New Year!

It may be a sign of getting older that a New Year doesn't quite inspire me as it once did. I used to feel I had a clean slate, a new beginning, practically a sense of redemption. It was the same in September with the start of the school year. Of course it's been decades since I went to university. And I never felt quite finished with 2021, or 2020 for that matter, not even 2019. I don't think I'm finished being 53 or thereabouts. Time really has begun to slide past, a rushing river rather than the trickle of molasses I used to experience. 

Nevertheless, the calendar says I must learn to write another set of digits and so I sit me down to see where I might push myself for a while before getting, not discouraged so much as, distracted. I struggle to remember what seemed so important in January that I can't do something different in February or March. 

Bill and I returned to pilates class yesterday. We even paid for new instruments of torture: a squishy ball  each and some exercise bands. He is very good at finding a quiet moment to practice in the dining room. I quit trying to do this because he always seemed catch me out and want to watch. I'm better at ignoring him, I guess. Our instructor keeps asking me if I'm not really proud of him, which I am, though it's becoming rather annoying how she fawns over him. He is often the only man in the class. I'm mostly proud that this doesn't bother him like it would many men. The other guy that sometimes shows up is also a long distance walker, but probably closer to 64 than to Bill's (very soon) 74. 

Bill and I have been doing some running "together" several days a week. We've been doing something called 'parlauf', which apparently just means paired interval training. Bill has always used the term to refer to running in circles. We used to do this with the running club where he paired the fastest runner with the slowest then the next fastest with next slowest and so on. As part of a group, each pair would run around the pond at Exhibition Park until they met their partner, then they would each turn around and run until they met again and so on. This meant each person ran to their ability, with the faster person running further. Bill and I have a circular course that includes our front gate and circles the Metro station. My side of the course is slightly hilly, into the sun and wind on the way back and passes two bus stops (people waiting surely wonder what I'm up to if their bus is slow); I've no idea about his side of the circle. Of course I'm familiar with the route, but things look altogether different when running. The fact that I can't do more than two out-and-back efforts tells me I'm ridiculously unfit.

I've been moving our (my) diet towards being more plant-based, and seasonal. My current rotation for main courses through the week is (Sunday) soup/stew, roasted vegetables, beans, lentils, grain, fish, meat or cheese (Saturday). We each cook our own lunch and Bill frequently chooses sausage or beef burgers. I try to keep my opinions to myself, but of course I don't succeed. He is aware of both the personal health and the environmental issues associated with these choices and that's all that I can do. He nearly always eats whatever else I put in front of him cheerfully, so I can't complain. While I'm not likely to ever be vegetarian, never mind vegan, when I do eat meat I really appreciate it. 

I have pages and pages of other wishful thinking I'll not even mention now, but if anything comes of it I'll try to let you know. 

A lovely Christmas present from Helen & Martin.

Kitchen Work

Last month Bill and I went to Brockbushes Farm, near Corbridge, to pick plums. Even though it was mid-September and their website said plums were available throughout the month, when we got there most were already rotten, with plenty of wasps buzzing around. We did manage to find a few kilos (hint: if you're shaking the tree to knock down fruit, don't look up, look down to see where they fall). The second disappointment was that - even with the discount the guy said he gave us - they cost more than at the green grocer. I don't think I'll do that again. Nevertheless, we are enjoying our plum jams, made with 'zingers': nutmeg and brandy or orange zest, ginger and brandy.

When we were foraging for rosehips (already made into rosehip syrup and put into the freezer), I found a yellow pear tree. There were only dropped pears in reach, but I managed to salvage enough pear to make several jars of jam. I used half the usual sugar to account for their very ripe state. For both Bill and me, foraged food is far more satisfying than bought food. However, I did buy a bunch of green pears, thinking I might need to add them to make enough to bother with. Instead, I ended up making a separate batch of green pear jam, which has an unfortunate colour. If I ever do that again I will definitely peal them first!

I use the jam recipe provided by a book by the author of blog NWEdible, Hands On Home by Erica Strauss. She's not blogging for free any longer, but there are still plenty of great articles at NW Edible Life. 

I got a surprise gift of a bunch of crab apples which I'm still working on.   

I have another project to re-process some mixed fruit: strawberries (from Brockbushes - a much better deal), red currants (gifted from a friend's allotment) and gooseberries (from our own 2-year old bushes!). I'm still trying to decide whether to boil it down further (as Erica does) or whether to give in and add pectin.  A lot of the strawberries went into vodka, and sloes into gin and blackberries into whisky, mainly for Christmas presents. 

Then to work on the damsons and more blackberries for more jam. I made so much jam and jelly during 2020 that we're quite spoiled to the pleasures of homemade, far less sweet than storebought.  Life is busy here in late summer/early autumn.

Still waiting for our seven apples to be ready to pick!

Vegetable Tangerine

Our next WI has started having Zoom coffee mornings with a theme. The next Saturday's theme is 'Positive things that came out of the pandemic'. I'm still thinking on this, but one of them I think is that people got re-acquainted with their kitchens. I think cooking from ingredients is a vital life skill and that it is idiocy to be dependent on eating out / fast food / processed convenience foods. I almost see it as a form of slow suicide. I've noticed the older I get the less moderate my opinions.

I can't say the pandemic reintroduced me to my kitchen, but rather it reminded me I had a load of cookbooks - and acquired more - with recipes I'd never tried. I started our WI's Food Group on Facebook and the lady who agreed to take it over - I can't run everything - felt that photos were important so I've tried to take pictures. Mine are never as good as hers - my kitchen must not have the right lighting, but Bill and I have enjoyed greater variety in our meals. 

The Food Group also introduced me to some new cookbooks called A Pinch of Nom. I guess 'nom' must be the British version of 'yum'? I like these books because they have calorie counts. I'm only interested in those under 300 calories. I generally find I can make the recipes faster each time I make them and find shortcuts. For example, I make cauliflower rice in the microwave rather than adding it to the chicken and spices in a Harry Dieters Fast Food recipe. 

One of Bill's favourites is from A Pinch of Nom and it is called Vegetable Tagine. I'm still working on finding shortcuts for this, but I already have substituted potato for the parsnip and swede I didn't have; also tumeric for the saffron I'm not likely to ever have and ground cinnamon instead of sticks. Also, this recipe says to use a large frying pan on top of the stove, not the conical shaped clay dish which is also called a tagine. The first time I made it I sent Bill after a pomegranate to garnish the dish, my first ever encounter with a pomegranate. I thought it was delicious, but awfully fiddly, even with instructions from the internet. Subsequent uses of this recipe have omitted that garnish.

 I struggle to say this word, wanting to make it tan-gine and then Bill turned that into tangerine. We're pretty silly around here sometimes. I wondered how one should actually say 'tagine'. It turns out that there are two ways, a British and an American pronunciation. The British word sounds like 'ta-ching' as in money. No doubt Bill will have fun playing with that as well. I notice the American pronunciation has a softer 'g', like the French use. Doing something other than way the French speak seems to be a hallmark in British differences. 

How Bad are Bananas?

So, on Tuesday I had nothing to say but I've finished a book since then: How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee. I was thinking he had invented the internet, but I had him confused with his brother, Tim. There are a few brain cells in that family for sure.

I can recommend the book for readability and for straight-forward explanations, but there isn't a great deal of good news in it. Frankly we'll all need to give up quite a bit of our comfortable lifestyles in order to save the human race and I don't see it happening, at least not until the planet gets fairly uncomfortable for a lot of us not at high risk. Which means it will be lethal for quite a few poorer people initially. 

He does give a good list of what we can do and one of the easier things is eating in season. He gives a list of fruits and veg grown in Britain by month. If we don't select from this group he recommends going for tinned or frozen to avoid air-freighted luxury items. Interestingly, bananas aren't much of a problem as they are grown with natural sunlight and the keep well enough to be shipped by boat rather than plane. So that's a relief. 

He also gives a website produced by the Marine Conservation Society to help people select the most sustainable fish:  Good Fish Guide. 

However, food only makes up a quarter of the average Brit's foodprint of 12.7 tonnes and we all need to aim for a 5 tonne footprint. Berners-Lee says a meat orientated diet can easily make up the whole of a 5 tonne foodprint. We have a lot of work to do!

Learning New Tricks

One thing that has seemed to fill a lot of people's time during this pandemic has been cooking. I think that's brilliant as people can only control what they y eat by cooking their own meals. I've often seen a sign on local restaurants 'Don't Cook Just Eat', which infuriates me. Turns out this is a delivery service that restaurants can contract with to do deliveries. I gather it isn't cheap and they collect their money whether or not the restaurant is selling delivered food, though I could be wrong about this. 

In any case, Bill and I have been out of the habit of eating out much for years now. Once I retired, cooking dinner didn't seem particularly onerous, particularly since I had any number of 'recipes' memorised. My favourite involved starting with sauteed onions and then adding whatever vegetables and possibly meats were on hand. Stir fries cook up quickly and you don't have to use a lot of oil. 

However, I must admit it started to get a bit boring and, far worse, I started gaining weight. So I got out my Betty Crocker's Cook Book from 1987, which has calorie counts for each of its recipes. I had at some point circled the calorie count of any recipe under 300 calories and those are the ones I focussed on. Besides calories, I've been trying to cook less and less red meat and more whole grains and vegetables. I frequently substitute yoghurt for sour cream or oil for bacon fat (it is an American cookbook after all). 

Some of Bill's favourite recipes of late have been cream of mushroom soup and Pennsylvania red cabbage (cooked with brown sugar and apples). I've never, in the 30+ years I've owned this book, looked at the vegetable recipes. We've also discovered that bulgar wheat cooks up as easily as rice and tastes something between white and brown rice. 

So, amazingly, some bulgar wheat cooked up with a vegetable stock cube and some red cabbage and some Brussel's sprouts (shredded and stir fried with a diced onion) is a pretty satisfying meal. Who would have thought?

Cajun Gumbo?

Morphy drank a bottle of Breux Bridge and I had a soda. Angie sipped a glass of white wine as she cooked. She cut four chicken breasts into about sixteen piece and set them to one side as she set about preparing the roux. Cajun gumbo is made with roux, a glutinous thickener, as a base. Angie poured peanut oil into an iron-based pan over a hot flame, added in an equal amount of flour, and beat it with a whisk continuously so it wouldn't burn, gradually turning the roux form blond to beige and through mahogany until it reached a dark chocolate colour. Then she took it off the heat and allowed it to cool, still stirring. While Morphy looked on, I helped her chop the trinity of onion, green pepper and celery and watched as she sweated them in oil. She added a seasoning of thyme and oregano, paprika and cayenne peppers, onion and garlic salt, then dropped in thick pieces of chorizo sausage. She added the chicken and more spices, until their scent filled the room. After about half an hour, she spooned white rice on to plates and poured the thick rich gumbo over it. After that, we ate in silence, savouring the flavours in our mouths.

From Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

No idea if this is a good recipe for gumbo (I thought there was okra in there somewhere) and I'm not sure about cooking roux until it is dark brown, but this sure made me want to give this a go. May do a bit more research first.

Bill's Crackers (but you knew that)

This story begins with a bucket of yogurt. I've had reasonable success freezing and thawing yogurt for later use, but I've learned that success may vary with different brands. It always separates to some extent, but stirring generally does the trick. Not with this latest purchase however. Lovely and creamy when new, but not only did it separate but the solid part was grainy and Bill couldn't cope with this. 

So I strained it overnight, putting a double fold of linen towel into a strainer suspended over a bowl. The result was a jar of whey which I will put into some muffins and a tub of 'yogurt cheese'. I knew I could put garlic, herbs and salt into this to make a kind of dip but before I did that I asked Bill for ideas. His response was to make some cream crackers. I think they should be illegal. 

On the other hand, this is in keeping with the recommendation Michael Pollen makes in his book, In Defense of Food. If you want unhealthy snack food, don't buy it at the store, make it yourself. This will limit the number of times you'll eat it. Not that crackers are terribly unhealthy, they're just terrible. Because we eat them, not just with yogurt cheese but with peanut butter or regular butter. The carbohydrate and the crunch combined with something fattening is almost irresistible. I think this is the recipe he used. 

Whey.

So I'd best fight back by making those muffins, right?

Kitchen Issues

For years, every Thanksgiving, I have bought new containers of baking powder and of baking soda (AKA bicarbonate of soda) to be sure my holiday baking turns out well. (Also ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon, but that is a different post). Not that I don't still have other containers of baking powder /soda in the cupboard, I just don't trust them - in date or out of date, they aren't always reliable.

One of the last times I did this I got rather fed up. I know that baking soda can also be used as a cleaner on bathroom fixtures, being a bit abrasive. It is also useful for absorbing unwanted smells in places like the refrigerator. But those bases are already covered with other out of date containers. Also, I was wondering if there was anything I could do with out of date baking powder. Turns out it's also slightly abrasive, so could in theory be used as a cleaner.

Another question I had was how to tell if they might still be good for their original baking purposes. So I looked it up. 

For baking soda, put about a quarter teaspoon of the baking soda into about 3 tablespoons of vinegar. It should fizz quite a bit as soon as it hits the vinegar (so choose a bowl large enough to contain this reaction). If it doesn't fizz or does so slowly, it probably won't act as the rising agent you want.

For baking powder, do much the same, only with a half a cup of hot water instead of vinegar. Apparently baking powder reacts twice in your baking: once when it meets the liquid and again when the mixture is heated. That was new news to me, for sure.

Another thing I learned was that unopened baking powder is more likely to still be active as it is exposure to damp that causes it to lose its lift.  Unopened baking soda lasts almost indefinitely and one source suggested that opened baking soda could last as long as about three years; other sources say indefinitely...so knowing how to test it is important.

I already knew that a mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar would make the equivalent of baking powder. The equivalent of a teaspoon of baking powder is made by mixing one-half teaspoon of cream of tartar with one-quarter teaspoon of baking soda. This adds up to three-quarters of a teaspoon of powder, not a whole teaspoon, which suggests that the homemade mixture may well be stronger than store bought. 

Finally, given that baking soda has quite a long shelf life so long as it is kept dry and cool, I wondered about the shelf life of cream of tartar. Given dry and cool conditions it apparently also lasts indefinitely. 

All this has made me decide to a) test my opened baking powder and if it bubbles, use it up sooner rather than later; b) buy more cream of tartar; c) make sure I only ever have one opened container of any of these items at a time regardless of any use-by dates; d) have a go at making my own baking powder. If I make small amounts when needed and keep the baking soda and cream of tartar dry, I might save a bit of money and prevent some needless waste.

Do you ever research questions like this?

Another Kitchen Day

I have dutifully spent time in the kitchen each Friday the past few months, with varying success, which is to say not a huge amount lately. In my last post about jam, I showed all sorts of apple jellies (it's taken me decades to work out the difference between these two terms, that's how daft I am). These were made with scraps - the peels and cores - mostly from the many cooking apples that my friend Pat gave me, but also with some apples from Vivien, another friend. I used the recipe from this blog and had great success, along with the 'zingers' mentioned on the Northwest Edible blog I mentioned in that other post. The rest of the apples were stewed, because Bill loves stewed apples with his porridge in winter.

Apple Syrup
I had not so much success this time. I'd saved apple cores from a lot of Royal Gala apples and when I couldn't cram anything else in the bottom scrap drawer, I made some more jelly but it never even pretended to set, not after two tries to make it work. For the 3rd time I pulled out the last bag of scraps which had some peels in and it almost - but not quite - set. So I've concluded that most of the pectin is in the peel. The failed jelly has been poured into a wine bottle and frozen with the label 'Apple Syrup'. As it also has ginger and brandy in, I'm sure it will make breakfast cereal or pancakes sing!

Cold Tea
I'm aware that this will be anathema to most Brits, but for me it is a celebration of lovely warm, sunny weather we've enjoyed these last few weeks (due to disappear soon, I believe). I make a pot of tea and when well steeped - more like stewed, probably - I pour cold tap water into an empty coffee jar and add the hot tea (don't want the glass to break!). It then goes into the fridge door to cool. I don't bother with ice these days - it's not that warm! - and in any case most of my ice cube trays are full of herbs in olive oil or the like. I used to enjoy lemon juice in my tea, but this isn't good for my tummy these days so I drink it black (pale brown, actually). I find it very refreshing. What can I say? I'm a Southern gal.

Carrot and Coriander Soup 
I pulled out the last (I hope) box of chopped carrots from the chest freezer. I may have mentioned elsewhere that we found ourselves buying horse carrots on a couple of occasions, in quantities that were just silly (but incredibly cheap). In each instance they began to go off before we finished them and so I had a session of chopping, blanching and freezing around the end of last year. Well, this box didn't work out as well for some reason and the carrots were all fairly mushy. Bill noticed our bowl of coriander was possibly going to bolt and he hoped I'd come up with a use for it before that happened. (That sort of thing always seems to be my job, but since he does so much other stuff around the house, I can't really complain). I wasn't sure I'd like the soup, but it was worth a try and as I only had one third of the carrots required for the recipe, we weren't overwhelmed with the amount of soup that resulted from mathing (that's a word, right?) the ingredient list down to one third. Sadly, I forgot to take a photo of the soup, but I can show you my coriander 'bed'.

Turns out I like carrot and coriander soup just find. There is a bit of the soup left and it will go into a curry recipe in A Girl Called Jack, by Jack Monroe, one of my culinary
heroes. 

Salmon Pasta
We've not had yoghurt in the house for a while but I found some available for delivery and this enabled me to use some of my Brexit stash - bottles of salmon paste - to make Jack's recipe for salmon pasta, even though we were out of onions, which are apparently in short supply these days. I used onion powder instead, and chili flakes instead of a chopped chili and it turned out fine. I've forgotten what a bottle of salmon paste costs but it's buttons and, combined with the yoghurt, it makes a wonderful pasta sauce. Which is a good thing, because putting salmon paste on crackers, probably what it's intended for, just doesn't appeal to me.

Crabby Lime (chutney??)

If my apple jelly didn't work great, Bill really enjoyed the last small jar of Crabby Lime something (I'm not a fan of chutney - other than mango - and wouldn't ever attempt to make any on purpose). I made this on a whim with the leftovers of the last of a batch of crab apple jelly (too little to make a full jar) and some compulsively hoarded lime 'endocarp' according to this website. I probably would have called it the 'meat' as opposed to the rind, or the juice, but endocarp sounds terribly erudite, doesn't it? I had got a bunch of limes inexpensively but hadn't known what to do with them other than put slices into tonic as a form of 'soft drink'. When they threatened to dry up, I wrung the little devils dry but thought all that ...endocarp... shouldn't go to waste so I scraped it out and froze it; the peels were definitely unattractive. Not knowing what else to do with it I threw it into the crab apple jelly - and crabby lime (something) was born. I thawed it and presented it to Bill to tell me if it was trash and he LOVED it.  Kitchen experiments are just my absolute favourite things. Looking up the definition of chutney, one finds that it can be a condiment made of sweets and acids, so chutney it is.

Have you played in the kitchen lately?

A Practically Perfect Day

Sunday was my birthday. I turned 64 (Bill says yes he will). Brits (or perhaps it's just Bill) don't seem to treat birthdays with quite the enthusiasm that I grew up with. So to avoid being disappointed I gave Bill very specific instructions, along with all the information he needed to carry them out. He was very good and did as asked, even coming up with a surprise. 

The things I said I wanted were:

1. Flowers in pink, white, purple or blue, no yellow, orange or red (from Pansy's Florist in North Shields). An enormous bouquet was delivered on Saturday. They were parked in water at the time and then on Sunday I enjoyed trimming and arranging them in a large blue jug, a souvenir of a day trip to Juarez, Mexico back in the 1980s.

2. Two books: The Cut Flower Patch, by Louise Curley and The Late Scholar, by Jill Paton Walsh (from Waterstones). The former was a whim, but a good whim as the book is delicious. The latter turned out to be a re-read, but one from so long ago that it was only faintly familiar and I'd no clue about the plot. Bill was happy to buy this as he is also a fan of this author's Lord Peter Wimsey books.

I've been re-arranging my fabrics to improve access (and because they all came tumbling down a couple of weeks ago when I pulled out the wrong piece of the stack). This has allowed me to set aside any patchwork cotton fabric I come across, all of it given to me as I'd never pay that much for fabric! I've slowly zigzagged the raw edges and put them through the wash in preparation for making masks. Bill does most of the ironing around here, so he's had the pleasure of ironing all these colourful prints. He cleverly used one to wrap my two books.

We pottered around with plants for a while in the morning and then as the sun came around to the front of the house I put on shorts and sat in the nearly private front garden while Bill went out for a long walk. He's been doing some sort of challenge set up by the Long Distance Walkers Association; he did 220 miles in May. I put up my feet, read my Paton Walsh book and sipped a gin and tonic in the sun. Bill surprised me when he came home, handing me a small tub of ice cream from the Bistro du Parc, a local cafe that has supplied us with milk, cake, wine, beer and the occasional sandwich or loaf of break - and now ice cream. I didn't ask for a birthday cake, as it's a lot of bother for something I don't like that much, but ice cream is always welcome!

3. Steak for dinner (from Nicholson's butchers in Whitley Bay). We have steak perhaps once or twice a year, so it is a very special treat. Since I grew up in cattle country with a father who loved a nice rare steak, I have particular views about how steaks should taste. For probably the first 20 years I lived in Britain I was always disappointed in any steaks I bought, no matter how carefully they were cooked. I saved trips to Spain or to the Canary Islands or the occasional Venezuelan restaurant I found in London to order steaks that were well worth the price. Then we found an Italian restaurant in Jesmond , Avanti, that knew about steaks and they told me where to buy aged steaks in Gateshead, but I've forgotten the name of the place. It was ridiculously expensive anyhow, just as cheap to eat out instead. We've never shopped at Nicholson's but their steaks were wonderful, even without the benefit of steak tenderiser. We also had a vegetable salad and a baked potato with butter to go with the rather large and very tender, medium rare steaks, all accompanied by red wine.

After dinner we watched my birthday present from Vivien, the Downton Abbey film. Bill pretended he wasn't that fussed about seeing it, but given that he practically binged on the six series once I made him watch the first one, I paid him no attention. (And all our other television viewing is dictated by his rather narrow tastes, I this was another small treat for me). We did enjoy seeing it, but it seemed to all move very quickly and it felt as though the camera was much further away than usual. This meant not getting the pleasure from seeing the clothes as much. I told Vivien that I am guessing Fellowes had actually written another series but then just crammed it all into the one film. 

On Saturday evening, getting ready to watch some old Lewis detective programme on telly, I happened to look out the bedroom window to see a man walking past on the opposite side of the road. He was walking slowly and seemed rather meditative and I mentally sent him happy thoughts in case he was sad. Then all the sudden my friend Pat popped into view as she was crossing from in front of my house over to the man I suddenly realised was her husband, Stephen. I knocked on the window and she turned around so I was able to wave and throw kisses, which she returned. I went downstairs to tell Bill and spotted that she'd put a birthday card through my door. 

So all in all I had a wonderful birthday - even the weather cooperated. I had loads of birthday wishes from friends and family and I spent the day doing only things that I love. I can't actually think of any birthday that I've enjoyed more, in spite of - or perhaps because of? - the current lockdown restrictions. 

I think knowing what I do really enjoy is useful knowledge, along with a habit of having relatively modest desires. I hope your birthdays in future are wonderful too! 

Oat Crackers

I was sure I'd written about Bill's oat crackers before, but apparently not. This is another bit of baking he's done recently. Mainly because I complained about having scones hanging around the house and I don't care much for oat crackers. He loves them. In fact he got upset with me last month when I ordered two boxes of Nairn's oat crackers for him...because he ate them.

His latest favourite is peanut butter on oat crackers. I doubt he noticed the jars of PNB in the cupboard for the past ?10 years? but now it's his favourite. 

Never mind, I'm not fussed what he eats carbohydrate-wise, it all gets burned off. This past weekend he set himself a 50 mile challenge, walking 25+ miles on Saturday and on Sunday. Of course he was weary and sore after this, but he gets no sympathy for self-inflicted wounds. Heartless of me, I know.

Nicholson's

On one of our walks we passed Nicholson's butchers in Whitley Bay. We've never shopped there as theirs are premium prices but they are, I gather, doing a roaring trade in this time of lockdown. I'm glad to hear they will pull through. 

I'd never noticed the very instructive signs outside their shop. I've some times wondered if the US and Britain label their animal parts differently.  Do you know?

Bill's Scones

Can't say I've done any 'Quar Baking' as they say in the New York Times, but Bill has. He's made a couple batches of scones, which is good and bad. Good because they are delicious, bad because I eat them. 

He got the recipe from this book he picked up last year at one of the many National Trust properties we visited.

I was going to type out the recipe, but then you'd be in the same fix that I am.

Vegetable Stock, Flour and Salt

I'm not sure if the ingredients in the title would combine to make anything tasty but, for this post, they are two separate topics.

One

You may or may not remember the bottom drawer of my kitchen freezer, mentioned in the post on using up orange peels, but on a recent Friday I made a batch of vegetable stock from a few cups of compiled ends, peels and bits of vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, carrots, onions, red peppers, etc. I'd not made veggie stock before so I consulted Love Your Leftovers, by Hugh Fernley-Whittenstall. I was a bit disappointed that he said to grate a carrot, an onion and rib of celery to cook in a tablespoon of oil, nothing to do with leftovers. So I did this and added a few cups of scraps and a liter, I think, of water. I forgot to take photos - not that it was particularly photogenic. I froze two smaller jars and left the larger jar in the fridge. I cooked rice in it that evening, since it's not really soup weather - or it wasn't that Friday. 

Two

Reading a Treehugger article about measuring ingredients to the side of rather than over a bowl (basic cooking) I got a picture in my mind of my salt jar. Because poring salt into a spoon is too fiddly and wasteful. So I put it in a jar into which I could dip a measuring spoon. This also allows me the space to level the top with a knife and push the extra salt back into the jar. 

For this same reason I put plain flour into an old yogurt bucket. The messes I've made trying to level a cup of flour over a flour bag don't bear thinking about. I've come to realise that measures by weight are far more efficient, but no American cookbook has them.

Mind, this old fashioned kitchen design with a flour bin and all sort of other clever conveniences is my dream. 

Cole Slaw

These posts are in no particular order. Rightfully this should come a bit closer to the Hillheads fruit and veg delivery. Admittedly I did leave the cabbage til near the end of the veggies to use. I used half to steam and serve with corned beef hash (half a tin of corned beef, fried onions and boiled potatoes all mixed together). Bill thought it an odd combination - not the hash but the cabbage with it - but to an American 'corned beef and cabbage' rolls off the tongue like 'peanut butter and jelly' or 'biscuits and gravy', but those too are American. Perhaps I should say like 'bangers and mash' or 'beans and toast'. Never mind, this is about cole slaw.


Which I think I may have made once before in my lifetime, though I think Mom made it a quite a bit most summers to eat with our weekend barbeques in the back garden, with Grandma and Grandpa and our next door neighbour over the fence, Chris and her Yorkshire Terrier, Laurie. Since including Laurie I suppose I should mention Debbie, Cookie or Duchess, whichever of our dogs we had at the time.

Add caption

Anyhow, Bill found a recipe for me, perhaps from his mother's cookbook, I don't know. Translated it says 6 grated carrots, 1 small cabbage shredded, a pinch of caster sugar, 3 tablespoons cider vinegar, 1 tablespoon mustard, 200 g mayonnaise. Mix the carrots and cabbage, season with salt. Add sugar and vinegar and toss, let sit for 20 minutes then add mustard and mayonnaise. I halved this recipe and used regular sugar.

I found the result a bit dry and added more mayo until I liked the consistency better. I expected Bill would be eating more of this than I would, him being able to afford so many more calories.

Gosh that bowl looks close to falling off the counter!

Still, I enjoyed the little I had. And we used up some more of our zillion carrots. Not to mention the cabbage we wouldn't normally buy.

Marmalade Cheat

Once upon a time long, long ago we had toast for breakfast each morning, made with store bought bread. I had honey on mine, Bill ate his with margarine spread and marmalade. 

• Before we had a bread making machine and Bill always had marmalade on his toast; 
• Before we gave up toast for cereal (except at weekends);
• Before we put aside spreads for real butter;
• Before the pandemic when we ran low on butter and Bill decided to try his toast with just jam and pronounced it fine. 

But not before I had started experimenting with making jam.

Dead easy to mix the jam in with the Seville oranges.

When shopping for food I'm inclined to choose the cheapest brand first and if that disappoints to then work my way up until the quality is sufficient. I discovered that Bill didn't care for the cheapest marmalade, it was too sweet, so I bought him the special low-sugar brand at 3-4 times the price. Then I discovered Lakeland carried tins of Seville oranges and found that combining a jar of cheap sugary marmalade with a tin of Seville oranges made several jars of just-right marmalade at just under the price of the special brand. This was probably my first foray into jam making. Supermarkets also began carrying tins of Seville oranges.

I don't know about your cupboards now but mine are being whittled down to the out-of-date, I'll-figure-out-what-to-do-with-that-later stuff. Amongst which was two said tins of Seville oranges and a single jar of sugary marmalade. Since the tins have shrunk since the olden days I thought I'd risk it.

I didn't taste it until the whole process was nearly finished as I hate marmalade, with or without sugar. I worried that it might be too bitter but Bill pronounced it as perfect, which was a relief. I got four and a half jars from this, which will mean the jam I like will last longer since Bill will go for the marmalade first as he always did when we had store bought jam. At least that's the plan.

I did express some concern that the low sugar content might allow the jars of this mix to spoil, but Bill seemed confident that since the dimples in the lids had all popped, it would be fine. Hopefully any spoilage will be obvious with green or white growth on the top. This would of course mean that we had four less jars of marmalade. And I wouldn't care a whit. 

Candied Orange Peel

I have designated Friday as Kitchen Day. There are always chores to be done in the kitchen and grouping them together in one day seems an efficient way to tackle them...or procrastinating until Friday seems a more comfortable way to live, take your pick. The bottom drawer of my freezer in the kitchen is dedicated for collecting scraps of one kind and another. This is about the orange and satsuma peels I saved for a few weeks. 

I belong to a Facebook group about making do and mending - actually several groups - about sewing with scraps, up-cycling etc. Anyhow, one member talked about making candied orange peel with her scraps and her method really appealed because it wasn't fussed about removing the pith on the inside of the peel, a hassle that put me off the idea when I read it years ago in Tightwad Gazette. 

How do you like my replacement lid handle? A cork. Bill thought it ought
to be the fake cork instead of real cork but when he tried it, the thing melted.
I do love being right!

This involved boiling the peels until soft, then replacing the water and boiling for 20 minutes. You cut the peels into strips or whatever shape you like. Then you make up sugar syrup, 300 g sugar to 150 ml water. She didn't specify whether to use fresh water or that second boiling water so I did the later. Turns out it was supposed to be the former as boiling is to remove the bitterness. I didn't find my syrup in the least bitter, so I got away with it. She mentioned scaling up the syrup recipe and I wasn't sure how much I needed, so I made extra according to the amount of boiled orange water I had. This was a mistake as I had far too much! On the other hand, it tastes pretty nice and may be a great addition to some of my jellies. Or nice on cereal like we use rose hip syrup now. Over over ice cream perhaps? 

Anyhow, you pour the syrup over the sliced peels and cook over a low heat until the syrup is absorbed. The next time I do this I will make the minimum amount of syrup and see what happens. As I did it this time I had far too much and ended up drawing a lot of of it off. Then after a couple of hours I gave up and left it on the low heat only you know what I came back to...burnt orange syrup. 

The burnt ones are on the far side and they taste just as nice - maybe even
nicer - as the ones in the foreground.

I pulled out as many of the orange slices as I could, including some dark brown ones, and left the pot full of boiled water to soak. I carefully placed these slices on two cookie sheets and I put them in the front porch - the driest place in the house I could think of. Now drying foods in the north of England is sort of a race with the mould. I've heard of people's thick terry towels growing mould in winter, which is why I keep our tumble dryer in spite of the fact we only use it maybe twice a year for emergencies. 

The lady on Facebook said to turn the peels a few times to aid in drying and that it would take about 3 days. I turned them once, they were pretty much glued to the metal - turns out I should have put paper down first, she didn't mention that. However, on the third day they did come up pretty easily. Only they were still pretty sticky and I didn't want to keep them in the fridge as we would just eat them. (She told me this wasn't nibbling, it was Quality Control!). 

I must admit they strongly resemble worms - orange and brown sticky worms.
How appetising!

So I rolled each piece in regular sugar until it wasn't sticky anymore and placed them in jars (another reason to save them) and put them - 2 1/2 jars - in the chest freezer. I'm thinking they might make nice additions to the Christmas hampers we do each year for Bill's kids. However that might all work out this Christmas...

After being rolled in sugar they all look more the same, but now like
sugar-coated worms. They are delicious though!

Jars

I have a whole other post drafted about hoarding collecting of things most people would throw away. I hope to develop in to show why this is not crazy, but useful.

For the moment I will show you the jars I've collected, with the help of Vivien, I might add. The reason I started saving small bottles was because of the fruit alcohols I make for Christmas presents. It turns out that few bottles look right other than small (187 ml or thereabouts) wine bottles or slightly larger ones with nice shapes. A salad dressing bottle seems only destined to hold salad dressing or a lemon juice bottle only lemon juice. Perhaps it's a lack of imagination on my part.

Keepers.

However, wine bottles are great for freezing rose hip syrup. And then Bill took up making homemade wine. I was pleased to see him find a new hobby. So far there have been few results I call really drinkable, but every now and then he comes up with something really nice, like elderberry and damson wine. We tend to keep bottles with a punt (a dip in the bottom) for dealing with sediments for his wine making. Flat bottomed bottles are for rose hip syrup.

When Buy-the-Kilo opened up at the metro station near us, she sold her products either in expensive (to my mind) new jars and bottles (£2/£3 each) or she took community donations of jars which she cleaned and sold on for 50p each. Mostly she encouraged people to bring their own containers. I am amazed I've not written here about her marvelous shop, but then I've not written much here of late at all. It deserves its own post, I think. Anyhow, I saved jars to take to her.

For Jackie / re-cycling

Then when I began wanting to make jams I needed the type of jar with a dimple on the top. (Jam making in Britain is a whole different process to most food preservation in the US. I won't pretend to have the expertise to explain why this works). I wanted smallish ones, so that I could spread the varieties out and interesting shapes were nice, too. Since we'd recycled most of our marmalade jars from the past and honey jars don't have dimples, I needed help with this. Vivien also went through a jam making stage but she kindly shared a few of her jam jars. When I got really desperate I went down to Buy-the-Kilo and bought jars from her for 50p each. She had some nice square ones on offer.

Having been on holiday to Vienna with Jane and Chris, Bill's sister and brother-in-law, we discovered not only that Chris liked stewed apples but we did as well. So I began saving coffee and other large jars for freezing stewed apples to eat with our porridge or cereal. These coffee jars were also useful for filling up with dried fruits or popcorn at Buy-the-Kilo.

More keepers.

We got all these jars out of the loft or under the stairs because I understood that Jackie, at Buy-the-Kilo, was running out of her community donated jars and bottles and I had placed an order with her. Our original plan was to take these jars down to her when Bill picked up our order. Then she changed her mind about this and was using her full price bottles. All her dry products she was putting in paper bags and charging 10p each, what they cost her. It may be that people are nervous about used jars or she doesn't now have time to be re-cleaning them all.

Of course, jars can be used to store food, much like the plastic containers we're all used to. The freezer has lots of glass jars in there with various contents. The same as with plastic containers, they need to be under-filled to give room for expansion when the contents freeze. With plastic containers the lid will pop off while glass may shatter. 

My button collection is stored in jars, sorted by colour group. That deserves a photo by itself when I get a moment. How can just staying at home feel so busy?

In the end, I picked out all the jars I thought I might want for jams, stewed apples and purchasing post-pandemic at Buy-the-Kilo and we recycled the rest. I didn't have to heart to ask Bill to haul them all back up into the loft. Hope I don't find I needed those after all!