Hummus, cheesy toasts, beef & veg pie

It feels like we've had weeks of heavy rain (well, it's been heavy showers, not continuous rain, but enough to have standing water and thick mud in the fields and partially flooded lanes) and very strong, bitterly cold winds.  To be fair, there has been some sunshine too, just in very short bursts most of the time.  Well, today has dawned with a mostly blue sky, no rain, a lot less cold and not much wind, and it's forecast to be like this all week.  Marvellous!  Just to qualify....when I say not much wind - it's always windy here, there's nothing much between us and the Bristol channel which is only a couple of miles away as the crow flies, but it's just normal wind, not the kind that brings tears to your eyes and practically blows you off your feet.  So we might actually be able to get out in the garden to start tidying up, pruning and weeding, and preparing for the year's food growing.  Well, husband does the food growing, I do the pretty flowery stuff in the front garden.

So this week we're eating out of the freezer every day, I've done an inventory and week's menu plan.  I'm specifically talking about using up all the odds and ends of leftover meals, cooked veggies, etc, that have accumulated in the freezer, not shop bought packs of veg, meat, fish fingers and the like.  Not wanting to waste anything, I always freeze the leftovers of meals and veg, but it means we end up with numerous pots and bags of stuff that languish in there forever and take up space.  So I've devised a week of meals that'll use up as much as possible of the oddments and leftovers.

Today for lunch I'm making hummus using a pot of frozen chickpeas (I cooked a whole bag of dried chickpeas at once weeks ago, freezing them in portions, there's just one left).  We'll have it with cheesy French bread toasts - a brown French baguette that's been in the freezer for ages, sliced thinly and topped with grated cheese, sliced spring onion and mayo, then baked in the oven.

For dinner it'll be a pie using homemade shortcrust pastry from the freezer, filled with diced beef left from yesterday's dinner, a mix of chopped veg both from yesterday and some from the freezer, and leftover horseradish gravy.  I made enough gravy yesterday purposely to use some in the pie.  The pie will make 4 portions, we'll have the remainder for lunch tomorrow.

From the freezer today:-

Chickpeas
Small brown baguette
Pastry
Leftover cooked veg