Lunch from the Lottie - #10 - with the help of some stock

Two Lottie Lunches this week; the first using tomatoes and broad beans from the freezer with the last of the parsnips







and the second with stock, potatoes, leeks and dried peas.....


Normally after Sunday's big roast I have bones to boil for stock but this week's pork was boneless. All I had left to boil up were some lumps of overcooked hard meat - surprisingly it did look and taste like stock after boiling.

 I remembered this time to do my advance planning  by soaking dried peas overnight. These are home grown and dried and this is the first time for testing them.


After their 10 minute rapid boil, I cooked them in the stock with the, now softened, meat scraps and our potatoes and leeks.

 A really thick pea soup for a cold winter day.

Lunch from the Lottie #5

'green salad' - ie chopped cabbage, rocket, baby lettuce, american land cress and cucumber - with tiny red and yellow tomatoes

'minestrone' with fresh parsnips and carrots and last year's broad beans and tomatoes from the freezer

chilli with 3 beans - french, broad and white. Used up lots of small wrinkled tomatoes, a variety of peppers and chillies, and added some fizzy ,turning to alcohol, homemade passata to thicken.

Lunch from the Lottie #4

 A lot of salads again - trying to make something different out of more or less the same ingredients each time

and for a change -- soup, with potatoes, carrots, parsnip and frozen broad beans from the freezer

Drying for winter

We seem to have the back porch filled with veg for winter use. It catches the late afternoon sun so can get quite warm in there making it ideal for drying. I don't quite trust the freezer to NOT fail because of power cuts or something so like to  have some of our veg stored in 'old-fashioned' ways.


After a while the onions will be moved into the darkness of the garage....

...and the broad beans and peas podded and jarred. The beans are just normal broad beans left to dry on the plants but the peas are a type, Maro, best suited to drying. I think I may have picked them a little early and not all have dried with a nice green colour - any odd ones can be sown again next year. Some had even started to send out shoots - proves I haven't mastered drying them - and these I've re-sown straight away in a large pot which can be dragged into the greenhouse when the weather drops cooler. I might even have fresh peas for Christmas!

Fish pie with added beans!

One snag of growing our own veg is the sudden gluts of one thing or another. Admittedly it's a nice drawback to have but broad beans everyday were starting to get dull so it was time to try something new... Fish pie with added beans!

I was actually going to adapt Teen's school recipe for tuna pasta bake but then decided to use potatoes instead. 

As per recipe, I cooked the veg first

Mixed them with the tuna and some red pepper for a bit of colour

Topped everything with partly-cooked potato slices

poured over some white sauce and grated a very small amount of cheese on top.

Ta dah!

Very nice, even if I say so myself.

Homegrown, homemade minestrone

 Coming back wet and cold from the allotment, I decided soup was the best thing for lunch - and with one bag full of broad beans and another of peas, thought it best to use at least some of them.

I wasn't quite sure what I was making at the start - I podded some broad beans and started cooking them, then added some of last year's tomatoes from the freezer. I wondered about making chilli at this point so added a couple of my dried chillies and a small courgette - from the polytunnel at the allotment. Then thought about the peas and kale I'd brought home so added them instead and called it minestrone.

Normally I'd add carrots but I'd decided by this point to only use my homegrown produce, though I did add some chopped up leaves from shop-bought celery.

Unfortunately, hubby was late back for lunch and the kale overboiled a bit and looked bedraggled - still, it tasted lovely!

Low fat cheesy broad beans and pasta

It's broad bean surplus time at the allotment, so I'm looking for different ideas of how to cook and eat them.

I don't think this is particularly original - there are lots of similar recipes that involve high fat cheese or double cream but we wanted a low fat version. I make this more often with just ham and mushroom, sometimes with courgettes added.

I cooked the beans first. Fried up some onions, peppers, mushrooms and one slice of ham (as I didn't want to open the next packet!) and threw the beans in with everything. It looks better with red peppers as they stand out more but today's options were green or this yellowy one.
I added about a teaspoon of cayenne pepper - which might have been a little too much. It would probably be fine to leave it out or grind some black pepper over after cooking.
Then I added about 2 tablespoons of very low fat cheese spread and heated it through to melt.

And *fanfare* dinner is served.