You know when you wake up in the middle of the night, feeling hungry for a light snack and you don’t have much in?
I had some ready salted pringle (saddle shaped crispy things) an old bit of cheese and a few baby beetroots left in a jar. So I sliced a few bits of cheese, then one of the baby beers into bits and stuck them on the pringle. Voilà baby beetroot and cheese on horseback!
I realised though that the beetroot stained my fingers red so switched them so the cheese was on top. Strange but tasty…
I’m still trying to keep my gratitudes diary going. I’m on day 205. The idea is you look for three small things to be grateful for. Then you write them down and it turns your thoughts to a more positive way of thinking. I’ve found it hasn’t solved my anxiety or feeling down, but I definitely think it’s helped my mood. I might be in pain, but it helps me take my mind off it.
Today’s three gratitudes? Going out for a little walk in open sandals for the first time since splitting my toenail. I went with my hubby so I felt safe. Secondly, listening to ‘the infinite monkey cage’ on BBC radio 4, thirdly having a pan au raisin and a cup of tea after shopping….
Last night my hubby went out in the garden to put some bird food out and almost tripped over a hedgehog! He said it seemed to be asleep at the base of the cherry tree. He went out again and took a bowl of cat food. This morning the bowl had been tipped over and the food was gone.
When we see hedgehogs I think of spring. It’s still pretty cold and we may get some snow, but they are coming out of hibernation.
DON’T FEED…. milk and bread, hedgehogs are lactose intolerant. They also don’t get enough calories from so called ‘hedgehog’ food. Apparently it’s just meal worms and pet food manufacturers are just trying to make money. You can feed them cat food. Ours seem to like fresh wet or dry cat food. Also nake gaps in wooden fences at their bases to allow hedgehogs through into your garden. .
We had finished tea and my hubby took the plates in to the kitchen to be washed up. He shouted through to the living room ‘are you cooking something else?’… ‘No’, ‘well you’ve left one of the gas rings on?’ I didn’t realise I had and I walked into the kitchen just as he lifted the Wok lid up off one of the gas stoves burners at the back. He’d only just turned the burner off and as he lifted the Wok lid by its plastic handle he let out an involuntary ‘ow!’ Turns out when I poured some pasta into the big pan of mixed veg and salmon I was cooking on the front hob, I must have dropped the wok lid over the back hob without switching it off. Because the gas was on low, and the lid and handle are heat resistant nothing caught fire, it just got very hot. If the pan lid had any food clinging to it, it would have caught fire, and because I can’t smell things properly we could have had a real problem. Thank goodness hubby spotted my mistake!
I was busy yesterday doing some paperwork and by the time I remembered it was really too late to cook. So for tea today I made pancakes. They are a traditional food for Shrove Tuesday. You can look up the meaning of Shrove Tuesday on the Internet, and part of the tradition is eating pancakes.
How do you make them? (this is how I do it, it’s very vague! 😂). Put a couple of large cups of flour in a bowl. Mix in two or three eggs to make a thick paste then add milk to thin the paste down to a thickish batter (I prefer that as too much makes it runny) not too thick though. Maybe a 1/3 of a pint of milk? Beat it up with a fork till its a smooth batter. I think you are supposed to let it rest, I don’t!
Memories flood back as I remember my mom cooking them. She used to use half milk and half water I think? As winter was colder then it often snowed, she would use snow water as she said it was fresher than tap water.
Now your batter has rested…. Heat a frying pan on a high heat and add oil so its hot. Make sure the pan is hot but not smoking. Pour some batter into the pan and tip it so it spreads out across the base. You can see the batter drying out on the top as the bottom of the pancake cooks. Flip it with a spatula. It might break up but that’s better than trying to toss it and it landing on the floor! When it’s cooked lift or slide it onto a plate.
This recipe will make six to eight large pancakes. Try and make them equal sizes and as you put them on a plate sprinkle sugar or powdered sweetner plus lemon juice on them and fold them in half or roll them up. The last one always ends up too small or too thick depending on how much the batter is shared out.
The results are like thin, eggy, floury omelettes! Delicious. You can basically use different toppings, maybe stewed apple or banana slices or ice cream? We enjoyed them a lot. Good for a cold day.
I just made a vegetarian stew for dinner. I could have made Staffordshire Lobby which is a beef based stew, lobbing all sorts of things into the pot. But I used a meat substitute, Quorn pieces.
Basically I put two small chopped potatoes, two small sliced carrots and half a sweet potato, peeled and sliced, into a pan and covered them in boiling water. I let them simmer for a few minutes, then chopped up a small red onion, chopped some slices off a cabbage (about a sixth of it) and two sticks of celery sliced up. Then I added half a pack of Quorn and a couple of teaspoons of Lazy Garlic. I let everything simmer for about twenty minutes. Then I added a couple of vegetable stock cubes. Let it cook for a few more minutes before serving with a hunk of brown bread and vegetable spread. I didn’t add salt, but if you do add it on top of the stew when you serve, that way it sits on the food and doesn’t get absorbed into it. That means you don’t eat too much salt. You can also add pepper at the end.
Red curry, rice and noodles from Sawadee Thai taste in Hill Street in Stoke, Stoke-on-Trent.
We didn’t have time for a Valentines meal yesterday so I got this as a takeaway for us with a starter of Thai fishcakes. It was very tasty.
Look up the restaurant in the phone book if you want to book a table or a take out meal. It’s good food and not too expensive even in these costly days.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was grapes. Imagining a bunch of grapes and trying to draw them is hard! But I tried x it’s a pencil crayon drawing and so I added the pencil as part of the sketch.
Afternoon tea, a couple of cheese ant tomato Staffordshire oatcakes with a dab of brown sauce and a hot chocolate with squirty cream, marshmallows and a tiny jammy dodger biscuit with a ram heart at its centre, presumably for valentines day? (which I have hubby). We had this at Westport Lake visitors centre. We sat on the balcony in a slightly chilly breeze, overlooking the lake. The geese were calling, I think they wanted bird food. But we couldn’t feed them because there us bird flu in the area and feeding a flock can help spread it. The latest news is that it has jumped species to small mammals which is very worrying. Anyway, sorry to put a downer on this post!
A quick curry using vegetables and a small amount of Quorn pieces and prawns.
Ingredients.
One jar of curry sauce, chose your favourite. I got tikka massala. One onion, one sweet pepper, a handful of button mushrooms, a big handful of washed baby spinach, about a quarter of a bag of Quorn pieces and a small packet of kingprawns (or small prawns). A packet of microwaveable rice.
Method.
Defrost the Quorn in the microwave if you have one. Peel and chop the onion. Put in a frying pan in oil and start to fry. Roughly chop the pepper and add to the pan. Chop the mushrooms and add. Put the Quorn and prawns in. Finally stir in the baby spinach, add the packet of rice and pour the curry sauce over the mix. Cook on a low heat with a lid on for about twenty minutes. Make sure the curry is thoroughly cooked before serving.
Mallaband-Brown 