Cooking: Girl called Jack recipe book

I've been reading the Girl Called Jack blog for ages, and really admire what she's done in her campaigning,as well as cooking, but I'd never really tried her recipes before as they're on her blog, and I don't have a tablet and never remembered to print a recipe off to try. But then her recipe book came out, and it's brilliant!

I've been enjoying trying the recipes out, and they're particularly good for us, as there are a lot of vegetarian ones (this is budget cookery, after all), including some involving pulses, which I'm trying to include more in my weekly menu plans. Yes, I plan what we're going to eat a week at a time - it's cheaper that way, and means I can plan around what is due to come in our veg box that week (plus fortnightly meat box for the OH) and then go to the supermarket with a shopping list.

These are several photos showing the process of making the carrot, cumin and kidney bean burgers (which apparently can be made for 9p each, although I doubt mine were as the carrot came in the veg box and the kidney beans from Waitrose!).

They were really very easy to make, although created quite a bit of washing up!

Although I did enlist the food processor to help at one point.

This is the finished version, just before I cooked two of them (I froze two to eat later in the week). Of course, I then forgot to take a photo of the cooked burgers, but they were very tasty and held their shape well. I think this is something I'd make in a bigger batch next time and freeze more of them.

This is the sausage and lentil one pot dinner, which I made using vegetarian sausages (Cauldron Foods' Lincolnshire ones). It made enough for three portions so one went in the freezer. I can't find that recipe on her blog, so perhaps it's only in the book?

Oh, and this is Use-me-for-anything tomato sauce, which I made to use up some odds and ends. Another good one for the freezer!

Marmalade

We get a veg box (and sometimes a meat box) from Riverford each week, and last week I couldn't resist adding a marmalade kit too, now that I have more time in the week. It consisted of a bag of Seville oranges and a couple of lemons, plus a recipe.

I'd never made marmalade before and had intended to include some more pictures of the chopping up process, but I ended up with two builders in the kitchen at that point so didn't feel like taking photos of oranges whilst they were there! ;-)

It turned out that I could have done with a proper preserving pan, as the largest saucepan wasn't really big enough.

 Still, it set fairly easily and went into sterilised jars (with a bit of splodgy orange goo landing in various places it shouldn't. If I do this again it will involve a proper preserving pan AND one of those jam pouring gadgets).

Knitting-wise I finished my Everyone outta the pool socks and am pleased with the effect of the stitch pattern. I deliberately went for fraternal socks rather than completely identical. It's a nice pattern that I'd definitely use again as it was easy to memorize and fun to knit.

I've cast on another Beyond Puerperium (my third!) for a friend's baby, due in a couple of months. This will be the 6-12 month size, and the yarn is Rico Baby Classic DK. It's synthetic but it feels lovely and soft and not plasticky, as well as reasonably priced.

The lace knitting has stalled as I haven't had much time to sit and concentrate on it - looks like I'm going to have to frog this attempt though as I struggled with the pattern and whether to knit or drop all of the yarn overs in the second section.

And I've realised that I forgot to do garden at the beginning of January  - as in totally forgot, as I haven't even taken pictures! But thanks to the astonishingly mild weather we already have lots of bulbs coming up and here is our first snowdrop:

And the temperature's now dropping down to the minuses!

Tentacles of the slime monster

The OH thought my spiced parsnip soup bubbling on the hob looked like a slime monster's tentacle was about to emerge from it. I think he's been watching too much Doctor Who.

See, it looks totally normal once it's been through the food processor and is cooling down ready to go in the freezer. Recipe here.

This week has been a bit crazy - knitting group got hastily moved to a new location as the pub we usually meet in closed down about 2 hours before we were due to meet! We ended up meeting at a different pub, which isn't a permanent move as it's very busy, so two of us went to investigate another potential venue after the meeting. We're going to try that one this week...

Then the night after that I went to a talk about the history of gin (!) at the Wellcome Library with a friend from work. It was great, and felt deliciously bad to be sat drinking gin in a library - everyone got a free drink before the talk! Meant I didn't get home until nearly 10pm though.

Then the following night was my church home group, which is always lovely and chatty, particularly as we hadn't met since before Christmas, so I didn't get home until nearly 11pm that night.

So not much knitting happened last week, thank God for a freezer full of batch meals and fortunately the temperature has finally fallen and we've now had a frost, so there wasn't any gardening to do. I did get the Isabella jumper blocked and I'm really pleased with it:

 I love the way the colours work, and it's ended up fitting well - I was worried about the sleeves not being long enough so knitting from the top down was definitely the way to go - I've ended up with 3/4 length sleeves as I wanted, and 7g of yarn left over!

 The bottom is supposed to be knitted as a hem, and you then turn up the bottom and stitch it so that the holes form a picot edge. I decided I didn't like that effect, or the way it made the jumper shorter, so I've just left it as a rolled up edge with a decorative (!) row of holes along it.

Not sure how much time I'll have again this week - I have knitting group at home one night, then craft group at work another night. There are a lot of beginners at craft group at work though (I've now signed up over 10% of the staff!) so I spend most of the time teaching and not doing my own project.

Stir up Sunday

OK, so I know you're meant to make the Christmas pudding on Stir up Sunday, but I'm not making Christmas pudding this year, so I made the Christmas cake instead.

I went for the cop out option, a box of ingredients from Waitrose. This really is incredibly funny - you don't even have to measure things, it's all just packaged up separately ready to go in the mixing bowl. Like they used to do it on Blue Peter.

 Although they don't prepare the cake tin for you, had to do that myself!

Otherwise you just empty the lot into a bowl in a particular order and mix it all together. It didn't really feel like proper cooking! A few additional ingredients have to be added - orange & lemon zest, butter and 5 eggs.

 Put it in the cake tin:

 Shove it in the oven for 4 hours and lick the bowl out whilst you're waiting. This was also enough time to cook a roast dinner in t'other oven, watch Casualty and read the paper.

 And ta-da, one Christmas cake ready for marzipanning and icing at a later date.

The bonus of using the box kit was, I think, that it was a bit more economical than buying the ingredients separately. I'd have had things like the flour, sugar and spices in anyway, as I use those fairly regularly, but I'd have had to buy the black treacle, almonds and some of the dried fruit specially, and most of the rest of packets of that would have been wasted. Although it seemed a bit wasteful on the packaging front?

The extra ingredients were OK, as I use butter and eggs in cooking anyway, so had those in. I did have to buy an orange and lemon for the recipe, but I ate the orange, and sliced up the lemon to put in the freezer ready for future gin-and-tonics so it didn't go to waste.

Forgot to add - it's the Delia Christmas cake recipe.

Garden at the beginning of August

I'm a week late this time, which is what comes of 1st August being a Monday and then going out several nights last week. I didn't go online much last week as I was out three evenings so am now frantically trying to get caught up with emails, blogs etc.

In the big picture I don't think the garden has changed that much. I've pulled up the sweet peas as I didn't keep on top of dead-heading them so they went to seed, plus looked rather manky! But the sunflowers are now in flower.

They're not huge ones, but it's probably the rocky start they had in life with very hot temperatures early on in the year. We've also had some beautiful gladioli come up - these were from a free offer in the paper.

And a bit of a squirrel problem. There is a huge walnut tree in the garden that backs onto ours and the squirrels have been assaulting it much earlier this year than last. If you go outside all you can hear is loud chomping noises from high up in the tree.

 And, as squirrels have no table manners whatsoever, bits of half-eaten walnut come raining down and end up all over the lawn, where they have to be raked up, else they clog up the lawn mower. Of course, the squirrels are also too thick to realise that they've now eaten most of next winter's food supply...

One of my evenings out last week was a trip over to ShinyNewThing who wanted to swop some of her sock yarn. I was keen on it as it's solid or semi-solid which should show up some stitch patterns nicely, so swopped it for a couple of balls of variegated sock yarn in my stash.

This is a skein of I knit or dye superwash merino sock and a skein of Natural Dye Studio Nymph (70% British Blue faced Leicester, 20% silk, 10% cashmere).

I had a great evening looking at her dollshouses (which were really cool, I should have taken some photos!) and she also gave me some windfall apples from her garden.

Combined with some rhubarb and raspberries from our garden, I made some of them into a crumble:

That's all for now. I've only got 2 evenings out next week so might get more time to catch up on blog reading soon...

Adventures with the slow cooker, or 10 days at home

I enjoyed my ten days at home between jobs. The second week we had builders in installing our new downstairs loo. In the space of a week it went from this:

 Which wasn't great, the taps and pipework were on the leaky side and brown was a really good colour for showing up every single little tiny bit of limescale (and as the water here is really hard there was a LOT of limescale). Plus carpet on the loo floor is a bit, well, gross, isn't it?!

To this:

So much lighter and brighter. Plus we now have a mirror downstairs, crucial for that last minute hair check! And the window sill is bigger now, more room for plants! ;-)

As well as keeping the builders supplied with copious quantities of tea and chocolate biscuits I tried various slow cooker recipes.
This one is Mediterranean Vegetable Casserole (which actually turned out to be ratatouille). Then you just stir some mozzarella and basil in just before serving.

This one is chicken stew with olives. Except I forgot to get olives, so it's chicken stew.

And this one is slow cooked beef with madeira. Except I didn't have any madeira so it's just slow cooked beef. I also forgot to take a photo of it until it was on the OH's plate along with some potatoes.

And finally, I used up some vegetables by making stock. I then condensed it down and froze it into cubes. These can then be used with boiling water in place of using a stock cube.

 So, verdict on the slow cooker is that it's great. Although I've now got a freezer stuffed full of batch cooked meals so won't need to use it again for a while.

Most of those recipes came from the little booklet that came with the cooker, but some are from Antony Worrall Thompson's Slow cooking: easy one-pot dishes for the slow cooker, oven and hob which I found at the library. It's a really good book, with some nice recipes in and gives instructions for a variety of cooking methods, although it does assume your slow cooker is a 4-6 person one, rather than the 2-3 person one I was using.

I'm not sure how much time I'll have for blogging in the next couple of weeks as I start the new job tomorrow, which means a Longer Commute. I'll still be trying to keep up with other people's blogs though.

PS. Can't believe I put pictures of the loo on the internet!

Leaving work

Last week I finally left work. You may remember back in the dim and distant past of April that I acquired a new job. Unfortunately I also had the longest notice period in the universe so have only now finished the old job, ready to move onto the new one with a 10 day gap inbetween.

I had a leaving afternoon tea at work - tea, miniature sandwiches and lots of little tiny cakes and scones. Although I'm not sad to be leaving as it turned out to be a disappointing place to work and the new place has a lot more to offer, I will miss some of the people I met there, and many of them turned out to say goodbye. And gave me a rather cool sheep card:

A gardening book that's very "me" and definitely my style of gardening.

And a large pile of garden gift vouchers. After I'd finished  at work I had some friends to stay the next day, and Mum came for a few days, so we promptly disappeared off to the garden centre to spend some vouchers!

This is the first lot of plants (still got half the vouchers to spend!).

This week is a bit calmer, so I'll be planting these, and also keeping an eye on the builder who'll be installing our new downstairs loo. I have several things planned, including some knitting, some paperwork (boring, but has to be done), getting the boiler serviced, looking after the church office one morning, a planning meeting, reading group and meeting various friends for coffee!

And I've borrowed a slow cooker to experiment with as I've never used one before. I have a slow cooker recipe book reserved from the library too!

Bank holidays # two... and some knitting

We took advantage of the second four day weekend to have another day out. This time heading over to explore Woking (not exciting, it was just a load of shops and a pretty grim shopping centre like any other town centre with nothing even vaguely historic beyond the war memorial we found outside. I suspect Old Woking may have been more what we were looking for!).

before heading to Hatchlands Park a bit further south.

Where we walked through some park land, inhabited by Dexter cattle

and enjoyed the views. Fortunately it was a bit cooler so we didn't expire walking out in the sun away from the shade. Would have been impossible over the Easter weekend!

And I have been doing some knitting. I've nearly finished both front and back of my Isabella jumper so will post pics of that soon. This is the finished tank top for my nephew's birthday later this month. The pattern is from the Ann Budd basic pattern book and the yarn is Sirdar Crofter DK, about 1.5 balls, plus some leftover blue wool DK to do the ribbing. It was a fairly quick knit, but I still need to block it. I find the Crofter DK a little annoying - it has a tendency to be splitty, although I think it's a great yarn for summer.

 And I have started cooking a Sunday roast each week (except often on a Saturday as Sunday is too busy!). Having never cooked meat before two years ago, I'm slowly enlarging my repertoire. Roasts can be a bit of a problem as we only have one meat eater to provide for, but the nice man behind the meat counter at Waitrose very helpfully found me a very small (300g) lump of dead cow to roast, which did two meals for the OH. I was rather impressed that it all came out looking like a proper roast dinner, and couldn't resist taking a photo.

I didn't take a photo of my plate - but it was much the same minus the dead cow and gravy and plus some spicy beans.

Pictures of things in saucepans

The OH thought the post about knitting was a bit boring (mainly because it was just about knitting, all of which he'd already seen being created) so I thought I'd go one better and write a post about things in saucepans.

I've been taking advantage of having some time off work - 13 whole days, what bliss, time to actually DO things - to do some batch cooking and fill the freezer up ready for when we both go back to work and all of our time vanishes again.
This is vegetable stock to use up leftover vegetables from Christmas (yes, normally I would just use an Oxo cube).

And beef casserole (from Clever cooking for one or two which I highly recommend as an alternative to all those recipe books that assume you're cooking for hordes of people or have lengthy ingredients lists. It has a good chapter on making stuff for the freezer). Quinoa bake (not for the freezer, two portions for me, using Anne's algorithm) and mincemeat, cranberry and almond Eve's pudding (from a Waitrose recipe card) to use up more Christmas leftovers.

Then I did tuna pasta sauce (from the Good housekeeping cookery book), ordinary tomato pasta sauce (from Jamie Oliver's The naked chef) and smoky chicken hotpot (from Clever cooking...)

Sick of pictures of saucepans and my hob yet?!
Last one coming up:
Ratatouille and ham pasta bake, yet again from Clever cooking... Oh, but those aren't saucepans.

And I have got more knitting done too - we watched a bit of the first series of Cold Feet (I LOVE that series so much) which the OH gave me for my birthday, so I got more knitting done then. As well as listening to the Archers 60th anniversary programme and trying to cope with the trauma...

I finished the cabled baby tank top off, and have now started a plain one. It isn't really as wonky as it appears in the picture!

And that's it for now. Having produced 4 posts over Christmas normal blog service will now resume as I return to work tomorrow! I don't find the actual blogging part takes up much time, but the sorting out of pictures does - I end up with loads stored on my camera and downloading them, organising them into their category folders (I am a librarian, after all), smallifying them (I use Microsoft Office Picture Manager to make the file sizes smaller so they upload faster and take up less storage space) etc seems to take up ages so I never get any further or end up with pictures intended for a blog post but extremely out of date.