More shopping

Back now, from a trip to Cambodia (food yum) and Thailand (food also good, but not quite as yum as Cambodia) with a brief stop in Cairo (coffee good, food an interesting combination of sweet and savoury) and back to the weekly shop and attempts to (mostly) feed myself without either a) getting fatter, or b) creating things that even I don't want to eat. That, and continuing with the attempt to eat more fruit and veg.

And so to shopping. Two people, two shopping trolleys, two weekly shops. And for once, just once, I win! Hwsgo's veg to other food ratio was appalling - around 1:1 (under hot debate); mine, on the other hand, was a virtuous 16:6 (and that's only because the new potatoes and peppercorns both count as non-veg). That's 2.6 to 1.

Now I need to cook it. It's Saturday, and being a good slobby Saturday (give or take an hour's happy walk around the park), it's roast chicken and vegetables night. I've also been taking stock in my food cupboards - it's still January, and I have several things in the cupboards that didn't get eaten last year that I'm planning to eat up soon so they don't take up any more cupboard or (more importantly) head space when I'm working out what to eat. Some things (pickles, japanese ginger) will go into my lunchbox. Others will be part of specific meals. The jar of lentils will become Simon's lentilles aux petites salles and one of Jane Grigson's stock lentil dishes. The linseed will find its way into anything I can safely hide it in (like veg chilli): I've always seen it more as medicament than food anyway. The Mister Mash is self-explanatory, maybe used for a very lazy day. And the two boxes of specialised stuffing (cranberry and orange etc) will be mixed up with veg and stuffed into some baked peppers. The Thai basil leaves will end up in something suitably thai curried; the truffles, saffron etc will just stay in as stock cupboard items. The bocadelia sandwich paste that my parents brought back from Spain (on a small mixup between bocadillos, e.g. sandwiches, and boquerones, the fat little anchovies) will go into sandwiches and baked potatoes. And at that point, my cupboards will hopefully be optimised. Well almost. I'm not sure what to do with a large pot of Horlicks (although I should sleep well if I drink it), and that just leaves the large bag of chilli flakes and 5 different types of sugar (tea and coffee-drinkers keep leaving sugar in my cupboards). I'm sure I'll think of something.

Meanwhile, a small note to self. If, as today, I use the Jane Grigson recipe for Hummus, I need to remember to halve all the quantities except the chickpeas. I think she quotes the chickpeas at dry weight, rather than canned weight - if you try the recipe as set with canned peas, you end up with a very garlicky and unfortunately quite runny (til your partner throws in a bag of walnuts) mix. Also if you put the parsley into the mixer, then don't be surprised if the mix comes out green and looking suspiciously like pesto. Tasted okay though.

Addendum. Hwsgo has counted up his trolley items (which I also photographed, but will keep hidden to protect the not-so-innocent) and claims a 1:1 ratio. Based on some out-of-shot onions and not counting the wine. Hmmmm.

Breakfast fruit woes - and then there was juice!

So this morning I crawled out of bed (literally - I've got a bulged disc in my back) and wandered off for breakfast as normal. Cereal - check. Milk - check. Two non-5aday-items - check. Drat. On a 2-to-1 basis, that means that breakfast now involves 4 pieces of fruit or veg. And, having eaten an apple and an orange already this morning and contemplated with horror the thought of another pair of fruits before the fruit juice saved me, that's a rethink about breakfast.

So. Jam counts. Soft fruit counts. And -halleluja- so do fruit juice, smoothies and the red bits in red berry cereal. Which gives a small (and somewhat fruit-laden) set of breakfast options...

• Cereal/oats, milk (2nf) with fruit (raspberries, blackberries, frozen soft fruit mix, red berries etc), juice/smoothie and 2-fruit mid-morning snack (apple, orange, carrot etc).
• Bacon, toast (2nf) with 'shrooms, tomatoes, juice, 1-fruit snack.
• Toast/croissant (1nf) with jam/banana, juice.
• Kipper (1nf) with tomatoes, red pepper.
• Yoghurt (1nf) with fruit (berries, pear).

I'm still debating whether Pain Au Chocolat is a single non-fruit item or two of them. I think I'll declare it as one, before this all gets way way too confusing. On the plus side, a 2nf day will get me to 5 a day by lunchtime; on the minus side, I need to go and buy an awful lot more fruit.

Yeehah! I've just been to the 5-a-day veg portions list. Chickpeas count and so does onion. Hello, hummus...

I hate fruit so much, I've gone off chocolate

This is set to be a difficult month. And one low on chocolate. Twice now (already) I've foresworn a bar of chocolate because I couldn't face finding, buying and eating fruit to go with it. It's not that I dislike fruit per se - I like fruit when I'm eating it - it's more, like exercise, I dislike the thought of it until I get there. And so my chocolate consumption is curtailed (thanks, Hwsgo)... now all I need to do is work out a similar scheme for exercise. Maybe 1 exercise session for every 2 times I use the car?

2-to-1 month...

Yesterday, Hwsgo and I went shopping together. For food for each of our respective houses. Hwsgo helpfully put my shopping in front of his at the checkout. And it was more than a little embarassing. Hswgo: mainly fruit and veg, passata, some alcohol (champagne, I think). Me: bread, potatoes, tinned soup (tomato and scotch broth), baked beans. No veg. No fruit. Now admittedly that was because I wasn't sure whether I'd be visiting the fruit and veg market at the weekend, but it still didn't look good, and Hwsgo was at pains to point out a) my terrible diet and b) the ingredients in the tins (baked beans: sugar and salt; passata: mostly tomatoes).

So we tried again today. Spent most of my shopping time in the fruit and veg section, as advised (by Hwsgo). And when we got to the checkout with that lot and counted things up, we found that it had a 2:1 ratio of healthy things to eat (like green stuff) versus less-healthy ones (like bread). And since I don't have a theme yet for this month (still being on the Tesco-less diet), it's become 2 to 1 month. Every time I buy a foodstuff that isn't on the 5-a-day list, I have to buy 2 that *are* on the list. Oh, and I have to eat in that ratio too. Buying: not so difficult. Eating: almost bloody impossible, but I will at least try. It's only a month. Only a month...

But what *is* on the list? Hwsgo assures me that potatoes aren't, and apples definitely are, but what else? Ah - looking at the NHS site, pretty much anything fruit-ish or veg-ish that's not a potato. Passata counts (annoyingly), as does veg in soup. And if I eat 2 pieces of fruit a day, that should keep my ratios up okay. It's already started though: I went out to pick up some bread, which meant coming home with 2 french sticks and 4 assorted greenish things (rocket, mango, sprouts - yum-, and something green that I've already wiped from my memory). It amused Hwsgo though...

Simon: Parsley Soup, P146

I hate it when Hwsgo's right. Well not really - he is rather good at this cooking lark and I do listen to him, I'd just never admit that to anyone. Especially not to whoever's dropping in on my blogs... anyway, frying off some fennel then adding and frying off some chicken is a damned good way to reheat said chicken, and yes, admittedly, much much better than some of the dodgier things involving white sauces that I've done in the past.

And so from horror to disappointment. I've made soup, but it's not one of my best ones. I had almost all the ingredients for Simon's parsley soup, so when I saw bundles of Parsley in the market I leapt on them in anticipation of another special tasting treat. But no: I've made leek and potato soup with some parsley in it. Noticably. I may be being unfair to the recipe - I didn't quite follow it exactly in a not-quite-having-the-right-ingredients sort of way, i.e. I could only find one of the two leeks that I thought I had in the fridge, didn't have the energy to completely separate parsley stalks from leaves etc etc. (and I didn't envisage pulling parsley stalks out of my hand blender when I first started this quest). Simon recipes are usually robust to a little ingredient variation - maybe this one wasn't. It's not a horrible soup, it's just not spectacular.
But it did at least bring back another of those fun moments in cooking: the one where a lumpy bunch of vegetables suddenly turns into a big smooth soup. Maybe it'll be better in the morning.

Simon: Milk Chocolate Malt Ice-Cream (p45)

Hoorah for the credit crunch: rabbit is back in the shops again. Which is good, but we got ours from the game dealer at Bentley (always a bit suspicious seeing fridges stocked with duck a couple of miles from a wildfowl sanctuary, but hey at least it's had some exercise...). Hwsgo cooked the rabbit (whole, unjointed) as a French casserole with lots of tomatoes and veg inside: a good thing to come home to after losing the ability to move my arms much in the gym. Wine: Katnook Estate cabernet; not best matched to the Wabbit, but definitely best matched to our relaxed-out mood for the evening.

Oh, the Simon? Chocolate malt ice-cream. Not difficult really: I dashed home at lunchtime to make it (having collapsed into bed early last night), which mostly consisted of whisking stuff carefully and having patience whilst things melted into each other (and taking an educated guess at what "thickens slightly" means). It's had 7 hours of freezing now, but was at a happy cold-fudge state when we got home two hours ago, so it is possible to both make and eat it on the same day. Which judging by Hwsgo's earlier reaction to tasting it is really quite likely to happen.

The *really* important thing that I forgot to mention earlier was that I didn't use an ice-cream maker. I didn't even need to whisk the ice-cream mixture midway through: there were no ice crystals at all in it, and it just froze directly into the right state. Homemade ice-cream without the faff? Oh yes...

Outed

I cooked for my parents this weekend. Without breaking into a cold sweat. And I've outed myself: they now think that I can cook (eeek!). I did the Simon roast chicken (which I can now do with my eyes shut after a couple of glasses of red - well, I haven't tried that experiement yet but I'm willing to give it a go) with roasted onions, potatoes, garlic, red peppers and a thin gravy, followed by the Magimix apple crumble (translation: shove all the ingedients into the Magimax, hit the button, pour into dish, shove into oven, take out, gloat) with the custard recipe from my well-thumbed copy of the Good Housekeeping cookbook. And apart from cooking the custard a little too quickly (not watching it enough whilst chatting to my mother; possibly also affected by said couple of glasses of red by then), it seemed to be perfectly edible.

Okay, a little background here. My little sister is, as I've probably said before, a serious chef. A *really* serious chef. Gold medals at 18, world competition title by her mid-twenties, own gourmet restaurant before 30 - that sort of serious chef. And I by comparison - well, let's just say that I grew up burning things and making almost-inedible sauces with lumps in that looked like new life forms. My parents have been visiting a lot lately (few things to sort out down on the old farm etc), and every time they come I offer to cook and they do anything - anything, up to and including going out for a kebab - to avoid this. But yesterday they were so tired that I got away with it - and had the lovely warm feeling of producing a whole meal from start to finish including dessert in just over an hour. And having my mother go back for seconds (something she very rarely does) of *my* cooking. I'd consider being shocked if I wasn't too tired.

But a few details before I go. The crumble was great: a real light French apple crumble. This was partly because it was a French recipe book, but also because the apples were right. I had a bag of little red apples (I think from Tescos) that were floury and nasty to eat: I thought they'd cook well, and they did. I'll look for them again, next time I want to do a baked apple dish. It *is* possible to hurt yourself badly with a potato peeler (I did). Roasting peppers and garlic works really well if you put them into the roasting dish 30 minutes before the chicken's due out of the oven. And you can't hurry a good custard: if you set the temperature too high and whisk it too much, it will curdle (will taste fine but look horrid). Be gentle, be patient and it will, as most things treated gently in the kitchen, come right.