What's Cooking This Week

My freezer stash, which began the year heaving with lasagna, pie, bolognese and "meat"ball sauce, was starting to look a little sad. I've had a productive work week so far, so I took the evening off to tackle a couple of big cooking projects.

A few days ago I had set my slow cooker to work on a batch of curry, so I was already off to a good start with four portions of Quorn, potato and lentil curry (the ingredients are what I happened to have lying around). At the weekend my mum came to visit and brought with her a packet of meatball pasta bake mix, which I immediately began to crave. As luck would have it, I had both a bag of soya meatballs in the freezer and a box of pre-cooked pasta in the fridge, which I had taken out intending to eat it for lunch and fortunately forgotten.

I also wanted to make another batch of Quorn chasseur, as I had quite a lot of Quorn fillets and two packets of the sauce mix, so I tackled the two at once. It worked surprisingly well - the chasseur takes an hour to cook and the pasta bake only 25 minutes, so I managed to cook, eat, portion out the leftovers and clean up before it was time to get the casseroles out of the oven. People were coming in and out of the room to prepare their own dinner; it's always nice to have the chance to chat to my neighbours as we stir and chop.

Tonight's main topic of conversation was the kitchen food thief, who has been raiding people's cupboards - so far a bag of rice and a jar of pesto have been taken (whoever it is is very brazen - the stolen pesto was discovered, open, in the communal fridge). We aren't sure who it is, but I have suspicions. I'm not quite sure what we can do about it, other than locking our cupboards and hiding everything away. It's very depressing not to be able to trust people.

Anyway, everything went to plan this time (no melted plastic layer on top of the casserole) and I now have another eleven meals frozen away. On Friday my dad and his partner will be visiting and I will be using up the remaining Quorn fillets for fajitas, using the seasoning mix that came free in my Good Food Show goodie bag. On Saturday we're off to a food fair at a local farm, which promises to be delicious - and also provides a goodie bag to take home! I love freebies, they often inspire me to try new recipes and have even introduced me to some new brands once or twice.

Slow-Cooker Curry Experiment

The end result was bright orange and delicious

Because of my mission to empty and defrost the freezer, I haven't been cooking and freezing anything lately. Meals have been whatever I can get together quickly; risotto a couple of nights, sausages and salad in burger buns on others, until I have reached the point where my freezer now contains three almost-finished Quorn packets of various types, some broccoli, some bread and the last two pieces of spinach quiche. The trouble is that with term in full swing once more and my new schedule involving very early mornings but not much earlier nights, I'm not managing to cook dinner before I fall asleep. Last night I found myself eating a Graze box as my evening meal, after a lunch of salad leaves between mayonnaise-smeared bread, and I decided it was time to get sorted.

Store Cupboard Eating

My new year's resolution to attempt a new recipe every fortnight has not been going very well. I haven't cooked anything at all for some time now, because I'm making a desparate attempt to empty my freezer so that I can defrost it, and to avoid buying more food when I have so much stored already.

Representative contents of brown bags shown

As a result I've been eating a lot of rather samey meals. Mostly spinach quiche, which whilst being delicious was also huge. I haven't yet got bored of eating it, but I suspect that with another three portions to go I might well be glad when it's finally finished.

Batch Cooking for the Freezer

In the last three days I have made quite a lot of food. I've cooked for between 2 and 5 people each night, although admittedly often it only involved shoving something out of the freezer into the oven for a while, but in between times I've made spaghetti bolognese sauce, curry, meatfree meatballs in a tomato sauce, spinach spaghetti, and shepherd's pie. I've filled fifteen individual portion containers and I've not even divided up the pie yet.

National Vegetarian Week - Vegetable Curry

Today's recipe isn't a recipe exactly, because it is a great way to use up left-overs! The vegetables in this curry were cooked on Sunday – half were roasted for our Sunday dinner (more about that at the end of the week) and half were boiled and kept in the fridge.
So, left-over vegetable curry. I cheat and use a jar of curry paste, because frankly life is too short to be mixing your own.

It wasn't as orange as this in real life! Not far off though.