Tag Archives: freezer discipline

Thoughts . . .

We had several part bags of oven chips in the freezer. They are now in the oven cooking. We don’t buy them often, we just seem to use 90% of a bag and leave the others in a frozen corner. We also have four onion rings heating up with them. Because there are too many of them to fit in the tray properly it is proving to be a difficult job to get them cooked properly. When piled up, they steam rather than roasting. I know this from making roasted vegetables. At the moment I am writing this post and hoping that the time it takes will be enough for the chips to turn golden. They can be quite off-putting when they remain white.

White is the colour of things that you find under stones or the bellies of dead fish as they float past in a river . . .

Or maybe that’s just my imagination working overtime.

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

White, despite the way the label has been used over the years, is not an accurate description of me. I’m slightly pink and, in winter, a bit greyish too. Sometime in summer I go red in places and may even take on a very light tan colour. The sun and I are not a great team. I have light brown freckles, or had them. They may be age spots by now, after stealthily changing without me noticing. There are a few spots of me where I have burned or cut myself, and they re white, but they are very small, and you wouldn’t notice them most of the time.

It’s a strange thing to muse on, but what else do you do when you have twenty minutes to kill and a blog to write.

If I were a deeper man I would go on to explore ethnicity and racism. But I’m not. The only ethnicity I seem to have, due to the ginger beard and mousy hair, is Viking ancestry and, after reading about Vikings recently I now know that they are the cause of much toxic masculinity,  imperialism and Fascism. Being both English and Viking I have much, it seems,  to answer for in historical terms.

And with that in mind, I had better get to the kitchen before I imitate King Alfred the Great and burn the chips.

Dunwich Beach

Souper Sunday

Today, we had mushroom soup. It is only the second time I have made mushroom soup, and it is the first time it has actually tasted of mushrooms. The previous attempt tasted like I imagine musty Victorian wallpaper paste would taste. It does take a lot of mushrooms, but the Christmas ordering frenzy is upon me, and we did have a lot of mushrooms. My version uses onions, garlic, a stock cube, mushrooms, fresh thyme, water and vegetable oil. The version on the internet used cream and butter too, and didn’t have thyme in it.. Internet soup recipes often use cream and butter, but I decided that we could do without it, and I seem to have been right. My view is that soup is supposed to be frugal and healthy and filling it with dairy products is not the way to go.

I’m not sure if I will try it again. I like mushroom soup but carrots are a lot cheaper and don’t shrink so alarmingly when you cook them. We ended up with two large bowls of soup. If I’d filled the pan with that amount of root veg it would have made six or eight bowls.

In the evening we had spicy lentil burgers which we found in the back of the freezer. They had been lying there, undisturbed, since the first lockdown. We moved things round to fit a turkey crown in, and found several packets that we had forgotten. I always say that we should get more organised in the freezer, but I never do anything about it. That sounds like a New Year Resolution just waiting to be made. And the good thing about it is that I will be able to make it next year too, because it never gets done.

To go with the burgers I cubed a lot of root veg (carrots, swede and parsnip) and added sweet potato before boiling until softened. They went into a wok with onions, leeks and sliced greens to become a vegetable hash. I used the water from the boiling in another pan of veg, which became vegetable soup. I’m pinning my hopes on soup as a way of getting through Christmas without significant weight gain.

I couldn’t find my soup pictures so I used a waterlily.