Sustainable Living January

This blog has always been about living life in a mindful and intentional way, for me this means that most of the decisions we make have been thought about carefully, even if we decide to continue as we are a decision has still been made.  When we take a product from a shelf in a shop or tap a button on a screen, should we stop and think about how it has got this point before we do so?  It can be hard to make decisions over many aspects of our lives, we are often far removed from the means of production and it can be hard to find out how this operates.  Maybe we shouldn't be thinking is there a more sustainable replacement for something, rather do we really need it at all?  To help me keep on track I have come up with some words that I will be using to keep my decisions mindful and intentional, and my life in general as sustainable as I can make it.  These are the words (you can read my thoughts behind each of them here) that I been using in January.

Nourish

Winter here means lots of root vegetables in our weekly veg box, I always love them at the beginning of the season - not so much by the end!  We have been having lots of roasted veggies either as a tray bakes with lots of lovely flavours, as a lunch with dips or accompanying fritters, pies or bakes.  I have also been making lots of soup with them and experimenting with the best mix of veg to make a spicy vegetable soup, carrot, potato and sweet potato has been the best combination this month.

We usually have a salad for lunch at least once a week here all year round, in the summer/warmer months it is really easy to make up a salad with local ingredients that you would traditionally put in a salad.  I am loathe to buy tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce etc in the Winter as they all will be imported from overseas, this month I have been getting creative with ingredients some from the veg box and others from the pantry to create some really tasty salads.

I have also been making a salad to eat as an accompaniment, an old favourite made with celeriac.  If you have not come across this vegetable before it looks rather odd, often quite knobbly on one end, it has white flesh and smells very like celery.  I know that celery is not popular with everyone, so if you are not a fan of celery you may not like this vegetable either.  The salad I make is very simple so I though I would share the recipe with you:

Celeriac Salad
I head of celeriac
Sunflower oil
Mustard Seeds
Mayonnaise
Yogurt
Wholegrain or Dijon Mustard
Gherkins

Heat a couple of tablespoons of sunflower oil, when hot add the mustard seeds and leave to cook in the oil until they start to pop, the exact amount of each will depend on how much celeriac you have but you want enough to coat the celeriac without any left over.
Peel the celeriac, grate it and place in a bowl/dish that you will serve the salad in, once the mustards seeds have started popping pour the hot oil and seeds over the grated celeriac and stir.
Mix equal amount of mayonnaise and yogurt along with a teaspoon or so of your preferred mustard, again quantities will depend on the amount of celeriac you have.
Chop the gherkins in to small rounds and mix in to the salad.

Lessen

We have been having a bit of a declutter here this month.  I like everything to have a home, a place to be put away, whilst this can give the impression of a tidy house a lot of what we put away may be tidy but it is then never used again or it is forgotten about, so when we need it, we cannot for the life of us remember where we put it.  Clutter of a different kind, I have read that some call this deep clutter.  Whatever you call it we have been going through some of it and creating more organised and easy to use corners of our house.  We managed to rehome all of our unwanted things, a very slow process as some of it was going to friends or family we don't see that often.  There have been times this month when it felt like we were drowning in stuff.  It has all gone to pastures new now and I am enjoying the space that we have created.  Decluttering is a constant process though and there are plenty of places that still need attention.

I took delivery of a bulk food order this month.  I do this every three months or so, it feels like a lot of money to be spending on food but it is cheaper to do this in the long run.  A few friends add to my order for themselves too which is extra work for me but I am happy that they get to take advantage of the reduction in prices too.  It is also a reduction in packaging too as many of the items are in larger quantities than you can buy in the shops.  We don't live in a particularly big house but with clever use of space we have created the storage to enable us to do this.

Grow

We are in the full throes of Winter here, that means cold temperatures with frosts, a little bit of snow and lots of rain, there is very little growing in my garden.  I use this time of year to finish off the clearing and tidying up that I didn't manage in the Autumn which is what I have been doing this month.  I haven't quite got the garden to the state I would like it to be as yet, hopefully I will achieve that in February.  I planted my garlic cloves at the beginning of the month, not quite as many as I had hoped, I could do with some more and have been hunting for some locally without success as yet.

Inside I have been sprouting - not the small green cabbage kind - pulses and seeds, something I have done every winter for nearly twenty years.  They are soaked in a jar of water for 24 hours then drained and spread on the trays of my seed sprouter.  It takes anywhere from five to ten days for them to be ready to eat, at that point they have a small shoot and occasionally the beginnings of a leaf if I have left them that long.  They are packed full of great nutrients and make a tasty addition to our winter salads.

Thankful

I have so much to be thankful for this month.  One of my brothers, after a very difficult year last year seems to have had a better month, it was so much easier to have the twice weekly phone conversations with my mum.  We had a wonderful trip to London with my parents who we have not seen for a few months, we went to the V&A, one of my most favourite museums, to see an exhibition that Cameron wanted to see for his Arts Award that he is working on.  We got to stay with my mother in law (the first time I have done this without my husband) and had a lovely time.  We have restarted our french class after a break last term.  We have started a new art class for older home educated children which Alice and Cameron are really enjoying, I am so grateful to the mum who organised for this to happen.  Whilst the children are in the art class I get to spend some time with my friends which is such a lovely nourishing way to start my week.

Create

January has been mostly about socks, knitted socks.  I completed one pair and continued working on another that have been on the needles for about two years or so.  It is the second sock of a pair, a complicated pattern which makes it a much slower knit.  I have turned the heal, knitted the gusset and am now working my way down the foot.  I really hope to have this sock finished in the next few weeks as I have bought some yarn to make myself something and I would love to cast it on.  I know that if I do this that sock will sit there untouched for some time!

I have also been adding the odd row to Alice's tunic I am past the buttonholes and working my way up the body, I am about 2/3rds of the way up and again I hope to have this finished by the end of this month.

I host a craft group at my house every month, for Alice and some of her friends.  This month we had a go at painting pebbles, an activity suggested by one the children.   I will admit that I was a little sceptical about doing this but I really loved it, it was lovely to all sit together for a couple of hours painting and drawing our designs.  I have been using mine as a weight to hold down pages of a book so that I can work from them without needing to use my hands.  I want to create some more of these to use as plant labels for when the veggies growing in the garden.

I also got my watercolour paints out, after a long break, to add to the pages of my nature yearbook that I started last year.  It has a double page for each week of the year, I add to it as and when and will do so until the pages are full, which will be many years away I expect.

Learn

At the end of last year I had come to realise that the way I was doing the housework was not sustainable and frankly not working.  I was ill for most of November which meant the housework did not really get a look in, except the essentials such as the laundry and keeping the kitchen clean.  Come December which is often a pretty busy month the house was starting to look decidedly grubby and unkempt.  Up until that point I was doing most of the housework on one day, all at once.  For me this was hoovering, dusting, cleaning the bathroom, ironing and changing the beds.  Sweeping the hard floors and laundry were done as and when they were needed.  It would take several hours and felt like a big chore, there were areas of the house that rarely if ever got any attention and during busy weeks it all got pushed to the weekend, a time when I really did not want to be doing any housework.

I knew I needed to change the way I was doing things.   I hadn't even given it any thought when a solution fortuitously fell into my lap.  The Organised Mum has a method she calls TOMM (The Organised Mum Method).  Where by she divides things up in to three levels of jobs some are done every day, the next level is time spent on a particular room, which is the same day every week (Monday to Thursday), the final level is Friday Focus whereby you focus on one room and do a deeper clean, depending on the number of rooms on your list this might be every six to eight weeks.  I have been doing this method since the beginning of January and my house feels like a different place already.  There have been mornings that I haven't, for whatever reason, been able to do all the jobs on my list as I know I will back in that area again the following week, it no longer feels as the jobs are piling up.  I have made my days suit what we are doing each day so I don't do the rooms in the same order as The Organised Mum.  The only job that I haven't worked out where to fit in is the ironing, this is still a work in progress - the TOMM method does not include it as she doesn't do it!

This has been a huge learning curve for me.  Embracing the housework and doing a little bit each week day.  As I have absorbed this routine into the rhythm of my week I have found that I have time at the weekends for doing those jobs that I have always wanted to do but rarely have the time to, the ones that have sat patiently on the shelf and now their time has finally come.   I have read many posts on housework over the years, many which allude to the fact the people are doing what their mothers did.  My mother, whom I love dearly, was not a fan of housework or keeping a particularly tidy house.  When I would have been old enough to remember my mother doing housework she herself was back at work full time and my parents paid for a cleaner, she was the fairy who came in and magically transformed the house and did the ironing whilst we were all out.  Housework is something that I have had to figure out for myself, it has taken me a long time but hopefully I have found a better way of doing it, I will let you know in the coming months how sustainable it is for me!

Fun

It has been a pretty busy month this month, with two visits away from home to catch up with family and lots of wonderful new activities that we are now doing on a regular basis.  The highlight of the month for me though was spending the weekend with my brother, his partner and their two year old son, my nephew.  They are the relatives that live closest to me, although still a two hour drive away, Cameron and Alice love spending time with their aunt and uncle and now that they have a child, their cousin too.  On one of the days that we were with them we spent an hour in an inflatable theme park, we all went in and had an hour of madness and fun running around through the assault course, down the slides, playing in a huge ball pool and so much more.  We were exhausted and hot when our hour was up, but it was definitely more fun than an hour in the gym (not that I have ever set foot in one, they really don't appeal to me), it was a great workout!  It is so important to have a bit of fun in our lives.

Thank you for reading through this rather long post, I do hope you have enjoyed it.  You are most welcome to join me, if you publish a post do let me know in the comments below.  I will be returning on Tuesday March 3rd for my roundup of Sustainable Living in February.

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you may spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, this is a little of what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

When you have a growing teenager in the house there are days when the need for a supply of food never seems to stop.  It is such an important time of growth in our lives not just physically but mentally and emotionally that I have been giving some serious thought to some of the in between meals that seem to be needed here at the moment.  I remember my mother telling me that when I left home to go to university it made no difference to the amount of food she cooked, she was feeding two teenage boys.

A friend told me recently that teenage boys need nearly 3000 calories a day.  I am not a calorie counter, I have absolutely no idea of the calorific value of any food, except celery which I have always been led to believe is negative, but I assume this is a lot more than I would eat in a day.  I increased the amount of food I was cooking for each meal some time ago as I noticed his appetite was increasing, this worked for a bit but more recently I have been caught on the hop between meals on an almost daily basis by I am hungry what can I have to eat, I needed to be more prepared for those words.

So I have found myself needing to provide more snacks, mostly of the savoury variety as Cameron does not have a particularly sweet tooth, for those days when fruit, nuts or cheese and biscuits are not quite enough or have been offered one too many times.

I have found myself making many batches of an old favourite round here, cheesejacks, a cheesy/savoury flapjack from a old recipe book of mine that I bought when I first left home nearly thirty years ago.  I don't need to get the book out to make these any more as the recipe is now stored in my memory.  Luckily for me it is quick and easy, so I often make a batch when I have the oven on whilst cooking a meal.

But you can have too much of old favourites, when visiting my Aunt this summer she made us a batch of her delicious savoury flapjacks and I came home with the recipe.  They have many more ingredients than the cheesejacks so they are not a quick cook but they are so tasty they are worth the extra effort.  If you would like to make some too you can find the recipe here. All those nuts and seeds have got to be good for a growing teenager.

I was reading through one of the recipe books I mentioned last month, I love to read recipe books like any other book especially when they are new.  Call me nosy but I always enjoy having a look to see what recipe books people have on their shelves when I visit them, its a great way to find new ones too.  Anyway I found a recipe in the yellow book for savoury muffins, I make quite a few sweet muffins but had never tried a savoury one before so I gave it a go.   They were delicious, as I expected really as everything else I have tried in this book has been.  You have to cook up some vegetables and an apple which you then stir into the usual wet and dry ingredients.  The great thing about them, apart from their taste, is that you freeze them, here that equals lasting longer and a more constant supply.

Not only have I been freezing muffins but dips too, I realise that might sound like an odd food to freeze.  If, like me, you make lots at once, you can freeze it in small amounts and, provided you remember to take them out of the freezer in good time, it makes a great snack with crackers or veg sticks.  I have made my own hummus for years using the recipe from the same book as the cheesejacks.  It makes a big quantity and it sometimes feel like I am eating it with every meal for a few days to prevent it from going off, putting it into four glass jars and freezing three of them ensures that I have a constant ready supply.  When the last jar of a batch comes out the freezer I soak some more chickpeas to make the next.  Some other yummy dips we have tried recently are yogurt, cream cheese and chives, white bean, cottage cheese and pesto, and broccoli, cashew nut and lemon juice.

You might be thinking after reading this that I spend my whole time in the kitchen making either snacks or meals, sometimes it can feel like that is how I spend my time!  My weekends are usually, amongst many other things, the time I am thinking and planning our coming week, some of those thoughts are about food.  Whilst I am cooking meals, I will often be making the snacks for the coming week, but only one or two of the things I have mentioned here, not everything at once!

All these snacks I make are also great as part of meals particularly picnics, which we have twice a week year round to fit in with the things that we do on those days.  Do you make any snack type food?  Would love some more ideas, particularly savoury, so please do share......

I will leave you with the cheesejack recipe that I mentioned earlier and can be seen in the first picture.

Cheesejacks (Makes 12ish)

Butter 2oz/50g
Porridge oats 5oz/150g
Cheddar Cheese 6oz/175g
1/2 Teaspoon Rosemary
1 Egg

Heat the over to 180ºC/350ºF/Gas Mark 4

Melt the butter in a pan.
Grate the cheese
When the butter is melted, stir in the oats, then the cheese and rosemary, and finally the egg
Mix well and press into a square tin 7"/18cm or equivalent.
Cook in the oven for 40 minutes or until golden.
Cut into pieces, can be eaten hot or cold.

Printable recipe (click on the document and it will give you the option to print)

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you may spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

It has been over three years since I have shared with you what has been going on in my kitchen, in that time there has been some fairly radical changes to what we eat.  In the mid 90s I was diagnosed with Crohns disease whilst this can be a very debilitating disease for some, I am so thankful that I have not been seriously ill with this chronic condition.   In the early days, the medication that I was taking to keep this check gave me further problems due to side effects I made the decision to stop taking them and started my long slow journey into alternatives, that was in the days before the internet was there at a click of a button.  Around that time I had a food intolerance test which transformed my life, within a week of excluding my list of foods my symptoms had all disappeared.  Life ticked on and I continued to exclude my list of 'no' foods until a few years ago, when it occurred to me that it was great that my symptoms had not come back but after so long excluding these foods I was still unable to reintroduce them without side effects, was I really 'better' then or just managing a different status quo?  I hadn't stopped reading and researching in that period but I knew that I needed to try something different.  I eventually decided that I would try giving up wheat and sugar for a whole year and see what happened, if that didn't work I would try something else.  Both of these ingredients formed a integral part of our diet, although sugar less so, I gave up all sugars including refined sugar, sweeteners such as honey and maple syrup and all fruit.  Yes you did read that right all fruit too.  I spent at least a month before I started planning and finding new recipes.  It made a huge difference to me, I felt much less sluggish, less bloated and I slept so much better, but even more amazing was that during that year I started to reintroduce some of those foods that I had not eaten for nearly twenty years and I suffered no side effects.

That was back in 2017, now we eat a wheat in maybe one meal a week or less, sweeteners are used sparingly and fruit is very much back on the menu.   When I look back through my old In My Kitchen posts there was a lot of baking going on then, that has all been much reduced.  It has been a big change.  I didn't think, before I gave it up, that I was eating a lot of wheat until I started to look at a week of meals rather than each meal individually, I am a huge believer in every thing in moderation but that was not an ingredient we were eating in moderation.  It has been surprisingly easy to bring about this change, rather than look for alternatives, using gluten free flour to make pastry or bread for example, we ate differently.  We now eat a lot more vegetables than we used to and with a teenage boy in the house our veg bill is large!  Now I can eat out, share food with friends and family and not worry about the ingredients for the first time in so, so long.  It has made a huge difference to my life and I am so glad I gave it a try even though at the time it felt like a really extreme thing to do!

When you make a fairly radical change to your diet it can mean that many of your cookbooks are full of recipes which are no longer used.  I have given away many of the books on my shelves, particularly the bread baking ones of which I had quite a large collection.  This has been a good excuse to buy some new ones and last year I was given two amazing cookbooks for my birthday, one (fourth book on this link) of which I use a lot and has become a firm favourite for us.  We have yet to try anything from this book that has not been loved and made again, it is a book that really suits what we love to eat, a particular favourite is a Mediterrean Tray bake a dish based on roast veggies.

I am going to leave you now with a recipe for a meal that you could make for dinner* or tea, we usually eat this for dinner.  It is my favourite kind of recipe as it is a collection of possibilities all thrown together to make a really tasty meal which means that it tastes different each week and each season depending on what you have in the house.  If the flavourings don't appeal to you then add your own.  These quantities serve two so increase/decrease accordingly.

Shakshouka (Serves 2)

1 tablespoon butter
1/2 onion or a leek or 3 spring onions
3 cups of whatever green vegetables you have
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon chilli flakes or a few drops of Tabasco
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 handfuls of leafy greens and herbs
salt and pepper
eggs
4 tablespoons of any cheese you have and like crumbled or grated

Melt the butter in a frying pan over a medium high heat, add the onion/leek/spring onion, green vegetables and cumin.  Cook for 5-7 minutes.

Add the chilli/tabasco, lemon juice, leafy greens and herbs and cook until wilted.

Season with salt and pepper if desired.

Create divots in your mixture and break in the eggs one by one (as many as you want), sprinkle with cheese, turn heat to low and cover.  Cook for about 5 - 7 minutes until the eggs are set.

Printable Recipe

*****

*Where I live dinner is the meal that you eat in the middle of the day

In my kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, so this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome, leave a link in the comments section.

It has been a really exiting month in my kitchen  so many things that I have been pondering over for a while have happened.  I am, by nature, a ponderer.  I don't rush into much, I think things through, do mountains of research which sometimes becomes displacement activity.  I have read many posts about water kefir grains, they sounded interesting and something that I thought might do me some good.  I had considered buying them but hadn't got any further than that.  I casually mentioned, in a conversation with a friend who had just been given some, that I had been thinking about giving them a go.  A few days later I had my own small jar of grains.  I knew that, like a small child they could not be ignored but I hadn't considered that I might end up with some quite so quickly.  I dived right in encouraged by my initial research which suggested that you can't really go wrong.  My grains are on their second batch of food and multiplying rather quickly, it will soon be my turn to pass some on, we are enjoying the first batch which is on it's second ferment and fizzing up well.

It wasn't just my kefir grains fermenting in my pantry this month.  These past few weeks I have felt like an alchemist in my kitchen mixing up weird and wonderful concoctions, never quite sure how they will turn out.  I have been wanting to make sauerkraut for years.  When I was fifteen I went on an exchange to Germany the family I stayed with made their own sauerkraut which they seemed to eat with every meal, I loved it so much they sent me home with a jar.  It is so simple to make that I cannot believe I haven't tried it before.  I love it and know that this small batch won't last long.

Breakfast is an important meal, probably the most important of the day, and yet it is the one I pay the least attention to.  I have been eating my own take on Bircher muesli for a few months now, long enough for me to no longer find it appetising.  I started making oatmeal pancakes again, soaking the first two ingredients over night.  They take a bit more organising as I make my own yogurt which always seems to unexpectedly run out.  I am sure I have yogurt eating fairies in my fridge.  I don't want to get fed up with these as well so I am on the hunt for a few more tasty recipes and switch between them.  What do you have for breakfast?

It's not just food I have been making in my kitchen this month.  I ran out of toothpaste and deodorant both of which I make myself. I have am using a different deodorant recipe to the one I previously posted and I don't seem to have shared my toothpaste one, I shall have to rectify that soon.  I have also made a few more beeswax food covers.  The first batch I made were mainly a gift for a friend, I only had a couple which wasn't enough.  When I posted about them several of you asked if they kept their shape when you cover food with them, I hope the photos above demonstrated how beautifully they do that!  They are covering my soaking pancake ingredients and the leftovers of a meal that I didn't have room in the fridge for!

I dont know whether it is the lighter evenings, the warmer days, or the increase in sunshine but I have cooked so many new, to me, recipes this month.  Each Thursday when I sit down to plan the meals for the week rather than the same old again, I have been reaching for the recipe books.  I also had a go at making one up when I couldn't find what I wanted in my books or online.  I fancied a burger/pattie with cashews and lentils, this is what I came up with

Cashew and Speckled Lentil Patties

1/2 cup cashew nuts (soaked overnight)
1 cup speckled lentils (soaked overnight)
1 onion '
2 garlic cloves
1 tbs hemp seeds - optional
1tsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp coriander powder

Preheat the over to 180°C/350°F
Fry the onion in your preferred choice of fat, when they are transparent add the garlic and fry for a further minute.
Add the lentils and stir to mix, add just enough water to cover and cook gently with the pan lid on.
Put your soaked cashews into a food processor and whizz, add the cooked lentils and the remaining ingredients and whizz.
The mixture will be very sloppy at this point and look rather unappetising!
Using both hands place handfuls of the mix on a baking tray and flatten slightly.  When all the mix has been shaped, wet your fingers slightly and smooth and shape the patties.  (the photo above shows the patties smoothed on the left and not on the right).
I made nine with mine, but you can make more or less depending on the size of each one.
Cook for about twenty minutes in the oven.

We enjoyed ours with a dressed green salad.

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat, so this is what has been going on in my kitchen this month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome.

I have fallen in love with a new ingredient this month, I bought it in error.  I use paprika quite a lot at this time of year in stews and sauces but the smoked version is just wonderful and so much better.  It brings a very different flavour with it, as you would expect, one with such depth but not over powering.  If you haven't tried it before I can really recommend it.

I get most of my veg delivered to my door from a local farm share I buy into.  Once year I get a kohlrabi bulb, an unusual looking vegetable that looks like a wrinkled turnip or a rather solid cabbage, which is what it is.  It tastes like a cabbage but has the texture of most root vegetables.  I love trying out new ingredients but it does take me a while to find the best combination of flavours, it is hard to form that kind of relationship with a vegetable that we only eat once year.  I have been unable to buy it anywhere else so I guess it will remain as a once a year pot luck meal!

I was really lucky to get a lovely new kitchen appliance for Christmas.  I have wanted a new blender for a while my last one, a wedding present, packed up a few years ago a stick blender sufficed for soup making but nothing else.  I was given the money from several family members so I had a good pot, I didn't have the time for any research prior to Christmas so in a quiet moment in January I found what I wanted.  I have been getting to grips with it this month, having not had one for a while I have forgotten what I can use it for, this one has many different settings the most used one so far has been smoothies.  Every night I throw a handful of oats and a glass of water to soak, in the morning they are whizzed to make oat 'milk' for Alice's breakfast.  I have attempted a few smoothies with mixed success, the best combination so far has been banana and blackcurrant with oat milk and a dash of yogurt.  If you make smoothies I would love to hear what you put in yours, especially vegetable based recipes.

I have had some nurturing to do this month, one of my sourdough starters was looking and smelling a little neglected.  I buy my flour direct from a local mill, my last order didn't include any rye flour so when I went to make a loaf back in December I was a bit surprised to find I had nearly run out.  I decided to use the little bit I had left to keep my starter going, feeding it every week until I needed to order some more flour.  The mill is not somewhere I go past very often and I didn't want to make a special trip for one bag even though I buy 6kg at a time!  Despite my occasional feeding, the starter wasn't looking too healthy when I finally had the flour to make some more bread with it.  I threw half of it in the compost bin and fed it with one tbsp of flour and one of water for a few days and then made a loaf with it.  As with all new starters the first few loaves were a bit strange but it is now back to normal and making delicious rye sourdough loaves again.  I have not been baking with sourdough starters for very long but I have loved how in a short space of time I have gained the confidence to know what to do by the look, smell and feel what I am doing.   That doesn't mean that I make completely successful loaves every time, but you can always make breadcrumbs from the failures so nothing goes to waste.

We have been cooking for our feathered friends this month.  The end of January and February are always the coldest months of the Winter here, it often snows and food is hard for the birds to find.  We feed them all year round with scraps from the kitchen but at this time of year we make them food.  Using lard as a basis we make two different types, one for the seed eaters which is full of seeds and breadcrumbs, the other for the insect eaters with meat scraps (if we have any), oats, cheese and sultanas.  I melt the lard, mix in the ingredients, leave them to cool in bowls, before scooping them out and leaving them for the birds to enjoy.  If you have the book All Year Round there are recipes on page 207-8.

Whilst the birds might enjoy that recipe it doesn't sound the least bit appealing to me but we have been enjoying stews this month especially if they include dumplings.  I always throw whatever vegetables I have to hand in my stews, leeks, carrots, swede, potatoes, sweet potatoes are favourites here.  The flavourings are always the same, my favourite combination is a pinch of cayenne and a tbsp of smoked paprika added with 2tbsp of flour and stirred into the vegetables thoroughly before adding the liquid, stock with a dash of soy sauce.  The dumplings are added after cooking the vegetables on their own for about ten minutes.

Cheese and Herb Dumplings

This makes eight dumplings you can increase or reduce the quantities to make more or less, they don't reheat well.

100g Wholemeal Self Raising Flour*
25g Butter
50g Grated Cheddar Cheese
3tbsp Chopped Parsley
50 - 75ml Milk

Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles fine crumbs
Stir in the cheese and parsley.
Add just enough milk to make a firm dough.
Divide into eight and shape into balls.
Add to the dish, cover tightly and cook for 20-25 minutes on a low heat ensuring the dumplings don't catch on the bottom.

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* If like me you don't buy self raising flour, just use the same weight of ordinary flour with 1 level tsp of baking powder.

In My Kitchen

I love to cook, good food is really important to me.  If you are anything like me you spend a large amount of your life in the kitchen preparing good nourishing food to eat.  I have posted the occasional recipe here in the past, so I though it would be fun to do a post of what has been going on in my kitchen each month.  If you would like to join in you would be most welcome.

It would make sense, in the first post of this series, to show you round my kitchen.  It faces North East, has dark counters and dark walls none of which is conducive to good pictures in the Winter.  You would be forgiven for thinking it is a dark cave but there is a big window and the walls are few as it is open plan into the hall and the dining room.  It will have to wait until a lighter month.

The Festive season in our house means eating special food but not overindulging.  I am not a huge fan of many of the traditional foods eaten at Christmas in the UK.  But the good thing about tradition is that you make your own at any time.  I have never made a Christmas cake, my Mum did every year it often didn't get eaten until well into January, I wanted a cake that we could make,eat and enjoy at Christmas so this year I tried Stollen.  I remember my Dad bringing one back from Germany some time in the 80s when they were unheard of in the UK, I thought it was delicious and light, and much preferred it to the heaviness of the traditional rich fruit cake.  The recipe made enough for two very large loaves, Stollen is more of a bread than a cake, that didn't last long, it was delicious.

I got some lovely presents for Christmas all of them exactly what I would have bought for my self.  We exchange presents with some friends who bought me the perfect recipe book.  My shelves are already growning under the weight of recipe books but there is always room for more.  This book is all about salads, 75 recipes.  I love making and eating salad.  I miss them in the Winter months but no more, this book has salads for whole year.  Hearty salads that would be too heavy for the summer are perfect for the winter.  We have eaten a different recipe each week this month and they have all been wonderful.

At the beginning of the 90s I went travelling around Morocco, during my eight weeks there I was sold for camels (but you already knew that) and found interesting presents to bring home.  Two of which were these:

If you have not seen one before it is a tajine we saw them everywhere we travelled, in restaurants, cafes and outside in the streets.  I used it a lot when I first bought it home, but being on the big side* it is stored at the back of a cupboard where it is easily forgotten about.  I was reminded of it recently on a visit to my brothers' who was the recipient of the second one and who cooked us a wonderful meal in his.  You cook with it on a low gentle heat and the unusual shape creates a complete seal, the gentle cooking means that the ingredients soak up all the flavours you add, creating a delicious meal in one pot.  You pile the food up in layers in a cone, the base should be the ingredients that take the longest to cook with the quickest cooking ones at the top, pour over your flavourings and liquids place the cone on top and cook.  You can use this one on the hob or in the oven on a low heat, I have also used in in an Aga putting it in in the morning before I went to work and coming home to tea ready to be served!  In Morocco we saw these outside houses set on a fire bowl of smouldering embers.  We have been enjoying a recipe from this book which a blogger has helpfully created a PDF version of should you want to make it yourself.    In the manner of all good recipes we have adapted it to suit us!

I am going to leave you this month with a recipe that we are enjoying at the moment.  We eat seasonally so this has two vegetables which are regulars in our veg bag at this time of year.  I made this up so I have never measured quantities, I just go by how many I am feeding.  It is essentially two vegetables in a rich creamy sauce, it freezes well so if you do make too much.........we never have any left over here.

Squash, Leek and Feta
Squash
Leek
Butter
Flour -  any
Thyme
Stock
Double Cream
Feta

• Peel and chop the squash into bite sized pieces.
• Trim and slice the leeks into slices about 1cm thick.
• Melt the butter on a low heat into a large pan/pot (it is important your pan/pot has a lid with a good seal) and cook the vegetables until they start to soften, stir occasionally to stop them catching you can put the lid on to do this it works well either way
• Add flour enough to just coat your vegetables, you can use any flour you want for this it helps to thicken the sauce slightly
• Add the thyme, stir through
• Add enough stock to just cover your vegetables, I always use vegetable stock as I am vegetarian I don't know how it would taste with any other type of stock, bring to a simmer, turn the heat down very low, cover and simmer gently until the vegetables are cooked
• Chop feta into very small chunks
• Add the cream and the feta stir in and cook gently until the cheese is melted

I serve this with mashed or jacket potato.  It also works well as a pie filling with a pastry top.

In the spirit of all good recipes this also works well with Sweet Potato instead of the Squash and a soft goats cheese instead of the feta.

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*This one is 30cm/12" wide and 24cm/9.5" tall.

The top photo is the Galette de Rois I made for Twelfth Night.

Pie

Our weather is still cool.  When the sun does shine we still need coats, hats and gloves when heading outside.  The fire is still lit every night.  I have been thinking about the seasons and our marking of them of late.  I will share those thoughts another time.  The continuing cool has meant that Pies are still very much part of our menu, a welcome meal at the end of a busy day outside.  I have mentioned these a few times over the last few months and a few of you asked me to share my recipes, so I thought it was about time I did.

A pie, for me, has the potential to be a meal in itself and sometimes it is all I make and serve.  Of the two parts, the filling and the covering,  there are endless possibilities and combinations.  Most of the pies I make have one of two coverings, mash potato or pastry, shortcrust or puff.  I make the shortcrust but buy ready made puff pastry.  I sometimes add other root vegetables with the mash, swede or sweet potato are tasty additions.  The fillings can be cooked and frozen to be used at a later time, sometimes I cook double quantities and freeze half.  So many of the fillings I make did not start life as a pie filling, they are recipes that I have liked the sound of, cooked a few times, tweaked a bit and then turned into pie.  So here are some of my favourites.  My quantities are always a bit vague as I tend to go by what it looks like rather than weighing anything so I will do my best to give them but feel free to change and adapt as you see fit and to suit your tastes!

Spinach and Feta

This is probably my most adaptable filling. I always use pastry but have made this into one large and individual filo pastry pies and the same with puff pastry.  It is also rather tasty with jacket potatoes....
This is loosely based on the Spinach and Feta Filo Pie to be found in the Leiths Vegetarian Bible  if you have that cookery book.

1 onion
1 clove garlic
400g spinach (I always use frozen spinach)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground cinamon
Freshly ground nutmeg
225g feta cheese
1 egg (omit if using as a jacket potato filling)

• Chop the onion and fry on a low heat in a sauté pan until clear, crush the garlic and add to pan fry for a minute or so, being careful not to burn it.  
• Add the frozen spinach and cook until all the liquid has reduced.  
• Add the spices and cook for a further minute or so.
• Roughly chop feta into small pieces
• Turn off heat and add egg and stir to mix
• Add feta and stir again.

If you are going to freeze this don't add the cheese and egg, add these after you have defrosted.

Spicy Lentils

This is another very versatile filling, it works with or without vegetables and I have topped it with mash, and wrapped it in puff pastry as small and large pasties.  I tend to use red lentils for this but it would also work with green ones too. It is an adaption from a recipe in the book Entertaining with Cranks (this is an old book, which you can get secondhand).

1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp Curry Powder
1 tsp Ground Cumin
1 tsp Ground Coriander
350g Lentils (red or green)
Water

• Chop onion and fry in oil until clear, add garlic and cook for a few minutes.
• Add spices and cook stirring for a few minutes
• Add the lentils and stir to coat with the spices.
• Add water to cover (about a litre) and cook covered on a low heat, until all the water is absorbed and the lentils are soft. 
•  Stir occasionally to stop it catching on the bottom, if it does don't worry just leave the lentils in the pan for a few minutes with the heat turned off and stir again and you will find the stuck lentils come off the bottom of the pan.

This is the basic spicy lentil sauce. To this you can add any vegetables that take your fancy, at the same time as the garlic and cook until they are softened before continuing. I prefer to add vegetables if we are having this as a mashed potato pie but leave them out if we are having this with pastry.

Spicy Puy Lentils and Feta

Puy Lentils are also sold as dark speckled lentils, they are very small and hold their shape once cooked.  This pie is delicious with pastry or mash potato.  This is an adaptation from the Leiths Recipe book mentioned earlier.

2 Onions
1 Clove garlic
2 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp garam masala
2 tsp ground cumin
Pinch of cayenne
225g Puy Lentils
2 tsp dried thyme or 2 tbsp fresh
Water/Stock
225g Feta

• Chop onions and fry in oil in a large saucepan until clear
• Crush garlic and add to pan, stir and cook for a minute
• Add the spices and cook for a further two minutes stirring constantly
• Add the lentils, thyme and approx 250ml of water or stock, enough to cover and cook gently for about an hour, stir occasionally to check for liquid. 
• Chop feta into small pieces
• Remove from heat and stir in feta

If you are going to freeze this don't add the cheese, add after defrosting.


Leek, Squash and Feta 

Feta seems to be a bit of a theme!  If it is not your cheese of choice I am sure there are many others which will work, something with tangy taste, maybe a goats or sheep cheese?  I have made this with goats cheese in the past.  I think that this is a recipe that I made up as I cannot find it in any of my recipe books.  I make this with a mash potato topping as it is a sloppier sauce and maybe too wet for pastry.  You could try just topping it with pastry rather than wrapping it, that would probably taste good, not tried it myself tho!

1 onion
2 cloves garlic
2 -3 Leeks (2 if large, 3 if medium size)
1 squash (not too large otherwise it will overwhelm the dish)
2 tsp sage
2 tbsp flour
Stock
200g Cheese

• Chop onion and fry in a saute pan or large saucepan on a medium heat until clear
• Crush garlic and add to pan, stir
• Slice leeks, peel and chop squash into bite size pieces
• Add the veg and sage to the pan and cook until sofening
• Add the flour and stir well to mix (you can use any flour this is to thicken the sauce slightly)
• Add the stock enough to cover, usually a pint to a pint and a half
• Reduce heat and simmer gently to reduce slightly and cook until the vegetables are soft
• Chop cheese
• Take of heat and stir in cheese. 

I also make a version of this without the squash and cheese using a 500g bag of Quorn pieces which I add after having cooked the veg but before adding the flour.

To cook all these pies I would recommend the following....

Filo Pastry cook on 180°C for about half an hour.
Puff Pastry cook at 200°C for about twenty minutes for one large pastie or ten minutes for small ones.
Shortcrust Pastry cook as per the filo.
Mash Potato cook at as per the filo.

Enjoy!

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Something completely unrelated but which you might also enjoy is this wonderful and generous giveaway on a delightful blog that I have recently discovered.  Do go and take a look at this talented lady's beautiful artwork.

Feasts

I have been reading a most interesting book this week, the detail of which I will share later in the month.  The author describes an interview she held, back in 1991, about virtual reality which in those days was pretty much unheard of.  The author asked the question "Aren't you worried that people will get addicted?"  The reply and emphatic No - for one reason: Texture.  Any scenario could potentially be created, you could be anyone or anything you wanted to be but there is no texture which as animals, we crave, it keeps us rooted and grounded.  A life lived fast with labour saving devices* can strip us of texture.  The 'old' tasks growing food, baking bread, preserving food are our interaction with the natural world in a mutually beneficial way.  Real comfort food.

We have, as part of our learning, been finding out about the many, varied and interesting festivals and traditions observed around the world.  It has been interesting to note as we observe and celebrate them not only the similarity between the different festivals but also how many are centred around food.   In many ways this is hardly surprising given how old some of these festivals are likely to be and how vital food production was to our ancestors.

Some festivals are still synonymous with food.  Pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, the many foods associated with Christmas, the specific foods and fasting of Lent, Ramadan and Passover.  I have found recipes mentioned as part of my research learning about some of the new, to us, festivals and this seems like a perfect way for us to integrate them into our lives and continue to observe them in the future.  A perfect place for me to start has been the two lovely book on my shelves Festivals, Family and Food and Festivals Together which between them contain many festivals and recipes.  So far we have enjoyed eating Besan Ladoo a very sweet sweet made for sharing for Divali, Spicy Biscuits on St Nicholas Day, St Lucia Buns for the feast day of St Lucia, Potato Latkes for Hanukah, Gallete de Rois for Twelfth Night, a Spicy Apple Punch to toast the apple tree for Wassailing and a seed cake for Imbolc.  I am sure there will be many more delicious recipes that we make and share throughout the year.  If you have any to share I would love to hear about them!

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* I am not for one minute going to suggest we rid ourselves of all of these!

Recipes

Some of my earliest childhood memories are wrapped up in kitchens, those of my mother, and grandmothers especially.  The shiny navy blue cupboards of my mothers' seventies styled kitchen,  the belfast sink in one grandmothers kitchen where you could stand and watch the huge array of birds feeding in the tree just outside the window, the light and airy kitchen of my other grandmother it was a big room and always full of people and steam.  One thing I don't remember from any of those kitchens, at the time, is the recipe books.

The recipe book market is huge.  In 2011 it was worth £87m up from £20m in 2006, a huge percentage increase.  It appears to be an industry that has been little effected by the internet and free recipes.  Who doesn't love a good cookery book?  My grandmothers and mother had recipe books but not in the volumes that I have and my mother has now.  They had some for baking and all had a book where they would write their own recipes down, collected from all manner of places.  I have no idea what happened to either of my grandmothers books, they would be wonderful to read through...........I have gone for a more modern method (at the time) of recording recipes I collect I have a card index box not quite so interesting to hold in your hand and read through but it works for me.  How do you store recipes you collect?

I have written here before about meal planning.  I do it in advance partly to prevent the rabbit in the headlights moment when you realise that tea should really be on the table by now and partly because it saves money only buying the ingredients you actually need.  It also means that I can whizz round the shops super quick which has to be a bonus too.  My meal planning involves a piece of paper, a list of vegetables we are going to receive from our local farm share co-op and sometimes a pile of recipe books.  Despite having three shelves of books full to bursting with recipe books (they often fall on the floor) I don't consult them that often.  If, as we told, the recipe book industry is thriving why is it that we as nation have so many people who cannot cook.  Who have no idea what constitutes a healthy meal, who fill their trolleys week after week with ready meals.  Perhaps they have their shelves of recipe books but like me they don't look in them and use them for inspiration.  Now don't get me wrong I don't cook every meal I make by making up the recipe, I do use my books on a daily basis but I have a tendency to cook the same, or at least similar meals each week.  I have been trying hard lately to consult my wonderful collection of books more often.  To introduce at least one new recipe a month sometimes more often especially as my youngest has commented a few times recently, 'not this again!'

Some of my recipe books are like old friends, they are familiar and comforting, you know that you will find what you want on their pages.  I do find myself returning to the same books time and time again, they are the ones with the stained pages and damaged covers.  Those that don't get used often or at all are usually given away especially when I have my eye on a new one there is no room of any more on my shelves.  They are stored on three small shelves in my kitchen.  They are actually in part of the house which was originally the hall.  When we moved into our house someone had kindly knocked down a few internal walls, it makes the house seem bigger and it is much much lighter.  This means that we have no wall at one end of our kitchen it flows into the hall.  To the left of these shelves is where the doorway to the dining room is except we don't have a door there anymore just a big hole. Perhaps one day I will take you on a tour of my kitchen!

So my favourites?  Well the book I use the most is the Leiths Vegetarian Bible which appears to have been renamed as the Vegetable Bible, a close second is Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, both these books look a little battered now.  I also have a very well thumbed and totally falling apart copy of The Cranks Recipe Book this was my very first vegetarian cookbook the date inside informs me that I purchased the book on 07.11.91 around the time I started to stop eating meat.  I actually bought a second copy of this book recently (a charity shop find, it is no longer in print) as I am not sure how much longer my original copy will last.  I have never been one to write in my books but I was looking at a copy of this book at a friends house recently and many of the recipes had wonderful comments added to them, friends they had shared food with, additions and changes to make next time they made something.  I rather wished I had done the same..........

Do you write in your recipe books?  What are your favourites books?

Preserving

I spent some time earlier this year researching festivals and noting their dates.  If they fit in with what else we are doing then we observe them.  It was the Autumn Equinox last month and as I was reading about it I was struck by the similarity of what the author suggests to do at this time of year and what we are already doing in our own lives which I do through my own experiences with my mother and grandmother.

While the summer speaks to me of being outside as much as possible enjoying its warm envelope and long days, the autumn is about readiness and preparation.  Preparing for the cold times ahead when the home is the heart of our lives and where we are wrapped in warmth. Preparation of food for consumption in the wanter and early spring by preserving it so that it keeps.  In the part of the world we live the growing season has a beginning and end, defined by the seasons, we are not able to grow enough food to live on all year round.  Often at the end of our growing season we have a glut of produce most of which would not keep unless it is eaten straight away or preserving it, allowing us to eat our produce for longer.  There are many ways that good can be preserved, using tried and tested recipes or, with much trepidation, new ones often you have to leave whatever you have made for a few months before eating it is a long time to wait to see if a recipe has worked!

Freezing

We are lucky enough to have the space for a chest freezer.  It is in our garage and is model that is designed to be located in an unheated space.  It is usually quite full at this time of year and I am getting better at organising it, although you wouldn't think it when you open the lid.  One item we have in abundance in there is frozen fruit.  We are not big jam eaters so if we have a lot of fruit either from the garden, foraged for or given to us I usually freeze it in the first instance and use it up over the following months.  Last year I froze over 20lbs of fruit, this year I suspect it is the same I have yet to add it all up.  I use this fruit to make puddings and cakes mostly but I am going to make more fruit leathers with it this winter, experimenting with different flavours!

I have also been making and freezing soup.  We eat a lot of soup in the winter and they make a great addition to a picnic.  It is always handy to have some on standby..............I have been using courgettes and cucumbers from the garden.  The courgettes have been made into this recipe frozen before the cheese is added.  The cucumbers using this recipe given to me by a friend:

Cucumber Soup
1 cucumber
1 bulb fennel
1 onion or 6 shallots or several spring onions
1 pint vegetable stock
Pinch cayenne
1 tbsp parsley chopped

Chop onion and slice fennel, fry in butter.  Slice cucumber and add with stock and cayenne to pan.  Simmer until fennel is soft.  Blend and add parsley.  I omit the parsley if I am freezing and add when I have reheated.

Pickles

I grew gherkins for the first time this year.  They were moderately successful and I would grow them again.  They didn't fruit as much as the cucumbers but I think that may be down to neglect on my part, they weren't getting as much water for a start.  The gherkins that did grow were large, I expect that if you want to have a mass of smaller fruits, like the sort you buy, you need to tend to the plant more and pick the fruits more.  The few I did pick at a smaller size had gone mouldy by the time I had enough to fill a jar.  I think I need to learn more about growing gherkins before trying again.  Undaunted I decided to pickle the large ones I had by chopping them into pieces and using a recipe I adapted from Festivals, Family and Food:

Dill Pickles
Gherkins
Dill
Pickling Spices
2 Tablespoons Salt
1 fluid oz White Wine Vinegar
2 pints water bought to the boil
Jar - clean and sterilised

Wash and scrub the gherkins, slice into pieces.  I chopped mine into bite size pieces, some slices are whole, some halved, some quartered.  In the bottom of the jar sprinkle some dill and about 1/2 teaspoon of the pickling spices.  Add the gherkin pieces until jar is almost full.  Place a bit more dill on top.  Mix together the salt, vinegar and water to make a brine and pour into jar whilst it is still hot. Store for three months before eating, I hope they taste good!

I have pickled onions for years, I remember doing this each year with my mother making a huge batch as my family loved these.  I have grown pickling onions in the past but I don't find the sets for sale that often round my way, I often end up buying the onions to pickle.  I grew onions this year and about half of them were very small, I know that you are supposed to use pickling onions for pickling (they have a slightly milder flavour) but I thought I would pickle my tiny ones.  Although I have been pickling for years I have yet to share my recipe:

Pickled Onions
Onions
Salt
Water
Pickling Spices
White Wine or Malt Vinegar
Jars - clean and sterilised

Peel onions and put in a big bowl.  Make a wet brine with 50g salt to each pint of cold water.  Pour the brine over the onions placing a plate and a weight on top to ensure that all the onions remain in the brine.  Leave for the desired amount of time, 24 hours will give you crisp onions (my preference) you can leave for up to 48 hours depending on how crisp you like them.  Meanwhile prepare the vinegar with a teaspoon to a tablespoon (we prefer the latter) of pickling spices to each pint of vinegar.  You can place the spices in a muslin bag or strain them out at the end, either way put them in pan with the vinegar and boil steadily for 15 minutes, leave to cool.  I usually find that 3lbs of onions needs 1 pint of vinegar.  Drain and rinse very thoroughly.  Put the onions into your jar(s) and pour the cool vinegar over, seal down and leave for three months.

I have made one jar with my own onions and will buy some more pickling onions to make some more, we eat a lot of pickled onions in our house!

I have also pickled cucumbers using this recipe.

Syrup

We have once again made rosehip syrup this year, using rosehips picked in a friends garden.  They are supposed to taste better after a frost, sweeter apparently.  I made mine before the frost, just, I should have waited as we had a very heavy one this week!  I froze my berries before I made the syrup  which has the same effect as a frost, apparently............I have been enjoying this on my porridge each morning.

Fruit Leather

I first made fruit leather last year it took me a while to get the temperature and times right for my oven.  So do persevere if they don't work at first they are well worth it!  I had only made them using apples so I tried blackcurrants this time, cooking them with a little honey into a puree.  I strained them through a sieve to get rid of the pips, spread them out onto the baking tray and cooked/dried in oven.  They were really good although a little sharp I might use a touch more honey next time.  I have a freezer full of fruit so am going to experiment with a few other fruits and combinations..........

I still have a few more cucumbers that need attention, probably into pickles.  Sadly the apples orchard that we usually go and pick apples in yielded a poor crop this year only enough for a weeks worth of eating apples.  This means I was not able to freeze apples as I usually do or make apple chutney and apple butter.  I will just have to find another source of apples for this year!

Do you do any preserving?  Do you have any recipes to share.............

Eating

There was a time when I did all my food shopping in the supermarket.  It was convenient, everything was under one roof, I worked full time and usually went shopping after work.  I didn't want to use up too much time and thought that was the most efficient way to shop.  I would wander through the fruit and veg picking up whatever took my fancy, paying no attention to where it was grown and whether it was in season.  At home I would make whatever I could with the food I had bought usually by looking through my recipe books getting frustrated most weeks by the one vital ingredient I didn't have!  Over time I migrated away form the supermarket, but not entirely, to using a variety of different local shops.  I am aware that I have plenty of time to devote to my food shopping should I want to but I did manage to shop that way in a lunch hour when working part time.

Food is important to me, using good ingredients I always cook from scratch from necessity as I become ill if I eat too many preservatives.  I don't worry about five a day or seven or ten or whatever the latest research/advice is.  I think more about the overall week to keep our diet balanced.  I do this through planning, the basis of which is vegetables.  We eat a mainly vegetarian diet, I am vege and do all the cooking!  I buy meat once a month at a farmers market which I will cook about two to three times over the month.  At this time of year all our vegetables come from the garden for the rest of the year, a veg bag from a local farm co-operative.  I devise a menu of meals for lunches and teas from the available veggies.  At the same time I also plan (or try to) our weeks' activities so that I know how many picnics and quick meals for late days out to plan.  Any ingredients for our planned meals that I don't have in the cupboard go on a shopping list along with items that I have run out of that I don't buy that often which I record on a small blackboard in my pantry, a cupboard under the stairs that we have incorporated into our kitchen!

Planning meals focuses and reduces my shopping time,  I can do all in less than an hour, despite visiting several shops and having two children in tow.  My list keeps me focused especially in the supermarket, I am not tempted by offers, reductions etc unless they are on my list.  It is also saves us money as I only buy what we have planned to eat so every fresh ingredient gets used before it has a chance to go off and we throw away virtually no food.  What little does go off ends up in the compost bin or on the bird table.

One of the major, and in my book best, advantages of planning meals ahead is it has gotten rid of the twice daily dilemma of what to eat, but I still need to focus on our meals.  There is definitely a better flow to our days when I have thought ahead about which meal on the list we are going to have and what time we are going to eat, otherwise I have hungry children snapping at my heals as I try to throw a meal together which is not a great combination.  It is difficult to come up with lots of meals that are quick to cook so sometimes I prepare bits in the morning to speed up the cooking when we do get home.  This salad is a good one for that.  It is a recipe that I have forgotten the provenance of I have no idea where I read this or if I made it up but this is what I do, actually recipe is perhaps a little grand for this as the quantities are made up as you go along.....

Broad Bean Salad

Broad Beans
Feta
Fresh Mint
Olive Oil
White Wine Vinegar

I have not given quantities as it is really hard to work out the weight of broad beans from their pods.  The pile above yielded 110g of beans.

• Remove beans from their pods and steam for a few minutes.
• Put beans in a bowl of cold water to stop them cooking and to make them easier to remove from their cases.
• Remove cases and put in a bowl, I know this is a faff but for this salad the beans taste so much better.
• Chop enough feta into small squares so it balances the quantity of beans.
• Likewise with the mint. which you finely chop.
• Combine oil and vinegar 2:1 I used 1tbsp oil and 1/2 tbsp vinegar for this salad and drizzle over other ingredients.

Stir, eat and enjoy!

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So are you a menu planner or do you prefer to fly by the seat of your pants or somewhere in between?