Miso soup and a duck teriyaki bento box for my tea tonight from the Miso Japanese restaurant in Stoke on Trent! It was a treat as I’ve had some slightly better news about my health. Not a clean bill of health, but slightly less worrying. The food was delicious and plentiful.
I’ve still got to have some more tests, but with luck there will be a reasonable treatment and nothing to drastic. Maybe I’ll treat myself again if things work out.
Anyway after a few weeks of worrying I feel a little less stressed, I have lots of other things to deal with so things were really getting me down. Crying with relief seems to be the thing to do. X
Went with a friend to our local Thai restaurant tonight. I had some starters of spare ribs, chicken wings and battered king prawns then a papaya salad and some sticky rice.
We’d been out to my exhibition at Spode and for the first time in months I felt like visiting somewhere different. I’ve not been out for a long time but there was a friendly welcome as usual. It was good to have a laugh and relax.
I go to a (nameless) supermarket that used to give discounts if you purchased shopping from them and used their discount card. I would build up a bit of money over the year and use it towards my Christmas shopping.
Recently they changed the system. Now if you use your card you should get a discount off some products and ‘everyday essentials’ (like milk and broccoli???). I’ve asked a few times how I find these products, apparently they have an extra blue sticker on them. So now I have to spend time looking round the shop for stickers? It also means that I have to choose what the shop wants me to buy to save money. Today I saved a whole 20pence on a tuna sandwich. That’s 20 pence off £26.40. When I asked the manager she said customers nationwide had asked for it? I wasn’t consulted.
Other information is that as theirs is a small shop they have less discounted products. If I go to a bigger store I will find more! Guess what, they are further away and consequently cost more to get to! Wow, wonderful (not).
I like cooking curries from scratch. I’m no expert though so I just make it up as I go along. I like vegetable curry so I’ll use butternut squash as a basic ingredient.
You have to take off the skin and deseed the squash. Then chop it into cubes. Meanwhile I put some oil in a pan and gently fry my spices. Mild curry powder, some crushed garlic, a bit of chilli (dried or powdered) and a bit of cinnamon or garam masala to give the curry a richer flavour. Sometimes I add this later so the taste is more noticeable.
Then I sautée (add a small amount of water to the oil) some chopped onion in the curry mix together with the squash. This takes a while to soften so I cook it on a low heat with a lid on.
As it softens I add other vegetables, like pak choi, mushrooms, beans, a bit of broccoli or some cabbage. I might add some potato chopped up. I keep an eye on the water content so it doesn’t dry out. I will also add tinned tomatos or tomato paste. As I say I just add in what is available at the time.
Before it’s fully cooked I usually do a small amount of boiled rice (brown or white) and serve the curry and rice with plain yoghurt.
I hope this makes sense, it’s not a recipe as such.
I always season with salt at the end, I don’t cook with it, as it gets absorbed into the food, and you can’t taste it as much but it can raise your blood pressure.
I went out in the car today. Only to a post office to send some documents off and get some shopping. The postmaster asked me what was in the envelope that was addressed to “the bereavement team”. When I said a copy of hubbys will and death certificate he was instantly sympathetic.
As a sign we might be living in the matrix, while I had been waiting in the queue I had spotted a box of cuppa soups that I like. After I’d handed over my letter I turned round to pick up the soup… Where was it. I stood for two or three minutes but could no longer see it. A glitch in the matrix? All the other boxes of soup I had spied were also missing. Perhaps I had dreamt it.
Then I went into a shop and got a cornish pasty and a chocolate brownie for tea. I noticed that the woman who served me had a runny nose and touched it with her hand before picking up the brownie. I got home washed my hands, microwaved the pasty, washed my hands, microwaved the brownie, washed my hands. I think I might have been overcautious but I’d rather be safe than sorry.
Snack or meal? Trying to remember I need to eat vegetables as well as carbs, stuff I bought for my hubby has sat in the fridge for a couple of weeks. I didn’t want to cook. Easier to just buy cheap takeaway food. But that’s not good.
My portion sizes are still for two. So I will have to cook, then freeze or chill half of it. I guess it’s less energy to cook once and maybe microwave half of it later? Trouble is food still takes the same time to cook even if I halve the amounts… Life is a pain, but I must keep goingn
Fish fingers and layered pasta salad? 40 odd years of eating together makes choosing portion sizes odd. Last night the cats were surprised at getting a lot of chicken breast. I can’t remember what I had for lunch… Oh yes, hot cross buns that were going stale. That’s the other thing, lots of food are in “serves two” packets. My freezer is too small to store much.
I will see what happens when hubby comes home? But I think things will be different. Life is a pain sometimes.
I know I should eat less meat and more vegetables. I realise that the amount of CO2 and Methane created by meat farming is a major contributor to global warming.
The problem is I was bought up eating meat. Some of it was poor cuts of it, my parents could not afford much, so we had some very strange things on our plates. I’m not going to go into detail, suffice to say most of them had odd shaped bones.
I have tried to eat vegetarian food. But it’s hard to find a supplier of good imitation meat that isn’t too expensive. Suddenly vegetarian foods have become fashionable and therefore costly. With the cost of living crisis even tins of baked beans from some suppliers have trebled or quadrupled in price. So I guess the way to go is to cook from scratch.
Thinking about the prompt, I will try and eat less meat.
We were introduced to more exotic food at quite an early age. My mother and father would take us out for meals to local restaurants. Mostly Chinese, but sometimes Indian eateries. It was there we learnt to use chopsticks. We ate tandoori or baltis. We never really ate anything too hot or spicy though. My favourite Indian meal had orange flavours in it, very mild, a house speciality of a local restaurant.
Then a few years ago I discovered a Japanese Restaurant near us. I had not really understood the difference between Chinese and Japanese food so it was a revelation. I soon got other family and friends to try the cuisine there. We sometimes have birthday meals there. I don’t think I have really explored world foods, but at least we have tried some.
Mallaband-Brown 