This post comes from my kitchen, I am a meal planner and have been for the best of thirteen years, but I am not here to convert you all to doing that too. One of the downsides of meal planning is that it is just as easy as any other way of organising your meals to get stuck in that good old rut of always cooking the same thing all the time. It does not require much thinking and some weeks there is not much space for that, so sticking with what you know is the best and quickest option. Some weeks, I do have the headspace and I get the recipe books out to get inspired.
On one such foray I came across some pages that I had completely missed in one of my books. It was easily missed as I meal plan from my weekly veg box and if I am looking for new recipes I turn to the index for recipes that include the veg that I have to hand. These pages I had missed would not have been included in the index as whilst they are a recipe they are more like a formula for a recipe rather than a formally written one.
I am loving these pages particularly the one for warm salads. You roast some veg, add some protein (cheese, nuts or pulses), some leaves such as spinach or rocket, and finally make a dressing adding some herbs. This has become a weekly fixture on our menu, it is different every time although we usually have the same dressing olive oil and pomegranate molasses which is our new favourite.
Like so many parts of the world our energy prices have gone up considerably recently, my husband saw a slow cooker for sale in a charity shop and decided it might be a good idea for us to have one, as he was sure that it would save us lots of money cooking our food. He didn't buy the one in the charity shop but spent several hours researching the best one to buy. We are now the proud owners of a slow cooker, many years after many of you, I would expect, as I know that they have been around for years. I keep finding things that it is possible to make in it and whilst I was a little sceptical that it would get used much I am totally sold now. I can see that on those very rare days when the house gets hots (this is all relative you understand we rarely, if ever, get temperatures over about 25°C/77°F) if I do need to cook something it will be better to use the slow cooker rather then the oven which ends up making the house even hotter. I am loving that I can prepare our evening meal in the morning and it can spend the day slowly cooking whilst I get on with other things. On those days of the week when time is scarcer this is a huge bonus, I am finding that I often make use of the slow cooker even on days when I don't need to. Aside from the obvious stew like meals I have also been using the slow cooker to do Jacket potatoes, roasted veg and have even cooked a chicken in it.
Years ago I created a sourdough starter which I kept going for a long while. I stopped eating gluten for a whole year about five or six years ago and gave my starter away to a friend. About six months ago I got one going again and it is finally maturing into a reliable and tasty starter like my last one. Sourdough always seemed like a scary and strange process to me but it is so far from this. I have had several conversations with a baker at a local farmers market who has kilos of sourdough starter for his business. The tips I picked up from him through our conversations as I bought his wonderfully tasty handmade baked goods have been invaluable. We don't eat much bread in our house so I tend to make rolls once a week, when I have the time, we are also really enjoying sourdough pizza dough once a month too, all made with flour, water and wild yeasts, how amazing is that?
I have already mentioned energy prices here whilst the slow cooker is proving to be my new best friend in the kitchen there are some things that I do turn the oven on for still. I am maximising my use of it each time I use it and often do some baking at the same time. As this always coincides with making a meal my kitchen gets messy very quickly as I try to minimise the time the oven is on. I have sedimentary layers of washing up and opened ingredients from the cupboards. There is something really satisfying about clearing that all away when everything is in the oven.
I often have something sitting soaking alongside my sourdough starter, when it is not in the fridge. This past month I made new batch of wholegrain mustard. We get through a lot of mustard, I used to buy it in large pots from a food wholesaler I use. I only order every three months so if something is not in stock it is a long wait before I can try again. This happened to me a year or so ago, stuck without a supply and not being able to find one that was not full of preservatives in the shops, what is with preservatives in mustard? That has always baffled me. I turned to the Internet wondering if I could make it myself, it turned out I can and it is unbelievably easy I cannot believe I have not tried this before. You soak some mustard seeds in vinegar for a few days or if you are like me you forget about it and the few days becomes a few weeks, after soaking you whizz it up in a blender, retaining a few seeds to make it wholegrain, along with a few spices for flavouring. I made some and gifted it at Christmas last year.
I have also been drinking Cleaver tea. Cleavers is that plant that sticks to you, sometimes called goosegrass or sticky grass in these parts. Cleavers is a good cleansing herb which was often used to make a tea at this time of year to clear out the system after the winter particularly at those times when folks were self sufficient and relied on their own stores. I am making about a pint at a time and drinking a small glass full each morning before eating. I don't suppose it is good to drink this all the time, I have been making one quantity a week.
I also have a jar of oil steeping with comfrey leaves from the garden, they will sit there for six weeks before I strain the leaves and make a salve with it by adding melted beeswax. I first made some comfrey salve years ago when I spent an afternoon with a herbalist. I continued to make my own after I used up that initial jar, I also make plantain, dandelion and yarrow salves too, they also make a lovely present. Each salve has its own uses, yarrow, made using the leaves, is used like arnica cream except it has the added benefit that it can be used on open wounds which arnica cannot. Dandelion, made with the petals, is good for joint pain, particularly arthritic pain, and sore muscles. Plantain, made using the leaves, is good for bee and wasp stings, insect bites, skin conditions such as eczema, psoriasis, sunburn, itches and wounds. Comfrey is used for burns, cuts, sprains and sore muscles, bruises and fractures.
My least favourite housework task is washing up, the large piles of unwashed pots that are nearly always a feature in the corner of my kitchen will attest to this. Our dishwasher broke a few weeks ago, it had become increasingly unreliable and randomly left items unwashed each time we ran it until it finally stopped working completely by spewing water over the floor rather than draining it out. My husband has had it apart and ordered various bits for it in an attempt to fix it, we are now waiting for a part which we hope will solve everything and it can be returned to its rightful place in the kitchen, it is currently sat looking rather forlorn, and in pieces in the garage. We did find a large ball of rather greasy looking detritus in one of the pipes which probably explained the lack of draining. The washing machine went out in sympathy with the dishwasher a few days after the floor got an unexpected wash. That was a quicker fix and for the moment seems to be working fine. A machine full of bedding had to be washed twice after it was covered in detritus from somewhere deep in the machine. I think my kitchen appliances are in collusion with each other as at the end of last week a piece broke off one the shelves in the door of my fridge which nearly sent a half drunk bottle of wine and a jar of mayonnaise onto the floor as I swung the door open. The fridge is ancient and is looking rather sad and tired, the shelves in the fridge itself are rather cracked and distinctly saggy, one has been replaced by a piece of twin wall plastic leftover from when we made a cold frame. We have fixed the fridge too, for now.
What's been happening in your kitchen this past month?
