Tomato & bean soup and a spice mix

TA - Eloise's suggestions are good, I've used couscous in peppers, and those packets of flavoured couscous/grains/rice you can get nowadays are very nice.  Or what about mashed cauli or broccoli with cheese and bacon?

Joy - no I didn't defrost the sprouts first before roasting them.  They were fine - not brilliant but perfectly edible, and certainly much nicer than boiling.  

It's definitely turning into soup weather now, so that's what we're having for lunch today, I'm making a tomato and bean soup which I've made loads of times before, it's cheap, quick but very tasty.

Chop and soften an onion in a little oil in a large saucepan.  Add 2 tins of chopped tomatoes and a tin of baked beans.....you could use any canned beans, actually, rinsed of the salty goo.  Add a big squirt of tomato puree and a splash of balsamic vinegar or Worcestershire sauce, to give depth of flavour.  Sprinkle in herbs of choice - I've used basil and coriander, and half a teaspoon of smoked paprika.  Cook for about 10 mins.  Leave to cool a bit, then whizz up with a stick blender.  Reheat gently and serve with a swirl of cream or a dollop of Philly-type cheese or a sprinkle of grated Cheddar.

I often use SeasonAll on mixed roasted veggies or roast potatoes or in mince or pasta dishes....anything really.  For overseas readers, it's a little jar of mixed spice and herbs, a kind of multi-purpose seasoning.  It's a bit pricy for the size of the jar, averaging around £1.  Anyway, a few weeks ago I found a huge plastic jar of a similar thing in Lidl:-

It's a kilo in weight (about 20x the size of the little jars I normally buy), I can't remember how much it cost but I know it was really economical, because I remarked on it to husband and bought it.  Well, after using a couple of teaspoonsful of it a couple of times, I discovered why it was so cheap....everything tasted incredibly salty and a bit sweet.  On looking at the label, I saw the first ingredient is salt....59% of it!  Closely followed by sugar, 15%, and then assorted herbs and spices in unspecified amounts, as well as a few chemicals or e-numbers.  Not so good then - that'll teach me not to read the label before buying.

Well, I didn't really want to chuck it, so had an idea to make it better.  I did throw away about a third of it - goes against the grain but we can't use it in its present state.  I bought 2 supermarket value pots of mixed herbs and smoked paprika, decanted the remaining 2/3 of the spice mix into a large bowl and added the herbs and paprika.  I also added some opened stuff I had in the cupboard - some onion granules, some parsley and half a pot of sumac (I'm not keen on the taste of that by itself).  Mixed the whole lot together and then added it back into the jar.  It tastes a lot better now, and will last us a long time....provided the flavours don't fade, I do keep it in a dark cupboard and not on the worktop in the light.

Stuffed peppers

My stomach is gradually settling down, with the sensible good food we're eating.  

Tuesday I did stuffed peppers.  I fried a chopped shallot and some chopped chorizo until the fat ran, then added a few diced mushrooms and a couple of snipped sundried tomatoes.  Stirred it into cooked brown rice, with a tablespoon of corn kernels and a handful of grated Cheddar, then stuffed two red peppers which I'd cut in half and deseeded and quickly softened for a couple of minutes in the microwave.  We had them with frozen Brussels sprouts, which I roasted in the oven as an experiment, as the oven was on for the peppers.  We really like fresh Brussels roasted, so I wondered what frozen ones would be like done the same way....they were ok, not as nice as fresh obviously, but better than boiling them, frozen boiled sprouts are just mushy and tasteless.  I drizzled them with oil and sprinkled with SeasonAll before roasting.

Yesterday we had chicken stirfry - just sliced chicken breast with lots of veg - carrot, cabbage, red onion, peppers, mushrooms, beansprouts, with soy sauce and some powdered ginger....I completely forgot I've got lots of fresh ginger root in the freezer, never mind, I'll remember next time.

Today we're having fish....I'd bought a pack of 4 frozen salmon fillets - well, they're not very nice, not a patch on fresh.  So the remaining 2 I'm going to cut up and cook in a fresh tartar sauce (bought and frozen last week, reduced to 20p), along with a small piece of fresh haddock I bought yesterday that had been reduced to £1.  We'll have it with our homegrown baby corn cobs, French beans and courgettes.

A healthy picnic

Thanks for your comments, the monster butternut squash will ripen over the next couple of weeks on the sunny windowsill.  We always grow these squashes every year, and towards the end of the season each year we have several which clearly won't ripen on the plants, due to the lack of prolonged sunshine and shortening days.  So we pick them all and put them in the utility room, leaving a couple of inches of stem otherwise they start to rot, they ripen up in due course.  Husband brought a smaller unripe one in 2 or 3 weeks ago, another one he'd accidentally knocked off (he's very clumsy, unfortunately), that's now ripened and we'll be eating it this week.

We need some time out so will be going to our favourite beach for a walk and a picnic lunch today, to make the most of a lovely day before the forecast not so good weather later in the week.  A couple of weeks ago I made some cheese & bacon topped bruschetta, using a ciabatta loaf that I bought reduced to pennies, I froze all the slices.  I'll take some of those (I'll have just 1 or 2) along with a tub of carrot, cucumber and sweet pepper sticks, some cooked chicken and a little pot of mayo for dipping.  We'll have one of our homegrown apples for dessert, and a flask of coffee.  Hopefully, most of the holidaymakers will have gone home, so the beach should be back to the usual calm and peaceful state.

A monster butternut squash

Huh, typed a post complete with photos and it suddenly completely vanished before I'd finished it!  No doubt I did something by mistake.

Anyway, husband brought in a massive butternut squash yesterday, it wasn't ripe but he'd accidentally snapped it off so had to bring it in, it's on a sunny windowsill.  It's the biggest one I've ever seen....the orange (a normal size orange, not a satsuma) is there for comparison purposes, it dwarfs our kettle:-

And here it is being weighed:-

The display on my scales is a bit faint, but it shows a weight of 4.27kg or 9lbs 6oz!  How I'm going to cook the monster yet I haven't decided, but it will certainly do us for several meals.  We like it cubed and simply roasted with smoked paprika, or in a risotto with bacon and sage.  There's soup, of course, we especially like it with blue cheese in, or a curried version.  And oh yes, butternut squash curry is delicious.  Or I just boil and mash it sometimes, with some herbs, as an alternative cottage/fish pie topping.

And we have loads more of these squashes to come yet, a few of which will be just as big.  It's a good job they store well, they'll keep us going all through winter.

Beans?

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're being inundated with some of our veggies.....French beans in particular.  They're growing almost faster than we can pick them, and because some of them get hidden by the masses of leaves (husband planted them quite close together), some are huge and thick by the time we spot them.  Well, they're not very nice to eat by that time, the pods get stringy and tough.  So I'm wondering whether I can pod them and just cook and eat the beans.  I don't see why not, after all, all kinds of beans in tins started off in pods!  I'll give it a go in the next few days.**

We didn't think we'd get much of a good harvest of anything this year, it was such a disastrous start to the growing year as it was so wet, windy and cold in Spring.  Lots of our first sowings of veg seeds failed, even some of the second sowings, and quite a few seedlings we bought to try and catch up died off too.  But pretty much everything has not only caught up, but done extremely well.  Oh, except for the strawberries and blueberries, we didn't get as many of either of those this year, although the blackcurrants and raspberries have done well.  We're going to pick most of our apples (eating apple Fiesta, cooking apple Bountiful) this weekend, even if not quite ready - they're being decimated by wasps and I don't want to lose all of them.

Husband wanted southern fried chicken and chips tonight, I've been trying to avoid too many carbs this week for gut reasons so it will be interesting to see if the chicken coating and the chips have any adverse effects on me.  I'll just have a few chips (I will eat the chicken coating, it's the best bit!) and will make coleslaw to have with it.  We had a very thin base pizza last night, spinach and ricotta with sun dried tomatoes, I had about a third of the medium size pizza and left the crusts, to reduce the carbs, we had it with lots of salad.  No gut trouble, thankfully.

**EDIT  I've googled and found that yes you can eat the podded beans, but they should be boiled rapidly first (rather like dried kidney beans), as when older and bigger they contain a chemical that could give you stomach upset.  A recommendation was that you just pod and freeze the beans raw, then boil them for 10 mins from frozen, then cook a bit longer until soft.

Almost too much garden produce to deal with

We have garden produce coming thick and fast now, needing harvesting every day - loads and loads of French beans, both green and purple (why do they turn green when cooked?), 3 types of courgettes, carrots, salad leaves, cucumbers, baby corn.  There are still 4 bags of new potatoes left to dig up, and masses of tomatoes but they're still green.  Late summer/autumn raspberries, and the eating and cooking apples are ready too, the pears will soon be ripe.  Our butternut squashes have done incredibly well this year.....not quite ripe yet, but there are masses of them, enough to last through the winter, and some of them are absolutely huge, one will easily do us for 4 meals I should think.  It's great having all this produce, and saves us a lot of money, but it's a lot of work at this time of year....every day I'm having to process all this stuff, and there are times when I groan when husband comes in from the garden with yet another trugful.  I shouldn't moan really, I'd be a bit annoyed if we didn't have it all.

I've found that slicing and lightly frying the courgettes in olive oil, then spreading them out on parchment lined baking trays before boxing up is the best way to freeze them.  Carrots I chop up in my processor, I don't bother blanching them before freezing in plastic boxes, they're fine to defrost and use as they are in stews or mince.  The French beans I do blanch first, one year I tried not blanching them before freezing but they didn't taste very good when defrosted and cooked.

This is the first year we've grown baby corn....funnily enough Sue in Suffolk mentioned them this morning, a first time for her too, she said hers are ready and in fact possibly a bit too big.  Thanks Sue, I told husband to have a look at ours and he confirmed they're ready, he brought a load in so we'll be having them in a pork stir fry tomorrow.

We're having salads for lunch most days, I grate raw courgette and carrot to have as well, we had tuna with a sprinkle of grated Cheddar today.  For dinner we've just had Asian pork burgers (a bargain 50p for the two, reduced late in the afternoon when I went shopping the other day), with our own new potatoes and French beans and coleslaw made with our own carrots and chives with a bought cabbage.  Husband followed his with a slice of Somerset apple cake made with our own apples - I'm cutting down on carbs so resisted the temptation.

Rice salad, date & walnut cake, Panzanella

Yesterday I made a nice rice salad to take out with us for a picnic.  I used one of those microwaveable packets that most of the supermarkets do now, I like them because they're measured portions and now come in so many different combinations and flavours.  The one I used yesterday was wholegrain basmati rice with quinoa, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, really nice.  I grilled 2 back bacon rashers until crisp, then snipped them into the rice.  I chopped some tomatoes (sadly shop bought, our own aren't ready yet), homegrown cucumber and radishes and added all those, along with some sweetcorn.  Made a quick balsamic and oil dressing and mixed in.  Packed into 2 lidded bowls in our little lunch coolbag, with 2 slices of homemade date & walnut cake and a flask of coffee, it was a lovely lunch eaten at our favourite beach.

The cake was a simple quick one - I just basically made a Victoria sandwich mix, using half white/half wholemeal flour and an extra tablespoon of flour, to give the mix a bit more strength to hold the dates and nuts so they wouldn't sink to the bottom.  I used Demerara sugar and less of it than is usual for a sponge mix.  I always use about a third less sugar than is called for - you really can't notice the difference in taste, and husband has certainly never mentioned it.  

Today's lunch salad is going to be Panzanella, as I found some ends of sourdough bread in the freezer which need using up.  Again it won't be our own homegrown tomatoes, but I managed to get some nice British vine tomatoes reduced to half price yesterday.  There's a red pepper going soft in the fridge to be used up too, and I'll thickly slice one of our homegrown ridge cucumbers.  I'll make a balsamic and oil dressing and whisk in a spoonful of green pesto.  Think I've got some salami in the freezer, so will get that out to have with it.

Salmon fillets with our own new potatoes and salad for dinner.