Tag Archives: leftovers

Another Day Slips By

Stamford, Lincolnshire

I’m sitting at the computer with a hat and gloves on. The heating has gone off and it has become quite nippy indoors. We have a good heating system and adequate pensions, so don’t need to be cold, but old habits die hard. Personally, I would switch the bedroom radiator off completely as we should be warm enough under a mound of covers, but Julia has it set so that at 5.30 every morning I wake feeling too hot. She is often awake at that time too but seems oblivious to the possibility of turning the heating down.

I’ve watched quite a lot of TV, cooked, snoozed and written.

The writing is an article about a medallion. I failed to finish it. The cooking was a breakfast of festive bubble and squeak (using leftover sprouts, chestnuts and roast veg) with bacon and eggs). Tea was potato wedges with beans and cheese and onion pasties. It was a simple meal but still nice. We ate the last mince pies with a cup of coffee as our dessert. We seem to have missed lunch and not really noticed after the substantial breakfast.

Modern Eleanor Cross

Detail of the Cross

We will not be having a shopping delivery tomorrow as we have built up quite a surplus over the holidays and the veg is looking a bit jaded. It’s not going off, but it’s giving the impression that stage is not far off. I will be preparing a vegetable stew, a Chinese rice and a mushroom curry tomorrow while Julia is at the tearoom. We will eat one for tea, one tomorrow, and freeze the third. Soup will also be on the menu. Cauliflower and broccoli soup, then leek and potato. Some freezing will be involved.

Then I need to turn my attention to the growing pile of pizza bases and quiche cases. It seemed a good idea to buy some extra for holiday snacks but we didn’t, in the end, have to produce as many meals and snacks as my imagination suggested. I have been better at shopping over the last few years, but this year I did no plan quite so well.

And that was how I passed the third day of 2026.

Now I am waiting. WP tells me it can’t proceed to load photos as the connection has been lost. It hasn’t been lost from this end, so I assume the problem is (again) with the Internet or at WP’s end.

More Stamford.

When looking Stamford up on the internet and checking its use for filming I found it had hosted over 100 films and stars such as Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Elia Kazan, Sam Mendes, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Steven Seagal had been involved. This just goes to show the reach of the USA in its attacks on British culture. Not only do we have to put up with your spellings and, but you also try to steal our town names. Stamford Connecticut is, I’m sure, a lovely town but, having only been founded in 1640, lacks Mediaeval charm. Stamford, Lincolnshire, does have Mediaeval charm and has been the venue for Pride and Prejudice (2005), The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Middlemarch (1994). Pictures are from January 2018.

The All-Purpose Recipe

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Boiling vegetables

Take vegetables. Cube them. I use carrot, parsnip, leek, onion, turnip, swede, sweet potato and potato. Sometimes I use garlic. This, when boiled, possibly with a stock cube, is “Vegetable Stew” and is served into bowls with a ladle. I sometimes add red lentils or pearl barley and also sometimes add shredded greens. If I transfer it to a wok and added fried onions and perhaps shredded greens and corned beef and season it with Henderson’s Relish it becomes “Hash”. If you give it a day and hit it with a hand blender it becomes “Vegetable Soup”. If you tweak the vegetables slightly (I’m not convinced of the merit of turnip or swede in curry, for instance, and parsnips can be disconcertingly sweet, it becomes “Curry”.

Liquidise

In days gone by it would probably have been called “pottage” and would have been the staple food of much of the population. Looking back down my family tree, it’s clear to see that I am just the latest in a long tradition of peasants. Fortunately I have not yet been reduced to gruel.

Yesterday, as I believe I mentioned, we had mixed vegetable soup. It was the surplus veg from the hash with added black pepper and a cheese and tomato sandwich. A posh meal for peasants, but simple compared to the things you see on cookery programmes.

Serve. Just like yesterday and the day before . . .

In the evening we had a variation on the stew theme – Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry. I often use a can of tomatoes in it, but this time I used the leftover tomato soup from a couple of days ago. We also use vegetable soup for the same thing when we have it. Not sure if I’m brave enough to use broccoli soup or not. Probably not, it just doesn’t seem right.

I use bags of ready chopped onions – my hands aren’t what they were and buying like this avoids much frustration and cutting of finger tips

I was reminded last night, whilst watching TV, that writing things by hand engages different parts of the brain than typing. I was also reminded that it’s important, when checking things up, to avoid reading technical papers on the subject. I just spent ten minutes going through one paragraph. It turns out that writing with a western alphabet is different from writing in hieroglyphics or Chinese. I didn’t want to know that, or bend my head around so much Latin, and I know if I see “et al.” I have taken a wrong turn down the rabbit hole. It is written by a man with much knowledge and very little control of his words. They form paragraphs of brick wall proportions and clusters of words like thickets of thorns, holding me back rather than helping me on my way.

Cursive handwriting is better than writing in block letters for a number of reasons (which I skimmed. My decision on those two forms of writing is based on whether I want people to be able to read what I have written. Even I have trouble reading my own handwriting after a few hours, as I forget what I wrote and the squiggles that remain are of little help.

Inions and sweet potatoes – the suspense continues . . .

I’m going to have to look for a simpler version. I know handwriting is better than typing and want to go back to it (even though I hate typing my notes afterwards) but I can only vaguely remember what was said on the subject and can’t take much of any use from the paper I’m currently reading. I am feeling very stupid as I admit that, but that’s just the way it is. Think of Brave New World, we don’t all pop out of our test tubes as academics, some of us have to operate machinery.

I just found a simpler version. Writing by hand enhances memory and learning. The control of the pen, and sensory involvement, contribute to elaborate brain patterns which enhance memory and learning. It is important to include writing by hand in education, using pens and pencils instead of digital devices.

Add chickpeas and garlic paste as the sense of jeopardy escalates . . .

That is my sort of academic – knows stuff, connects it to real life and helps people learn. I feel more intelligent now. I am also going to make notes my hand rather than typing or cutting and pasting.

Add leftover tomato soup and simmer as tension reaches breaking point . . .

It’s a small step forward but a journey of a thousand miles etc. . . .

The final result – brownish food on brownish rice, with beige naan bread. I feel the end result may not have lived up to the sense of tension I tried to create.

Coins, Coins, Coins

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Gibraltar £20 Coin 2016 – made from salvaged silver

Slightly warmer and slightly drier today. My arthritis attack, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned so far, is subsiding. The swelling has subsided, the pain is much reduced and I have most of the normal function back in my hands, though tucking my shirt in still needs concentration.

I didn’t avoid mentioning it because I am stoic and brave, I avoided mentioning it because I am stupid. I’d avoided injecting myself for a while as it’s painful and you can get way with missing few doses. But if you miss a dose of tablets, which I did when I lost the last dose in last month’s cycle, things can get tricky. Yes, it was a self induced attack, not helped by the doctor’s system failing and taking an extra week to reorder.

Coin of Cabinda

It’s over now. I can confess. I’m on the way back to health and am grateful, once more, for the drugs. The cold and damp haven’t helped. They tell me it’s just a myth that cold and damp make arthritis worse. That might be true. It might just be that cold and damp makes everything worse.

We sold some decent coins today, and bought more junk. Fortunately we manged to sell some of the lower level stock on eBay. It’s nice and decorative, but it’s not quality coins. As we normally charge half price or less compared to the marketing companies, often just a quarter, we are providing great value. However, we don’t have to pay for massive advertising campaigns or pay large wages to marketing directors and people like that.

There is a quality coin sale on in London soon – a hoard of coins detected in Essex and thought to have been buried in 1066. There is some speculation about the owner burying the pennies and then being killed in the battle. But why would a soldier decide to hide his pennies in Essex and then march off to fight at Hastings, one hundred and five miles away? More likely it was a Saxon householder (though a rich one, as 122 pennies was a considerable amount of wealth in those days). Unfortunately the press do love an inaccurate, though poignant story.

And that is a brief account of events on Saturday. All in all it was a good day.

Then we mixed the left-overs from two meals and had corned beef hash and veggie stew and dumplings, to which Julia added a rack of sticky ribs. Yes, ribs twice in a week. This comes close to the lifestyle I would adopt if I won the lottery.

Dylan Thomas £5 coin Alderney

Tch! Forgot the title. Added it later so it may be OK.

Rice + Marketing = Special Fried Rice

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We have a dish in the UK, found in all Chinese Takeaways, called Special Fried Rice (or variations on the name). Americans may call it something different (though on checking, I found that you don’t), and anyone of Chinese ancestry may not even recognise it as Chinese cuisine. However, like Chicken Tikka Masala, it is now part of British life.

I made a version of it last tonight. It features the three inch end piece of a wrinkly courgette, a half red pepper with a couple of black spots on it, last week’s mushrooms, some green beans I found while looking for the courgette and, finally, some prawns with freezer burn. Yes, It’s a bit like my soup recipe – loads of imperfect ingredients in a random order – but you add rice instead of blending it all. It has garlic, mango chutney and chilli in it. It was going to have chilli jam, lemon juice and soy sauce, but I seem to have used the chilli jam, the soy sauce bottle turned out to be empty and the lemon, which was actually just a half lemon, proved to be too far gone even for me. I’m hoping to fool Julia into thinking I actually used a recipe.

I just had a look at recipes and find that Americans do have it, and that they use SPAM in it. As Number Two Son’s partner is from the Philippines I know about SPAM (a food I haven’t eaten for 50 years), so I wasn’t too surprised. However, I was surprised to find that they add MSG. I didn’t even know it was possible to buy it, let alone that you would want to add it.

Naturally, my mind then drifted onto the possibilities for a literary twist to end the post. Something along the lines of my life being like Special Fried Rice – a random mix of imperfect ingredients that isn’t really Special, just leftovers with a sheen of marketing. But I decided that was too cynical, even for me.

Mouse on Wheatsheaf Loaf

The photos? I have one, unattractive, photo tagged “rice” but these were in the same month so I used these.

Day 110

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I’ve been reviewing my soup making. The celery was disappointing, but apart from that the others haven’t been too bad. However, at this point I have to admit that “the others” generally means root vegetable soups, and they are difficult to mess up. I’ve also done mushroom, pea, broccoli and cauliflower, which have all been passable. The roasted squash soup I did last week was very good, but by the time I’d finished roasting the frozen squash chunks they had shrunk to almost nothing, and I ended up with just two portions. I know that roasting the veg adds to the flavour, but I feel guilty about using the oven just to roast in a bit of extra flavour.

I really need to extend my repertoire, but that would mean buying ingredients specially and that isn’t how I view soup. Soup is mainly what happens to stuff you have had too long. Yes, the pea soup and the roasted squash soup featured specially bought ingredients, but all the rest were just things I had too much of.

It’s my day off today and Julia has gone on a course to brush up on her Makaton so I am faced with a long boring day. I could look up some interesting soup recipes . . .

Or I could look at some Makaton videos and surprise her tonight by asking her if she wants a cup of tea by signing. Perhaps not. After a day of training she can probably do with a cup of tea without additional difficulty.

Soup recipes then . . .

Another Snapshot

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Sometimes things just don’t work out.

I had intended to make another short post yesterday evening, with a view to doing three short posts a day for the next few days. I just thought I’d introduce some pace and variety.variety.

So I put the vegetables in the oven and sat down to write. I have a behemoth of a post in preparation and wanted to cut it down from 900 words to 600. I think of 600 words as long enough for someone to plough through. After forty minutes I sat back and looked at the result. It is now 1,100 words and has five extra photographs. Editing is not as easy as it sounds.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t write the post I intended. I am easily distracted.

We ate after that and I had a nap in front of the TV. I woke, read and procrastinated. For the purposes of my diary that counts as three activities. Waking is not as simple as it used to be. For one thing, I don’t become instantly alert as I used to, and for another, it now takes a little more effort to rearrange my limbs.

I have a police procedural on my Kindle and even though it cost nothing I am seriously wondering if it was worth it. There are parts of it where I find myself seriously thinking they should be paying me to read it.

When I accept an award, or a big cheque (I’m not fussy which), for my as yet unwritten prize-winning historical crime novel, I will cite this one as my inspiration. Something along the lines of “I thought if this garbage can get published I really ought to write one myself.”

Tea was roasted vegetables (carrot, leek, parsnip, swede and broccoli) with the last of the gammon and a bit of gravy. Time to cut back on bread and potatoes I think.

Gammon, roast veg and gravy

Suddenly I had 300 words, which isn’t short by my standards, and it’s the early hours of the morning. I woke up six hours later and realised that although I’d finished the writing I hadn’t published it. So here it is.

Adventures with a Pan

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We had smoked mackerel pate for lunch yesterday. That involved the use of the food processor, so, for me, was a real technical challenge. I had to ask Julia to dismantle it at the end, because I can never work the catch that releases the bowl. You would have thought that in the 21st Century they would have thought of making this obvious.

Smoked Mackerel Pate

It was a simple recipe, involving two bits of smoked mackerel (about 200 g) and half a pack of cream cheese. I pulled the fish off the skin and broke it up, added the green bits from a large spring onion, a big spoonful of wholegrain mustard, some black pepper and then gave it a whizz in the food processor. Then I opened it up and pushed the big bits of fish down into the mix before having another go. I think that if I’d broken the fish up more I could have omitted that last step. I will aim for pieces about the size of a finger top joint next time – some of the ones I tried were nearly the size of my thumb and managed to ride up to avoid the blades. People often use horseradish, as it is traditional with mackerel, but I didn’t have any so I tried mustard and it seems to have worked.

I’m saving the last lime to make an avocado dip, so didn’t use any citrus, but it didn’t seem to make a difference – the mustard and spring onion gave the mix a good, fresh taste without citrus.

We ate it with toast. There was plenty of pate for four thickly spread rounds of toast.

Smoked Mackerel Pate with Toast

Today’s lunch was vegetable soup with warm rolls and smoked mackerel pate. The rolls were Paul Hollywood part baked rolls and there was enough pate left to be generous, though the rolls weren’t exactly huge.

The soup recipe was four manky carrots (though I suppose good clean ones would be just as good), a chunk of swede (rutabaga) that was starting to change colour at the back of the fridge, the potato offcuts from the oven-baked chips (keep reading for details of them) and some leftover peas. Boil it up with water and a stock cube, reduce to soup with a hand-blender, season, eat. It probably needed onions but we only have enough to last until the next shopping trip so I left them out. I also added garlic from a jar, but should have put more in as we couldn’t really taste it.

Vegetable Soup with Rolls and Smoked Mackerel Pate

Yesterday’s tea (sorry to wander about so much), was chunky oven-baked paprika chips, with fish fingers and mushy peas. It’s not great food, but it is a change as we haven’t had fish fingers for a month. I arranged them like something off Masterchef for the photo. I’m not sure it looks any better than throwing a pile of food together. It just looks like an idiot has been playing with his food.

Paprika Potatoes, Fish Fingers and Mushy Peas – Gourmet Fodder

As they were cooking, I made a pot of curry (chickpea and sweet potato – using a base of last night’s chilli) and the previously mentioned soup.

Tomorrow I will use the rest of the cream cheese in a charred red pepper dip and we will also have an avocado dip using the lime I saved by not using it in the pate. It can be quite tricky cooking when you can’t nip out to the shops.

Dressing Up Some Leftovers

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We had vegetarian haggis and root vegetables last night. We didn’t particularly want vegetables dressed up as meat, but Julia fancied trying it. It tasted exactly like haggis, because haggis mainly tastes of oats and spices.

I wimped out of the traditional neeps and tatties because neeps, it seems, are Swedish turnips, better known in England as swedes, and in North America as rutebagas. I like carrots, I like parsnips and I have no strong feelings about turnips, but swedes are a bit too strongly flavoured for my liking. As a result I generally eat them with other veg. That’s what we did last night – potato, carrot, parsnip, turnip and swede all mashed together.

Tonight I mashed the leftover veg and haggis together, added half a tin of chickpeas (also mashed), an egg, cumin, curry powder and black pepper and formed them into five veggie burgers. The actual plan was to do four, but there was some left over so I added a fifth. I left the mashed bits lumpy to give plenty of texture. Then I gave them 20 minutes at 200 degrees C, turning about halfway through.

Veggie Burgers

They were very acceptable, even if I do say so myself.

The stir-fried veg was (loosely) based on the stir-fried sprouts and chestnuts we had at Christmas, though with no sprouts I used some wilting broccoli and cauliflower. Henderson’s Relish replaced the soy sauce. I also drizzled on the end of a bottle of Hoisin Sauce because the honey has crystallised in the squeezy bottle. and threw in one teaspoonful of chilli and two of garlic from my jars in the fridge. I also threw in a few cashews and some almonds left over from other cooking.

Stir fried vegetables

The overall healthy nature of the meal was destroyed when I sliced a baked potato, left over from Tuesday and fried it with some chicken chipolatas left over from Monday. The chicken chipolatas were not a success, being dry and bland. I will not repeat the experience.

More leftovers…

The header picture is an example of what happens when the lens steams up as you photograph food. Or, to be more accurate, when you are hungry and ready to sit down and the lens steams up as you photograph food. You don’t bother wiping the lens, you just switch off the camera and go to eat.

Some Cookery Confessions

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So, you ask, how was the vegetable soup last night? You probably aren’t asking that, but I’m going to tell you anyway and it seems better if I pretend someone is interested.

Well, the vegetable soup, consisting of some festering ready-chopped carrot and swede, some greying carrots, a wrinkly parsnip, quite a lot of onion and some green bits from leeks, was excellent in parts. It was nutritious, tasty, sustaining, wholesome and almost additive free.

The additives came from a garlic and thyme flavour pot I threw in.

The parts that weren’t good came from the seasoning. It was, to say the least, a schoolboy error. It needs a bit of spice to give it a lift, I always feel, and I decided to test out the new jar of smoked paprika. I’ve only just started using it again, I never think of it as particularly hot and… you can already see where this is going can’t you?

A lesson I learned long ago is to test out each new jar of spice unless it’s one you’ve used before.

This one was quite a bit hotter than the previous one and despite attempts to cool it down with honey and extra dilution, it remained a little hotter than is usual for vegetable soup.

Despite this, the basic recipe was good and it used a lot of slightly manky veg.

Tonight we are having gammon, Hasselback potatoes and vegetables that are still to be decided. I’ve been meaning to do Hasselback potatoes for a while, and once I actually read the recipe I was amazed at how easy they are. They always look much more complicated when you see them served on TV.

This could be a case of “famous last words” because they are still in the oven.

Meanwhile, bubbling away on the hob we have a vegetable curry on the go for tomorrow. It’s onions, sweet potato, chickpeas, some chilli from a jar, garlic from a jar, curry powder and five ladles of spicy vegetable soup from yesterday, because it would be silly to waste it and if you have soup (or spicy vegetable sauce as it is now) you may as well put it in a curry.

You can probably tell from the nature of my ingredients that I’m not one of the world’s most industrious cooks, and that I have trouble with stock control and portion sizes, but I keep on trying. Cooking and writing are both similar in that you have to keep trying, and once in a while, possibly by accident, something good happens.

The photos tonight are chickpea and sweet potato curry and half-finished Hasselback potatoes. If I wait until it’s time to serve I’ll eat them before I remember to take the photos.

Chickpea and Swee4t Potato Curry, and steam

New Day, Old Photos

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After being side-tracked by ebay I finally got round to adding the photos to yesterday’s post. Then I had the problem of letting people know that there were now photos on the post, as they are unlikely just go back on the off chance.

I was going to add them on this post and refer people back to the post. Unfortunately I forgot. As a result I’m writing this post to refer people back (in case they want to look at photos of disappointing snow and a woman fighting a bird feeder). So that people don’t feel I’m wasting their time I’m going to add a selection of photographs.

The featured image is the poppies made from plastic bottles. They are still going strong, despite four months in miserable weather.

Garden Gnome at Wilford, Notts

I thought the garden gnome was reasonably topical.

This memory problem isn’t an isolated one, I also forgot what my plans for tea were. Having agreed with Julia that I would make Welsh Rarebit, as we still weren’t hungry after our large breakfast, I went through to the kitchen, where the smell of cooking reminded me I’d put potatoes in to bake ready for…er…

I couldn’t actually remember what I’d been planning. Fortunately, baked potatoes and Welsh Rarebit seem to go together quite well, and with the addition of the remains of the gammon from last week passed for a meal. Don’t worry, we also had fruit to make it a bit more nutritious.

Puffin at Bempton Cliffs

I threw in a Puffin photo because everyone like Puffins.

Tomorrow I’ll be throwing some vegetables into Monday’s stew so we will be a bit healthier. I’m planning on a few lentils too. It should be virtuous, even if it isn’t good.

It’s quinoa salad tomorrow too. If it’s true what they say about grains and salad and vegetables I’m going to be positively bouncing with energy tomorrow and stacked to the earlobes with vitamins.

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Life after the Care Farm