Tag Archives: Masterchef

Too Many Carrots

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I’m currently cooking with one half of my brain and blogging with the other. Or, to clarify, in case this conjures up pictures of more activity than is actually happening, I’m waiting for a timer to go off, wondering about what else to cook and thinking about recipes. At the same time, having missed a post last night, I’m typing a post while I have a few minutes and feel warm enough to do it. We are still economising on heating, which means I don’t get to the keyboard as much as I would like, as I’m still determined not to take the laptop into the living room.

We have not been doing as much menu planning as we should, and I’m faced with a problem of what to make with carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes and onions. We’ve already had vegetable stew and vegetable soup in the last few days. Julia did something Chinese with chilli, rice and prawns on Monday but I’m struggling to be inventive. We would have had fish pie but we are trying to clear the freezer for Christmas and all the fish is currently frozen as we aren’t very good at forward planning and anything takes days to defrost at the moment. I could, I suppose, bake pieces of fish in foil. They will defrost like that, but I’m not sure that they go with root vegetables. In the hands of a Masterchef contestant, with a carrot puree here and a parsnip foam there, and probably a sweet potato pickle and a fondant potato, I’m sure my list of ingredients would be wonderful. In mine, not quite so much . . .

We could have the good old standby of pasta with stuff in it and pesto poured on – we have prawns and mussels in the freezer and they take no time to defrost – but it doesn’t seem much of a meal in winter.

Julia just rang as I was juggling pans. She’s on her way back from a meeting and wanted to know if she should go to the chip shop on the way past.

So, tonight’s menu is fish and chips with peas. Tomorrow we will be having mixed vegetable hash with corned beef (it could be eaten tonight, but I’d rather have chips) and I’m currently using the vegetable water from parboiling the hash vegetables to make a carrot, lentil and garlic soup. It was going to be carrot and lentil, but the garlic paste jar looked about empty so I used it all, and the resulting smell from the pan is rather garlicky.

In fact the chips just arrived so I’ll eat now and finish this later.

Day 125

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It might have been having a good moan about it, or it may have been the application of hot water bottles over the last couple of weeks, but my fingers were a lot better this morning. Whatever the reason, it is a welcome development.

As a result, everything seems better. Even the birds are singing more tunefully, and I deadheaded 24 poppy stalks this afternoon, bringing the running total to 36, with a few more to go, as I didn’t do the second clump.

This is a very different pattern top last year, when we were getting about a dozen a day and they were lasting until mid afternoon. As far as I can tell they are lasting two, sometimes three, days, at the moment. The effect is the same, with lots of poppies out, but they aren’t producing the number of blooms daily that they were last year.

Whether it’s the time of year, the weather or the age of the plants I don’t know. I must observe and see what happens later in the year.

I’ve just finished watching the final of Masterchef and, though lost in admiration for the winner, am left wondering why they bother. Who needs a plate  spotted with oil and smeared with foam? Who, seriously, wants a dish with a name that includes so many words that you need to breathe in the middle of it?

“Stuffed chicken wing, chestnut cream, chervil root and Périgord truffle.”

I’ve written shorter poems than that, and I’m sure it’s not the longest recipe title I could find if I set my mind to it.  It should be possible to find one that includes the words “with pickled vegetables, citrus foam and a Parmesan tuille”. Some of them go on for an awful long time.

Foam, by the way, is not food.

Poppy