Pasta course
I went on a pasta course recently. I make pasta, but only for lasagna, so was excited to see we would be doing a prawn mousseline ravioli and an aubergine and pesto lasagna as well. I just love talking to chefs!
This is the aubergine and pesto lasagna which we had for lunch. It was very tasty!
These are my lovely prawn mousseline ravioli. It was great fun making them and they were SO delicious, there was also a sauce to go with them made from the shells. Unfortunately, the non-stick baking parchment I'd layered them in to take them home wasn't as non-stick as I thought and they stuck comprehensively - I had to scrape them off. A friend said that I could have frozen them just as they were and they would have come off the paper just fine.
I'm going to make them again, just for me, Mike hates fish, so freezing them is perfect.
There's a rat in me kitchen what am I gonna do?
We have recently noticed noises in the wall and ceilings that can only be (at least) one rat. I don't mind rats at all, I live in the country after all, but I can't have them in the house. They are very destructive and I can hear them chewing on wood to keep their teeth sharp. When we had a loft (now converted) they chewed electrical cable, plastic storage boxes and generally caused problems. I've taken to banging on the ceiling and walls when I hear them!
If you have a compost heap, you are told not to put cooked food on it as it attracts rats. But as rats will eat literally anything, I can't quite see why they would eat a cooked cabbage leaf, but turn their nose up at a raw one!
We've found where they are probably getting in - a hole around an outlet pipe. So that will be sealed up with expanding foam once we've got rid of them.
Pizzas themed to a country
I've been thinking about themed pizzas this week.
I thought for a Chinese one, I could use hoisin sauce for the base, and top with sweetcorn, bean sprouts, red pepper, spring onion, chicken, chilli, ginger and garlic.
For Mexican, apparently, there is a popular option that incorporates lots of spicy beef and refried beans sandwiched between 2 tortilla. I was thinking more of a conventional pizza base, spicy tomato sauce, seasoned mince, refried beans, black olives, spring onion and sour cream.
A Greek one I thought could have extra olive oil, olives, feta, artichokes, red pepper or tiny peppadew peppers, oregano, mozzarella and basil.
Google Australian pizza and you get various combinations of bbq sauce, peppers, egg, bacon and mozzarella. I'm not quite sure how I feel about eggs on pizza.
Indian pizza would involve either a pizza base or a naan bread, tomato sauce, paneer, peppers, onion, garlic and either curry paste or powder in some way.
I'm looking forward to exploring some of these idea and making something interesting!
Leftovers Soup
We had lamb steaks a few days ago for dinner. I made lots of vegetables and piled everything onto a serving dish. I roasted some Christmas 19p parsnips and carrots, simmered some cauliflower and 19p swede, fried a couple of onions, mashed some Christmas potatoes and mixed up some Bisto.
I find serving dishes very useful for dieting as I often take 'just a little for now', intending to have a little more, and find that actually, I don't need any more. Or if I do, it's usually the veg that I have more of.
I put all the leftovers in a saucepan, used a spatula to scrape the lovely juices in and added a teacup of red lentils and some water. Then simmered it and blitzed. Blimming lovely it was and I had that for lunches all this week.
My husband likes an Indian takeaway ( I generally don't have any for calorie reasons, much as I like it). When he has finished, I scrape all the leftover little bits of leftover sauce into a saucepan, add a big scoop of red lentils and top up with water. That's all simmered until the lentils are cooked and Mike had a big bowl after we got back from a walk today.
It's very satisfying making a meal from nothing much!
Cupboards
Yet again, I'm making efforts to reduce the amount of food kept in the house. To that end, I inventoried the huge larder cupboard and the roll out cupboard - I had THREE bottles of soy sauce in there!
The list I wrote of everything I have will help me to make meal plans using up what I've already got. Sometimes I know I've got something but simply can't find it. It's even worse if I'm pretty sure I've got something and can't find it, because even if I look for ages I'm not seeing it, or I haven't actually got it!
Here are a couple of things I'll be making, or have made, this week.
Carrot & Sultana Loaf
I like this occasionally for bread that's a bit different. I used to have it for breakfast, but I don't eat until lunchtime now, so when I make it, I incorporate it into lunch.
A baked jam sponge
On Sunday, we often have a roast lunch in the middle of the day, and a pudding at tea time. This week, I made this baked sponge using jam for the base layer. The jam I used was a home made plum jam that hadn't been used for some time and was getting a bit winey so wouldn't get used on toast.
We had it with a carton of custard that hadn't been used at Christmas, so that's 2 more things used up.
An e-book
I published an ebook for meal plan 1 in August and am delighted that many people have thought it was worth getting.
I've managed to get my head around WooCommerce so I can feature it on the blog and you can find it here. It's also on Amazon, but I'm not allowed to include links to there in a newsletter. No idea why!
I'm busy recooking, photographing and updating the recipes for Meal Plan 2 and putting them into an ebook. It was written in 2013 and still prices up, which is fabulous. But the posts are embarrassingly bad and need a lot of updating! I'm getting on well with them again, having taken a break to do other things. It's taking me ages to do this one!
Do come and say hello on the Fantastically Frugal Food Facebook group, or the Sensational Slimming Sustenance group. I'd love to see you. Lots of useful tips, recipes and ideas. The nearly 17,000 membership are brilliant, brimming with talent.
And don't forget Thrifty Lesley, where there are 800+ recipes of fantastically frugal food and many weekly meal plans. And Cheap Family Recipes where you can find all kinds of delicious things that don't cost much, with two family monthly meal plans.
I've also got a few YouTube videos up, not many yet, but I'm planning to do more. I've done a couple more, need to edit them now. So much to do, so little time!
With all best wishes, until next time
0 comments