The BBC Good Food Show and Christmas

Some while back, I entered a giveaway competition over on Mrs M's. I only enter giveaways if I really want the prize, and often they are only open to US residents, but the nice thing about our Mrs M is that she's here in the UK! The prizes in question were three pairs of tickets to the BBC Winter Good Food Show, and by chance the dates fell right around the end of my university term. I entered, assuming as I did so that I would never win, and promptly forgot all about it.

Public Service Announcement

Sainsbury's Basics milk powder in hot chocolate is weird.

It is, however more convenient than going to the kitchen to microwave real milk. The next time I buy hot chocolate, it will be of the instant variety.

Meal Planning Monday - October 8th - 14th

I have been reading At Home with Mrs M for months, but only just decided that I wanted to take part in her weekly meal planning blog hop. Meal planning, as anyone who has read my blog before will know, is a huge time-saver for me during term. I actually tend to plan for the week ahead some time during the weekend, although naturally plans shift a little as things get organised last minute.

I don't always plan out my lunches, but it does help to have some ideas of things that don't involve bread - I'm not terribly imaginative with lunch. I start my meal plan by consulting my diary and making a note of anything which is happening that affects my meals. For instance, this week I have a drinks party and a dance class straight after my tutoring lesson tonight, so I needed something extremely quick but not too heavy. The choir are going out for curry on Wednesday night, but I couldn't afford to join them so I will be having my own curry at home so as not to miss out entirely. On Saturday I'm going to a full-day event which includes a cooked lunch, so I chose something light for my evening meal.

Day	Lunch	Dinner
Monday	Spicy chickpeas	Sweet potato & leek soup
Tuesday	Couscous	Zucchini potato pancakes
Wednesday	Spicy chickpeas	Rogan Josh with rice
Thursday		Mushroom risotto
Friday		Spaghetti bolognese
Saturday	Event lunch	Quorn chasseur
Sunday		Chapel supper

And I have just noticed that this is my 100th post! I would never have expected to keep up a food blog for this long. It's great to look back and see how much better I have become at both cooking and managing my meals.

The New Blender's First Outing

A few days ago, while preparing vegetables for a curry (actually, while watching my friend preparing vegetables for a curry - I was not being very useful, although I did provide the vegetables), I peeled and chopped a sweet potato for soup. Then I put the pieces in a box in the fridge and forgot about them.

Today another friend came round for lunch and we dug out the sweet potato which was still perfectly edible, but threatening to become squishy and unpleasant, and made soup out of it, along with a parsnip, a leek and an onion. I also threw in some Bouillon powder and salt, and later the remainder of my blue cheese for an added kick.

It was the first time I'd used my new-to-me stick blender and it worked well. In fact I probably blended the soup more than was strictly necessary... I used the blender to stir in the cheese and salt, just because I could. It wasn't the best soup I'd ever made and it wasn't a hugely appetising colour but I was pleased with it by the end.

The really nice thing was that throughout the time we were cooking, the kitchen was full of people from the other rooms on my corridor, also cooking - and cooking real food: a vegetable stir fry, a Quorn dish, some kind of greyish curry. We chatted about cooking and they offered helpful suggestions which made it clear that they have far more food science knowledge than I. People, I live with fellow cooks! After three years in which the majority of my neighbours think that heating up a pizza counts as elaborate cooking and look askance at anyone who chops their own onions I am thrilled. Perhaps we will swap recipes and bulk-buy unusual grains and have dinner parties. Or perhaps we'll just jockey for elbow room at the one functioning hob - there are two ovens, and in theory two hobs, but the right-hand one has been broken for over a year with no sign of any attempt to fix it. On Sunday night there were no fewer than twelve people in the kitchen at once, thankfully not all attempting to cook their own meal but still. I seem to have ended up in the foodie enclave.

A Rookie Mistake

Today I did the first stage in my epic cook-ahead marathon. The supermarket delivery arrived late on Friday night but Saturday was filled with unpacking, choir and a concert in London, whilst this morning was spent attending three different breakfasts and watching Doctor Who (far more time-critical than finishing the unpacking, of course).

So this evening as I was cooking my dinner I decided to make a start on the list of meals for the freezer. I made a batch of spaghetti bolognese sauce without any difficulties other than the inexplicable absence of the plastic lids for my freezer boxes - one portion of sauce is currently freezing lidless. Then I put a bag of kidney beans into water to soak ready for chilli con carne tomorrow, and tackled a new recipe: Quorn fillet chasseur. It should have been simple...

Meal Planning with Scrivener

I recently downloaded the trial version of Scrivener to use on a university project, and while I was experimenting with the features I discovered it had a template for recipes. It got me thinking, and I'm now in the process of creating a complete meal-planning system using the program.

Obviously the purpose of the template is to store recipes, but I already have a fairly good system for that - I spent a day this summer formatting my recipe file and I mostly cook things without a recipe anyway. Far more useful is the fact that I can create a menu for the week, a shopping list, a list of what I have in the cupboards and link them all together, as well as include any new recipes I want to try. Of course I could do this without Scrivener too, using different files and saving them in the same folder, but it just seems more fun (and more efficient) with my fancy new software!

Last week I put in an order on the Sainsbury's website to arrive the day after I move back into college. I've got a couple of days free before term starts and I've planned a lot of batch cooking. This year will be even busier than last year, but starting out with a month's worth of meals in the freezer should make it easier. My kitchen this year has a table in it, which will make more difference than I would ever have imagined before I spent two years without one, and is not far from my room (without three sets of fire doors in between either!), and a friend has sold me her fridge as my new room didn't have one, and it has a good freezer compartment and more space than my old one. All in all, it should be an easier year meal-wise.

Chickpeas with Tomato Sauce

This is a recipe I adapted from an ebook recipe from Slow Cooking for Vegetarians, which has some great recipes I want to try. I didn't make it in a slow cooker, I made it on the stove, and I cheated on the herbs - I just used some mixed dry herbs and a tin of canned tomatoes with chillis rather than fresh chillis. But it turned out delicious anyway. All you need is a can of chickpeas - I used about 250g, I think, which was half the can, a can of chopped tomatoes, some chillis if they aren't included with the tomatoes, and some herbs. I fried the herbs and tomatoes in some olive oil for a few minutes, whilst the chickpeas were boiling in a separate pan for about ten minutes. Then I drained the peas, added the tomato mix to the saucepan, added some extra water (this step was probably unnecessary, to be honest) and simmered it until the liquid had evaporated off. It was served on top of rice and very delicious. I'll be making it again soon to use up the other half of the chickpeas, and I'll take a photo next time.