On a damp dreary day it's nice to have something bubbling away in the kitchen so today seemed like a good day to clear out all the tiny cherry tomatoes and pop them in a pan. We've been picking ripe ones from the allotment greenhouse until this week, and as it's not really salad weather supply has outstripped demand. There's really too high a percentage of skins and seeds for my normal 'lazy' passata, so today's version had to be sieved.
Part way through cooking, and loving the tomatoey aromas, I decided to turn half into minestrone for lunch.An excellent plan for a miserable day.
After lunch I settled to a quiet afternoon of sorting out buttons. I'm at the point in
my knitting where I need to decide how many buttonholes to make - and as I have lots of buttons, I wanted to find some out of the stash rather than buy more. The orangey-brown ones, centre front, would have been fine but there wasn't enough of them. In fact I couldn't find 7 or 8 matching, or even suitable to mix, buttons anywhere. So.... after all the playing and sorting, I've decided to move some from a denim shirt and replace
those with blue buttons. Not the simplest solution but at least I won't be acquiring more!
Another fortnight with lots of lunches out - and everything at home seems to have been salads or sandwiches.
Not really a lot of variety among the ingredients either - same old cabbage/apple/carrot/beetroot coleslaw or spinach/tomato/radish/cucumber pickles salad. Still at least none of it costs anything :)
The weather may be dropping colder but I'm still sticking with salads most of the time for lunch - the ingredients have changed a bit though. There's a lot of crisp cabbage ready now and still the occasional picking of spinach or indoor-grown baby lettuce; plenty of indoor-ripening tomatoes, even the sweet yellow plum ones; no more fresh cucumbers so on to the bright yellow bread and butter pickles I made from the earlier glut; probably the last of the 'normal' radish and I've also started the blue 'Herbst und Winter' variety which look like a purple parsnip, though have to be peeled most of the time; our allotment neighbour's gift of carrots is proving useful for coleslaw and I also add chopped up apples from one of our garden trees; corn cobs from the freezer which handily cook in the same time as sausage rolls; and there's beetroot for a splash of colour. With chutney and pickled onions these have made up the bulk of my lunches whether as salads, or sandwich/wrap/pitta fillings, but one day (while making passata) I couldn't resist minestrone soup.
I haven't managed to keep to the 'free lunch' every day because I've been out and about a lot, but I'll console myself with the thought that I could have found something free for lunch if I'd been in!
