Free Lunch Challenge - week 3

 Week 3 and I'm finding that it's far easier to make 'free' lunch if I have soup! Just raid the freezer and throw some things together.
 Monday; soup with tomatoes, sweetcorn and courgettes from the freezer. I'm definitely getting more inventive with using up what I've got!

 Tuesday; lamb stew without the lamb! A mix of potatoes, turnip, carrot and swede from storage in post-Sunday roast lamb stock.

 Wednesday; Spicy carrot and parsnip soup. I'd hoped I had enough parsnip left for plain (or curried) parsnip soup but once it was peeled and chopped it was nothing like sufficient, so I hunted down a recipe involving carrot as well and flavoured with coriander and cumin (not home grown)

 Thusday; good old salad - bits of rocket, spinach and chives, plus a couple of spring onions all fresh from the garden. The last bit of my last cabbage, so now waiting for the over-winter Savoy-types to grow. Blue radish, beetroot and dried apple as usual to bulk it up.

Friday; desperately trying to find something to put in a sandwich with ham - after yesterday's salad there weren't many leaves in the garden. Found some spinach and added some allotment kale (!), sliced blue radish and the tiniest tomato imaginable from a plant that's just surviving winter in the back-porch.


 Well, this week started well but went downhill at weekend. I managed to find some scraps of rocket in the garden to add to sandwiches but honestly they didn't really make a difference. I can't imagine next week will go well either as it's half term - no weird soup allowed.

Week 2 of the Free Lunch Challenge

 Monday; salad waiting for ham - spinach, red kale and radishes from the allotment, pickled home grown red cabbage, beetroot stored from autumn and homemade pumpkin chutney though I'm not sure if it was one of our pumpkins

 Tuesday; quick and easy leek and potato soup - stored potatoes, fresh leeks from allotment and garden

Wednesday; back to salad - fresh red cabbage, spinach and grated blue winter radish from allotment, carrot from another allotmenteer, beetroot again, homegrown, homepickle onion and a definitely homegrown green tomato chutney

 Thursday - lazy soup; broad beans from freezer and more gifted carrots in gammon stock, spiced up with one of our unpredictable chillies.

Friday; a soup that tasted better than it looks. My home-grown homedried cannellini beans soaked, cooked and mashed in chicken stock from the freezer.










Saturday was this week's 'day off' - bacon fry up with no room for veg at all.

Sunday; back to salad. It gets harder to find interesting bits and pieces to put together for this - fresh rocket, cabbage and radish. Red onion and beetroot stored from summer and some dried apple pieces.

Cable cardigan

 This latest project is really going very well. I've started with the easy bit - plain stocking stitch back- and completed it in a couple of weeks.

Now on to the fronts which will be slower because of the cables. First though, as I'm not working from a pattern I have to sort which cables to use and where to put them.

This will be the main pattern up the centre of each front with smaller cables either side.

Can there be such a thing as a Free Lunch?

I'm getting round to planning what I'll be growing in the veg patch and at the allotment this coming year, and it struck me that I still seem to have a freezer full of last year's allotment harvest. Time, I decided, to use it up - after all the whole point of growing veg is to eat it! So, building on my 'lunch from the lottie' idea, I'm trying to see how many times I can put together a 'free' lunch using fruit and veg that have either been grown by us, given by friends or through Freegle, or foraged. Obviously any meat, bread, cheese etc will have to be shop-bought so there'll probably be a lot of vegetarian meals. Here's how Week 1 went...
First up, Monday; a minestrone of sorts with tomatoes, broad beans and cabbage from the freezer and carrots gifted by someone from the allotments with a bit of dried chilli and a sprinkle of last year's dried oregano

Tuesday; leek and potato soup with, you guessed, leeks (fresh from the allotment) and potatoes (last year's from store). I also used some veg stock and freshly ground pepper, but if I was been really strict it could probably survived without them.

 Wednesday; ham salad. Obviously NOT home grown ham but I had cabbage, beetroot and blue winter radishes in store, fresh rocket in the garden, dried apples from a bag of windfalls picked up through Freegle and chutney made with a cucumber glut last summer.

Thursday; sandwiches - tricky as I can't grow grain for flour for bread, and I don't have a cow to milk for cheese, but the onion and beetroot were homegrown and the cucumber chutney mainly was.

Friday; chilli of sorts with beans dried not last year but the one before, tomatoes and courgettes from the freezer, and onions and dried chilli from store. No peppers as I didn't grow enough to freeze any, but it was still ok.

Saturday; sandwiches again. I've soon discovered that it's easier to cook a free lunch, than have 'free' sandwiches. Still, I picked some rocket, added some already cooked beetroot and a red onion from the store to go with tuna.

Sunday - another quick sandwich day so I just grabbed the first things to hand in the fridge - nothing 'free' at all. For dinner, though, there were potatoes from store and runner beans and cauliflower from the freezer, so maybe things evened out on the day.


Now to start planning for next week.....

Lunch from the lottie

 A couple of soups with all home grown ingredients.

 Firstly, "A rich root and cheese soup for a winter's day" from Nigel Slater's Tender - parsnip soup to you and me. The parsnips, onions, garlic and chillies were all home grown but I haven't managed to grow my own turmeric yet.

Then I decided it was time to use some of the beans I grew and dried last summer in a minestrone soup of sorts with tomatoes from the freezer, turnips stored in a bucket since November and kale picked freshly this week, with a little dried chill and oregano for flavour

after soaking

Finished at last!

selfie with cardigan

 Well, this isn't the best photo in the world but it does prove that I've finished my fair-isle cardigan project.

close up of pattern on sleeve

It appears that I've spent nearly a whole year knitting this! Hunting through the blog for previous posts about it, I found the first reference last January - OK it was only in the planning stage then but I can't believe it's taken me so long. It was a bit slow to get started , ran into problems along the way and my usual running out of yarn difficulties Still, it's finished now and I'm hoping my next project doesn't take the same length of time.

Recipe testing - Nigel Slater's Tender vol 1 - A rich root and cheese soup for a winter's day

A long rambling title but this is really parsnip soup. I've a mammoth 4-5 inch diameter parsnip to use and happened on this recipe while trying to find my 'normal' one, so thought I'd give it a go.
Soups are always easy to make - in this case basically take two parsnips, onion, garlic, chilli flakes and turmeric, and boil in veg stock. I did encounter a couple of problems with the wording of the recipe though.
As I say, I've an enormous parsnip to use so I'm cutting slices off as I want them - which led to the first problem; the recipe calls for 2 large parsnips. How large is a large parsnip? I'm not a stickler for them, but it's one of those times when weights and measures can be handy.
The second problem - again with the parsnips - was there was no indication of how small to chop them. In fact it seemed to say pop them in the pan whole. Anyway, I chopped them into small dice as quicker to cook, and after that everything went well.
I didn't have single cream, as called for in the recipe, to hand, so stirred in some milk at the end - it was still creamy enough. I also skipped the cubes of cheese Slater suggests adding, so technically mine was just "a rich root soup" but still delicious and different to my normal 'curried parsnip soup'.