sunday:
- Made egg and avocado burritos with Jack Monroe's banana ketchup (from vegan-ish)
- Called mum. Mother's day present not yet arrived. Spoke to Ms10 briefly.
- Finished Mask #1, then had to give self a pep talk about perfectionism and skills we are not good at.
- As You Like It readthrough with

wildeabandon et al, which was much fun.
- Made roast tomato pasta for dinner.
- Decided to deal with my grump about imperfect mask by planning projects /three stages ahead/. Now I HAVE to do the masks, and the tablecloths, in order to fine-tune the skills necessary to advance to bloomers, and then to bolero jackets. I know from comparable skills that, *unlike*, say, languages, I do not cope well if I just leap in a step or two ahead of my objective level, but the life strategy of strategic over-ambition has merit in many situations.

Done today:
- More laundry
- Made my assigned post at

covidcoffeecorner. Stop by, we're talking about stuffed toys.
- Spent some time panicking because NONE of my keytags would swipe me into the building (I could get in by an open cellar door). Called the real estate agent, who determined it was just the front door, and also apparently just me. By 3pm it was working again? Now unsure if I hallucinated it, or if it was something the renovating dudes just happened to be doing, or if - and this is possible but I really think unlikely - I forgot that the door has a little catch and you have to push it a bit. I'm sure I pushed it more than a bit!
- Due to above, did not go for a run
- Finished reading American Chaucers
- some phd>book draft
- signed up for another book review with Parergon
- Instead of running, took trolley and went up to the Other Migros, which turns out to be closer to home than the one I usually go to. Dropped off all my plastic bottles. Bought a small batch of grocery supplies (was out of milk), and then went back around and purchased 20L of potting soil and a pot of petunias. Never had much luck with petunias before, but hope springs eternal.
- On returning home, emailed some colleagues re possibly hosting a works-in-progress seminar for swiss researchers
- made vegetarian stroganoff - StrogaNOT, if you like - from the base recipe in Vegan(ish). Added mushrooms to the eggplant, and put the cream back in (didn't have sour cream, but 250ml of uht cream with a dash of lemon seemed to work). That used up the last of my (very very sad) potatoes, and also reduced the hamster-pile of shelf stable mushrooms a bit.
- Cut out the fabric for Mask #2. Identified somewhere I went wrong cutting the last one, but then made a different mistake this time. Not worth recutting, though, so onward ho. As I said to myself in my pep talk, I will make DIFFERENT mistakes next time! This time involves t-shirt material as well as more slippy satin, I shall be Tested.

Jack Monroe's Cannellini buerre blanc. (Good: if not using GF pasta, i'd have doubled the recipe - GF pasta doesn't keep as well). The Jack version is vegetarian, but I chucked some salami in there.

BBC Good food Chinese poached chicken and rice. Very good. Had leftover chicken to do something else with, although I can't recall what now.

Oh that's right: leftovers went into chicken pilaf.

Real Simple Curried eggplant with tomatoes. I made this a bit in Japan. Sometimes my version ends up with cashews in, for protein, or chickpeas.

Something that started with Delicious Magazine's Sweet potato and chickpea curry, except I forgot to add the coconut milk.

Something not actually very like Budget Bytes' Curried cabbage (I used wombok, sultana and onion), but I credit that recipe with giving me the sense that 'curry frying shredded cabbages is a thing you can do'.

Foodandwine.com's Red lentil Dal with coconut and kale except I had leek and spinach instead of onion and kale. I lacked many of the spices, so it came out a bit bland, wouldn't recommend as a solo dish, but as a side to the sweet potato curry it's good. And probably if you have the right spices it's great.

I'm sure I've mentioned these before, but I made Epicurious banana coconut muffins for the first time since going GF, and they're great on Migros gluten-free flour. Currently that link redirects to a recipe for pickles (why???), so here's the waybackmachine link. I leave off the flakes on the top and use dessicated coconut.

Not the cake I made today, which /lied/ to me when I stuck a knife in, and was sekritly still molten in the middle. Oh no. A pasta dish!

Lemon, Bacon and Feta Pasta

( Dietary and access notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

Tonight I made aloo gobi, and combined it with packet palak paneer (I draw the line at making my own palak paneer. I don't know where to get paneer, for a start), and lo, it was tasty. And it hasn't made me any more nauseous than I was before.

The figure skating Euros are this week and I am very looking forward to having something to fixate on that's not work.

I have had this icon since 2008. Ten years of my goddamn life, guys.

If anyone's wondering what kind of day today is, it's the kind of day where I put a pot on to boil for pasta, and come back five minutes later to find the pot's hob cold and the one under the chopping board has melted the chopping board and a plastic container-lid.

Meanwhile, a Good Recipe from last weekend. Adapted from Campion & Curtis' In The Kitchen.

( Accessibiltiy and dietary notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

I have been having Computer Trouble (TM), end result of which is I bought a Lenovo Yoga and the Mac Experiment period of my life will be over once I get the damn thing back, unrepaired, from the shop and copy my files off it.

Bleh.

Meanwhile, I have cooked a delicious food. Serious Eats' Takeout Kung Pao Chicken, only I used cashews instead of peanuts.

I don't think I've ever eaten Kung Pao, either authentic or westernised, but it still tastes like the essence of chinese takeaway, which is precisely what I desired from it. (If I wanted authentic I'd go and PAY for it. I genuinely LIKE the white-people-friendly staples of takeaway chinese, possibly because I am a White People.)

A++ would recommend.

Loosely based on a recipe from budget bytes which calls for italian pork/fennel sausage, which I cannot find.

( Accessibility and dietary notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

This is a simplified and budget-ised version of Melissa Clark's Rosh Hashana recipe at the New York Times. (Which, by a co-incidence of menu planning, I have cooked on the first night of same. Happy New Year, anyone observing!) Australians might want to save it up for late summer / early autumn, when plums are a thing.

( Dietary and accessibility notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

Things I have cooked today:

- toasted granola for 1x week's breakfast
- Epicurious Banana Coconut Muffins, homg, so good, do recommend
- basil-almond pesto (I've never made pesto before! And pine nuts are too expensive here! But eventually I had so damn much basil it became necessary to branch out)
- tuscan bean stew from the big red book

And I didn't even spend ALL day in the kitchen! Also got haircut, did grocery shopping, cleaned the bath, and washed the kitchen floor. Unprecedented productivity, wot.

Liberally adapted from a recipe at the roasted root.

( Diet & accessibility notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

I'm finding the eating-stewed-apple-chunks part weird. Whether weird enough to motivate me to puree the soup in future remains to be seen...

8.30pm at the end of a long weekend and I'm finally bored with being alone and crocheting. So I considered 1. making a decadent dessert or 2. going running. Obviously #1 won.

( Whisky-soaked fruit with chocolate sauce )

Adapted from a leafy salad at 101 cookbooks

( Accessibility & Dietary Notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

I served this as a side dish to a roast chicken, and then took the leftovers and cooked them into a risotto using the basic recipe I used here. Om nom nom.

Adapted from a cold salad in Leanne Brown's Good and cheap.

( Dietary and accessibility notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

I'm assuming this will store & keep overnight and be tasty cold. Note, the broccoli is still crunchy - if you prefer soft broccoli, perhaps steam in the microwave for a few min first.

1. Curried cauliflower with almonds and green beans.
Or: most of the spices for aloo gobi, without the aloo.

( Dietary and accessibility notes )

( What you need and what you do with it )

Note: other spices that might be good include mustard seed, garam marsala, anything that's supposed to be in aloo gobi, and garlic.

2. Somewhere between iced tea and punch, for hot days

A variant on

msjackmonroe's Summer Odds and Ends Cooler. It's stuff. In a jug. That's tasty.

( What I had and what I did with it )

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Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I shall wing it, I have wung it

Entries tagged with cooking

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Pandemic days 77, 78

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A recipe!

Notes on things that are not terrible

Beef, spinach and red lentil curry

Oooh, a delicious!

Today in mushy red fod: white beans with chorizo

Roast Chicken Pieces with Plums

Fooods

Beer and Bacon Soup

Spontaneous dessert indulgence

Roast Zucchini, Sweet Potato and Mozzarella Salad

Warm broccoli & apple salad

Two botched-together culinary successes

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August 2025

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