Decorating with chillies

It's the time of year for putting up the decorations but for a while the Christmas ones must wait. I have a string of chillies drying over the dining room radiator - and they cannot be disturbed!

It's one of the easiest ways to preserve them. When they're dried, I'll pack them in jars and they keep for years!

Homegrown dinner #2 Goulash or something close

Continuing to 'eat what we've got', I decided to make goulash - probably not remotely authentic, it involved lots of tomatoes, an onion, some small peppers, a jalpeno, white beans, runner beans and potatoes, helped by some left-over chorizo slices and gammon stock from the freezer.

For an experimental, make-it-up-on-the-go dinner it worked well - so well I'd try to make it again, but homegrown chillis are always very variable and the next version of this may be a lot milder.

Another Pumpkin.....

This pumpkin has been hiding in the cupboard under the stairs since Halloween and I only got it out now because I needed to make some marmalade.

That took a big 4lb chunk out of it so then on to using some for dinners ....

    chilli....


bacon and pumpkin inauthentic  goulash .....

curried bean and pumpkin soup

'leftovers' soup - basically cooked, mashed pumpkin with leftover spicy tomato sauce.







another chilli - with cannellini beans as I couldn't find kidney beans!

 ...and on to the very last piece for another 'leftover' soup, this time with a small amount of lamb stock, potatoes, baked beans and a generous spoonful of curry powder.

Last but not least - the seeds roasted with peri peri sauce. A tongue-tingling snack.

Take One Pumpkin #3

If you've been following the adventures of this pumpkin, you'll know I'm only about half way through it, so it seemed time to use up a lot in one go - for pumpkin and lemon marmalade.

3lb of pumpkin made 5 jars.












and there was still enough left for....
spicy tomato, chickpea and pumpkin stew...

....curried pumpkin and baked bean soup...













and with the very last piece....

pumpkin chilli - not quite a proper chilli as half way through I realised there weren't any tine of red kidney beans and had to substitute borlottis.

Take One Pumpkin....

I'm a great fan of pumpkins - either for soups, pasta, curries, chutney, marmalade...  anything really. This year we only have one small homegrown one, so with shops full of them for Halloween I had to stock up. I had intended to carve at least one of them but didn't so there hasn't been the desperate rush to use up pumpkin flesh that normally takes up the first week of November.

 I have now got round to cutting the first one - and I wondered out of curiosity how far my £2 investment would go....

The first wedge I took out went in lazy pumpkin chilli - chopped up pumpkin flesh, simmered till soft then a tin of chilli beans added.

 Second up was chutney ... 3lb of pumpkin chunks with onions, orange peel and mustards....

Same day - soup. Pumpkin and potato, flavoured with chilli and ginger, cooked in chicken stock till they could be mashed.





So far I've used a little under half. I wonder how much further it will stretch....

Alcoholic passata anyone?

Wanting to thicken some chilli, I opened one of last year's bottles of passata which gushed out almost like champagne. I assume the sugar was merrily turning into alcohol. Still I added it and no one fell into a drunken stupor after lunch so it must be ok to eat!

Store cupboard fail!

I decided one lunchtime last week to make chilli - mainly from home-grown veg - the end of a pumpkin that had been sitting in the fridge a little too long, my unpredictable chillies, tomatoes from the freezer - and a tin a cheap shop bought kidney beans.

Everything was going wonderfully till at almost the last minute I went in the 'tins' cupboard for the beans - plenty of special offer chick peas, cheapo baked beans, even a tin of cannellinis but NO kidney beans!

Now, I know I could have used one of the other sorts of beans but it seemed like a good opportunity to have a completely home grown lunch, so I raided the freezer again and added broad beans. Not usual for chilli, I'll grant you, but tasty nonetheless.