Two nights ago, the local 24-hr-supermarket had goatsmilk reduced to 35p. Best before date was that day, and it was 5 mins before midnight. I thought ‘what the heck’ and bought all three tetra packs. After all, those goats put so much work into producing this milk, it should not be wasted. I drank half a litre that night because it was so delicious (didn’t taste that goaty at all!), turned the other half litre into pudding and then heated and cooled the remaining 2 litres to make yoghurt. The pudding tastes great, the yoghurt is a bit thin, but suitable for shakes! The shake in the photo is banana & lemon.
This is the pudding I made from the goats milk. Combined with some of my homemade strawberry jam!
I made this dish up from some leftovers at my friends’ place. It’s a very primitive version of Mexican rice without onions or any other veg but garlic and the tomato puree. I can’t even remember if I put any spices in there apart from two cubes of veg stock. Was very tasty, though and had the perfect texture!
The ‘curry’ was not really a curry and contained spinach, veggie mince, pasta sauce, mushrooms, cinnamon and carrots. It tasted like an Italian-Indian-Mexican crossover, but in a nice way! My friend said it reminded her of Iranian food.
I like making stuff with tea or other infusions. This one is a rosehip and rosewater ice lolly. I think I brewed the rosehip tea, added sugar and a dash of rosewater. May also have put lemon, lime and/or honey. Is tasty!
A combination of three milkshake powders that friends got me from various countries. Makes one tasty shake! From bottom to top: Banania (chocolate milkshake from France), Kaba Vanilla (from Germany), Carnation Malted Milk (from the US). Unfortunately, I had run out of my favourite milkshake powder: Milo (from Australia, but the Chinese wholesale place a couple of miles away stocks it – hooray! ).s
1. Car baked cookies
I always wondered if you can make use of the intense heat a car attracts other than for frying eggs on the outside metal. Someone with a particularly hot car and an appetite for cookies came up with the idea to combine the two productively. Check it out!
2. Mushroom Movie
At last – a film about one of my favourite type of creatures on this planet: mushrooms! Here is the trailer:
3. Oatmeal Stout and Heath Bar Ice Cream
I have absolutely no idea what a heath bar is, but the description of the taste sounds like ice cream doesn’t get cooler than this!
4. US food safety bill scare
Dubbed the ‘Monsanto bill against organic farming’, there have been lots of initiatives on the net against it – or at least closely monitoring this endeavour. It’s good to know there are people out there who can still be bothered to read through government texts. I hope there always will be!
Ha! Today I made the best Mexican-style rice ever! At least that’s what it felt like when I ate it. I made enough for an army, using about 3 pounds of rice. How did I make it? As far as I can remember the recipe goes as follows:
I fried the rice in lots of oil (no, I wasn’t shy), then added
1 finely chopped onion
half a garlic, chopped
1 red and 1 yellow pepper, finely chopped
When the rice was browned and the vegetables soft-ish, I stirred in:
1 tin of tomato puree
3 or 4 vegetable stock cubes for 500ml water each
nearly 3 litres of water
some paprika powder
salt and pepper to taste
…and then waited for about 20mins for the whole lot to cook just soft.
The whole thing was so delicious, I completely forgot to eat the chilli that was supposed to go with it… and to take a picture, I’m afraid. But I will make it again ASAP!
Yesterday I did my usual late night bargain hunting – and was not disappointed! A massive pile of strawberry punnets had just been reduced to 39p (!) a pound. I bought about 6 pounds of strawberries to make some jam – can’t let delicious things go to waste! Of course, I also scoffed a few in the process…
With most jams I usually like them in a relatively runny consistency, so I can use them both as spread and as a sauce for ice cream or puddings. I made this jam with some leftover sugars as I had completely forgotten to buy that as well as the strawberries. Of course you can make jam without any sugar at all, after all the folks from st. dalfour can do it, but when I found some bits and bobs that needed using up (e.g. jam sugar from god knows when), I thought ‘eh, why not?’ I used less sugar than the usual 1:1 ratio. I find this way too sweet and, besides, if i make jam it doesn’t have a chance to go off, even in stupid quantities. So here is what I did:
I cut about 5 pounds of strawberries (as I said, some went missing…) into pieces (removing the green bits, of course!) and let these simmer for quite a long time with the juice of 2 lemons.
When the strawberries looked super-mushy and well-cooked I added roughly half a pound of jam sugar, half a pound of random brown & white sugar mix, about a pound of golden sugar (I did not dare putting the scary molasses sugar in I found in my cupboard which always turns stuff pitch dark). I simmered the jam some more until it had reached the desired setting consistency (did the saucer test -yum!), added some freshly ground pepper (I like a bit of ‘kick’) and filled the whole soup into sterilised jars (10 min oven method, not water method). I also turned the glasses over so that they stand on the lids – FYI I mainly use tomato puree and pickles jars that don’t have writing on them.
This morning, I went to the supermarket to get some fresh poppy seed rolls and fromage frais to indulge in the most decadent breakfast in a long time!
This week saw a strange mix of indulgence and leftover recycling. Highlights of the week included a pasta sauce made at a friend’s place from lonely stuff sitting in the fridge the following way:
Chop finely and fry in some vegetable oil:
1 large-ish onion
crushed garlic
1/3 chilli
1 carrot
tin of mushrooms in water
2 celery sticks
add
1 cup of tomato puree
1 cup of water
basil
salt, pepper
olive oil
Leave to simmer for a bit, blend and leave to rest for a bit. Tasty!!
Also made some veggie burgers with veggie mince which freaked out a vegetarian visitor due to their meaty consistency and taste. Very entertaining. Served half of them as bhaji with more onions in them and mint dip made from full-fat yoghurt, mint, salt and sugar.
And here is another of my trademark cranberry and buckwheat gateaux – this time without nuts as I was too lazy to chop them in the middle of the night (also being considerate to neighbours ). I wanted to experiment with the decoration and wondered whether to replace the usual circles with triangles and other shapes. I launched into a design pretty much at random – after all, I only had five minutes (!) to decorate it in the morning. When the design ventured towards the occult, I decided this maybe wasn’t such as good thing to bring to a retirement party, so I turned it into a somewhat pathetic ‘attention! stay happy!’ cake… erm…
While rummaging around in my baking cupboard, I also found a small quantity of leftover mesquite meal which was promptly turned into more ’scones’. Once more, I had to alter the recipe by substituting the yoghurt with full fat fromage frais and a dash of milk. Makes the whole thing puffier and more scone-like. Did not put enough honey in (though more than in the recipe), so I ate the scones with some leftover tomato jam (!) – yummy!
The last thing I made this week was a make-shift dinner consisting of a veggie sausage butty with ketchup and… onigiri (Japanese rice balls). As I have run out of onigiri mix, I made them with sesame seeds and cayenne pepper. They could have done with some pickles inside – maybe finely chopped pickled sweetcorn?
Another (lazy and) great leftover recycler. Leftover green beans from ages ago, limpy carrots and half an onion from the back of the fridge, two forlorn veggie sausages, an overload of garlic -perfect! All the ingredients were there! I only needed to throw all of them – except the veggie sauages – into a pot, stir them for a while, add a bit of water and wait until the ingredients had flavoured the stock enough (you can also ‘cheat’ with some veggie stock and if you are a carnivore you can eat meat or other leftover/otherwise unwanted animal parts for flavour). I pureed the soup, fried some veggie sausage (quite crispy!) and chopped them into the tasty green mush! It then looked like this:
Not exactly the most enticing picture, but honest Was nice just by itself with a big malty milkshake!
The other day, they had lots of bags of potatoes ‘reduced to clear’ (Anya potatoes actually). Although I don’t eat potatoes very often, I couldn’t walk past them, so I bought a bag. What to do with a bag of potatoes that is almost starting to sprout? The first thing that came to my mind was bangers & mash, so I tried out how the potatoes fared in this combination. Not terribly well, I had to find out, which may have to do with the fact that I forgot the potatoes for another two days on the kitchen table in their plastic bag, which didn’t exactly improve their condition. Not wanting to eat the rest of the mashed potato, I also did not want to throw it away. The options I had were: make burgers, potato cakes, dumplings… or bread!
I looked up some recipes on the internet, but most potato breads required raw, grated potatoes. So I made up my own recipe. Checking the flour shelf, I noticed that I also did not have much flour left, so I had to throw together bits of random flour leftovers. The result is truly a leftovers-bread!
about 600g mashed potato including milk/butter, spices
about 600g mix of different flours (plain, wholemeal, spelt)
about 400ml water
tsp honey
salt
more spices (caraway, fennel, coriander)
half a bag of sourdough (i found this left over in the fridge, too, so i just put it in)
2 packets of dried yeast
olive oil
Leave to rise, knock it about about, leave to rise again, put it into the oven for about 75 mins at 200 degrees celsius/gas mark 6 – ish.
It felt a bit like a recipe for disaster, but it actually turned out nicely! It's quite heavy though, but that probably also has to do with me putting the dough into the fridge over night and not letting it rise long enough after taking it out and not leaving it in the oven for long enough, because I had to fit the bread making round a crazy schedule!
). I wanted to experiment with the decoration and wondered whether to replace the usual circles with triangles and other shapes. I launched into a design pretty much at random – after all, I only had five minutes (!) to decorate it in the morning. When the design ventured towards the occult, I decided this maybe wasn’t such as good thing to bring to a retirement party, so I turned it into a somewhat pathetic ‘attention! stay happy!’ cake… erm…
