Going Green!

This week's CD Sunday challenge is "Going Green" - the colour or the environmental aspect or both. So I thought that as well as using the colour green, I would try to use something I had previously printed out for a different project, saving the paper, ink and power needed to print new papers.

This green brocade paper and the greeting are left over from papers I printed off from Debbie Moore's Glitter and Glitz Art Deco Story Boxes CD. The fan is made using a Keepsake embossing board - I cut two shapes, leaving one without the inner embossed details, and hinged the two together with a folded piece of matching card. The flower and leaf die cuts are from a Kanban set several years old.

Isn't gold card hard to photograph, especially on a gloomy day like today when it isn't possible to switch the flash off and use the natural light streaming in through the window! I'm afraid these photos are the best of a very bad bunch!

Meal planning Monday - the "It seemed like a good idea at the time" edition.

I don't use convenience foods. Not for me the ready meal, the packet sauce mix, the instant noodle. So what am I doing with all these in my cupboards?

Well, in every case, "It seemed like a good idea at the time". A good idea to pick one up after sampling it at a food show, or visiting an ethnic store, or a good idea to enter a competition where it was among the prizes, or pick up a pack in order to enter a competition featuring it.

So rather than plan individual meals this week, I've bought a big pack of chicken breasts and a selection of veg and salads - and also lifted out various tins of Chinese veg and coconut milk that "seemed like good ideas" too. And I've rounded up all the part used bags of rice and pasta in the cupboard. The week's meals are going to be "interesting", created out of what I can think up using these odds and ends. It's going to be rather like "Ready Steady Cook"!  Tonight there will be Malay Chicken curry, Indonesian vegetable curry and rice, and I will set some chicken to marinate for Chicken Tikka tomorrow and have a vegetable fried rice with it. After that - who knows? Maybe chicken in red onion and gorgonzola sauce with pasts and salad, or crispy crumbed chicken with lentils?

The one exception will be Thursday, when I'm going to London for the day to the Chelsea Flower Show, and Mark has a long day working further afield than usual, so on Wednesday I'll make macaroni cheese that can just be hated through when we get in.

Before I go, I'd just like to share that the Malaysian Chicken Curry Paste, Kari Ayam, is imported through their Hong Kong agent, Fok Hing trading limited. I don't know about you, but I'm laughing like a fourteen year old at that!

You'll find lots more meal plans, most of them much more structured than this, at At Home With Mrs M - why not share yours?

Dish of the Month - Pork Belly and Beans

I seldom join in Dish of the Month - the challenge run by Farmersgirl Kitchen where we share the Nigel Slater recipes we've cooked - because although I devour every word he writes and every moment he appears on television, I tend to use Nigel's  recipes for ideas and inspiration rather then as formulae to cook from. However I've seen so many positive reports of his Pork Belly and beans, the recipe for which appeared in the Guardian earlier this year and can be found on the Guardian website, that I really had to give it a go.

Unlike some food writers, Nigel Slater isn't didactic about his recipes being followed to the letter, preferring people to use them as starting points for their own dishes, which is as well because for what must be the first time in my life I found there wasn't a cannellini bean in the house. Neither a dried one or a tinned one to be found. But I did have a tin of flageolet beans, and on the quiet I prefer those, so they went in instead.

Then the Cavolo Nero -  well, the recipe was published in February, and if I'd made it then we'd have had a gardenful. But it's all eaten now, and the plants removed to make way for the summer shift (it's like hot desking in our garden). However there was half a Savoy cabbage in the fridge. Let's see now..... looking at the recipe .... 200g to serve 4 people.... halve that to serve 2..... 100g? 100g of Savoy cabbage? One of my favourite vegetables? How about half a cabbage instead? Yep, 350g, that looks about right.

So with the beans changed and the cabbage almost quadrupled, here is my finished dish.

And it was absolutely WONDERFUL. All the things we should NOT be looking for in the middle of May - warming, rich and comforting - that this year's miserable weather leaves us crying out for. I'll be making this a lot more in the future - and I'll carry on piling in the cabbage!

 

 

 This month, Dish of the Month is being hosted by A Little Bit of Heaven on a Plate -  very appropriate, considering how heavenly this dish was!

Bagels - a Random recipe

This month's  Random Recipe Challenge at Belleau Kitchen is challenge #28 - Bread.

Now I don't seem to have much luck with my random recipes - there were Delia's dry sausages, then there was "solid soup", and most recently the spectacular disaster of the beancurd satay.  So I was starting to think that I was fated to produce a stream of failures.

This month's challenge being bread, I was hoping my random selection (which I did just from among my specific bread books and booklets, or I'd still have been checking books halfway through the next challenge!) would be the crumpets from Paul Hollywood's "Bread" because I'd just bought some rings to cook them in, but instead my random number generator brought me to the new magazine - I think it is a one-off - from the BBC Good Food stable called, surprisingly enough, "Bread". And when opened randomly, it took me to a recipe for bagels, which the magazine had published from "The Pink Whisk Guide to Bread Making" by Ruth Clemens. I've never made bagels before - all I knew about making them is that you have to boil them.

Well, that turned out to be sort-of right, but they are actually just poached for a couple of minutes before baking. They rise quite spectacularly while being poached.

Here they are after proving - the splits in the dough around the circumference had me worried as they hadn't been there when I shaped them.

After just a minute on each side of poaching, the splits had filled out again

Then egg-washed, seeded and baked they looked very tempting indeed

I couldn't resist tasting one while it was still warm. They have a lovely light, even crumb, a soft yet slightly chewy texture and I declare them a 100% success.

And about time too!

The view from my window...

... today is this:

There is a lovely crab apple tree just outside our bedroom window, and I don't think it's ever flowered quite as profusely as this year. It was this that I thought of when I read that this week's challenge at CD Sundays is Ornate Blossom. And I knew just where I would find a suitable design - Joanna Sheen's "Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady" CD.

For a while now I've been in the mood to make what I think of as an "old fashioned" card, not a fashionable vintage or retro one, but one in a style that was popular when I first took up papercrafting, with lots of peel-off borders and corners, layering and ribbon, and I thought this design set would lend itself well to it. And of course being Joanna Sheen, there's a co-ordinating insert to finish the card off.

Meal Planning Monday - May 13th

I really must get around to using up the various packets and spice blends that I buy on impulse and never use! I'm going to devote a week to it, but it won't be this week, because this week is Fresh Week when Tefal would like us all to cook from scratch - and by pledging to do so we could win a Tefal Fresh Express and a Riverford veg box. Cooking from scratch is no hardship to us, that's the way we always do it, with the exception of staples like tins of tomatoes and chickpeas, but how typical that it should crop up on a week when I'd been thinking of clearing out all the convenience foods cluttering the cupboard. Oh well, it gives me time to make some proper plans to use them next week.

A little feedback on last week -  Wednesday's cottage pie didn't end up with a swede crust because the swede, which looked perfectly sound from the outside, was completely black inside, so it was back to good old spuds instead. The star of the plan was Friday's meal  which would have been a perfect summer meal, if we'd just had some summer to go with it!

Right, cracking on with this week's plan.

Monday we have some gammon left over from last night so I'm going to make it into a sauce for pasta, with mushrooms and tomatoes.
Tuesday the onions in the supermarket last week were really grotty, except for those in huge sacks, so I bought  a sack. They work out a lot cheaper than loose ones - about a third of the price - but of course only if they are all used, so tonight I'm going to make an onion tart
Wednesday I keep threatening to make Nigel Slater's Pork with Cannelini beans but it always gets bumped. This week I reckon it's actually going to get made!
Thursday Baked potatoes with Spicy Dhal - recipe in the June BBC Good Food magazine
Friday Venison steaks with celeriac mash and whatever veg we have left
Saturday I'll be out all day and looking forward to whatever Mark cooks for dinner
Sunday Roast goose breast  - I'll probably make some apple sauce to go with it but haven't decided on the other accompaniments yet.

 What are YOU eating this week? Why not pop over to At Home With Mrs M and share a link to your plans?

A rainbow of flowers

This week's code word at ATCAS is Rainbow

So here is my card - a rainbow of die-cut flowers. I don't think it needs any further explanation!