A mystery ingredient

A few days ago I was lucky enough to win a box of Greek foods from a competition on Facebook. Here's what arrived

As you can see, there are some individual pots of honey, a miniature of Ouzo, some preserved fruit, a tin of Nescafé (!) and two mystery jars, with all the nooks and crannies in between crammed with sweets and chocolates.

But what was in the mystery jars? There was no English writing on them and the only Greek characters I know are from my science degree days, and since I wasn't planning to measure the wavelength of the light they reflected or their refractive index, I was stuck.

First I tasted the lighter one - definitely a sesame taste, but not strong enough for it to be pure tahini. Then the darker one - deep, rich  and savoury with a strong vinegar note. Perhaps a chutney or barbecue sauce?

Then my daughter had a bright idea. We used the extended character set on the computer to type the words from the label, then copied and pasted them into Google and used the translate function. The front label of the lighter jar was damaged, so we worked on the ingredients. The top ingredient turned out to be chickpeas, with olive oil, sesame and lemon  juice making up most of the rest - it's a jar of hummus.

Next  the darker jar. We managed to translate the name of this - it is Pomegranate Sauce. But I have no idea  how it is meant to be used. I've tried searching for it online, but almost all the results I have found are either for a sweet sauce, or for a sauce made by incorporating fresh pomegranate while cooking. I've found the exact product here which lists the ingredients as pomegranate syrup, petimezi, red wine, onions, cedar seeds and extra virgin olive oil and suggests it can  be used to marinate game and poultry.  Has anyone ever tried it?  Can anyone suggest any recipes? And does anyone know what petimezi is?

And finally, the Nescafé. My only question about that is - what's it doing there????

CASology #5 - Pond

This week's cue card at CASology  is "Pond"

Oh dear, everything I could find in my craft box with a pond theme really didn't lend itself to the Clean and Simple style!

Then I rememberd an old Linda Luckin stamp that was tucked away in my "semi retired favourites" box, the place where old friends live until I decide to revisit them. So out it came. I brayered a background in shades of blue then stamped the image over it in Memento ink and cut it out.

All the card needed to was a little border in the same shades of blue, inverted to stop it from looking too bottom-heavy.

The snag is, now I've started looking through my box of old stamps, I want to bring them ALL back into use...... and I just don't have the space!

The best laid plans.....

... o' mice and men gang aft agley.

So said Robert Burns, and I'm sure all crafters have those days when their plans go totally agley. Mine certainly did this week! I saw that this week's  challenge at The Crafty Pad is "Show some metal"  and knew immediately what I wanted to make. I have a scrap of bright green Suze Weinberg's Art Metal left over from a stamping project many years ago, and I thought I'd emboss it in the Cuttlebug and then do something dark, inky, moody and arty with it - something with a very gothic appearance.

But after running it through the bug with the divine swirls folder, did it look at all dark and moody? No, it sat there on the table, looked up at me and yelled "Funky Christmas". So I had to go back to the drawing board, rummage through my Christmassy bits and find something funky enough to keep it happy.

The card I ended up with is far simpler than the one I had planned. but far more suited to this stubborn little piece of metal. Sometimes we just have to listen hard to what our stash tries to tell us!

River Cottage Rocks #5 - Summertime

What does summertime cooking mean to you? To me, it means eating the lovely fresh produce my husband grows in the garden, and that sometimes means coping with gluts. And at the moment we are lucky enough to have a mini-glut of blueberries. Now I know there is no such thing as "too many blueberries" but it is lovely to have enough to use in cooking, so yesterday I decided to make some blueberry muffins.

I used the River Cottage recipe for Lemon Curd Marble Muffins on page 388 of River Cottage Everyday, using the Fruity Muffins variation at the bottom of the page. As we have so many blueberries, I doubled up on the blueberries, and because I am diabetic I replaced the sugar with Truvia. Unfortunately Truvia doesn't have the same bulk as the equivalent sweetness of sugar, and this combined with the extra liquid from the doubled amount of blueberries meant the muffins were a little sticky at the bottom. I think next time I will use about a third less milk, which would make them just right. I'll also use the mixture to make 8-10 muffins instead of 12 because I'm greedy and like big muffins!

I am submitting this post to the River Cottage Rocks challenge #5 - Summertime on Jo's Kitchen

Less is More week 79 - Blue and Green

I'm back - I have avery busy August ahead so I'm spending today trying to squeeze in a little blogging and crafting.

This week it's a colour  challenge at Less is More and the chosen colours are Blue and Green  which I always think look lovely and calming together.

Since I wasn't around to join in last week, I have sort-of been inspired by last week's sketch challenge too!

The floral paper I used was from a huge box of gorgeous papers that I won last year,  the blue and green card are from Stampin' Up, the green ink is Adirondack Lettuce and the blue is an ancient Marvy pad I've had since I started stamping about 15 years ago and still seems to be  as juicy as the day I bought it. The allium stamp is one of my favourites from Penny Black and the word stamp is one from my box of random unmounted stamps.

Random Recipes - Chicken with lime and spices

This is the first time I've joined in a "proper cooking" challenge at Belleau Kitchen so I was very pleased to see it is called "Lets start at the very beginning". The task is simple - pick one of your recipe books at random, open it at a random page and cook what you see.

However when the challenge was announced, I was away from home (hence the blog silence over the last ten days or so) visiting my Mum, so I thought that rather than introducing the inevitable bias when "randomly" choosing a book of my own, with my hand tending to hover over a favourite, I would pick one from her much more limited collection - furtively snapped on my phone while she was lost in yet another monologue of wartime reminiscences.....

I just closed my eyes and grabbed, and picked out this tiny book, Lebanese Cooking, that looks as if it probably came from the bargain shelf of the local garden centre (one of her favourite sources of cook books in her more mobile days)

The recipe it fell open at was Chicken with Lime and Spices - chicken marinated in lime juice, mint, ground coriander, ground cumin and turmeric and then fried, and served with hummus and pita bread.

Since it was such a simple dish, I also used their recipes for the hummus and pita. I liked the hummus - I usually use tinned chickpeas and am always impressed by how cheap it is compared to the bought stuff (which incidentally always gives me an odd headache right in the top of my head - does anyone know what mystery ingredient causes it?), but this recipe uses dried ones which work out even cheaper. If ever I need an extra income, remind me to set up a hummus factory. It was also very lemony and included no sesame seeds or tahini, which made for a more refreshing version than my usual one,  and I will use this recipe again when cooking for friends with sesame allergy.

The pita breads were much less successful, going dry and crispy before they were cooked through. I think I will go back to my usual trick of making a naan dough and shaping it into pita sized breads! The recipe said the chicken and hummus were to be rolled inside the pita, but since that was impossible I dished them up side by side. We had lots of green salad with it, and some cucumber sticks to dunk in the hummus. The only change I made to the recipe was that the instructions told you to add the marinade to the chicken dish immediately before serving. Eeek! Add liquid raw chicken has been sitting in for several hours to a fully cooked dish? No thank you..... I added it as soon as the chicken was browned and let it caramelise on the outside of the pieces instead. I checked the publication date of the book and it was 1996 - surely after the first salmonella scare that taught us that everything to do with poultry had to be fully cooked?

Verdict? The chicken was lovely but not the kind of thing I would normally  have used a recipe for. In fact, looking through the book, I would say the same about most of the recipes. Although if the aubergines being grown by my husband come to anything, I will be trying the tasty looking Eggplant and Tahini Dip.

There's nothing in the fridge!

Yesterday morning I realised I'd planned nothing for dinner and wouldn't have time to go shopping. I looked in the fridge for inspiration and found: 

• a chicken carcass
• a lump of dried up Parmesan
• a similar sized lump of Cheddar
• half a butternut squash
• two cold boiled new potatoes
• two cooked baby beetroot
• one tomato
• a dozen green beans, the first from the garden this year
• half of a hazelnut salami
• half a bag of carrots
• a tiny wedge of  cabbage
• a head of Chinese leaves
• a scraping of red pesto in the bottom of a jar
• half a head of chicory

There were also the "usual culprits" - milk, eggs, butter (well, butter-like-substance) and a collection of half used jars of this and that. Oh, and a lettuce from the veg box of two  weeks  ago, unused because the salad came on all at once in the garden. I can't bear to throw things away but I have reached a point where I really, really dare not look inside the bag holding that lettuce......

First of all I stripped the meat from the chicken carcass and set it aside, then put the bones to boil up in lots of water with a carrot, an onion, some herbs from the garden and some peppercorns, cloves and mace to make stock. Since I work at home I could leave that to simmer for a couple of hours and get on with other things. Once it was cooked and all the bits sieved out, I chilled it and removed the fat.

Next I raided the cupboards  and found a little bit of hazelnut oil which I combined with olive oil and made some ultra-easy mayonnaise. To do this, I use the small goblet on my food processor and break in the whole egg, white included, and add seasoning and a scant teaspoonful of white wine vinegar. I  whizz it up to blend it and then with the motor still running, drizzle in the oil slowly until the mayonnaise reaches the right texture. It never fails to puzzle me how the more liquid you add, the thicker it gets! Nut oils are pretty strong  so you need to mix  them with at least as much of a light olive oil, rapeseed oil or corn oil, or they overpower everything in the salad.

I made the mayo very thick this time as at that point I was thinking of using it as a dip.

Next I finely diced a carrot and cooked it, adding a handful of frozen peas at the end. Actually, I bunged the green beans into the same pan to save time and fished them out afterwards, but you wouldn't do that would you? Then I  cooled them all under running water and mixed the carrots and peas with the finely diced beetroot and potato and some of the mayonnaise to make a rough version of that 1960s favourite, Russian Salad (do you remember when they used to sell that in tins? And do you remember how horrible it was?)

Well, this tastes a LOT better than it looks. Frankly, it looks rather like something you'd see on the pavement outside the kebab shop on a Saturday morning.... but it tastes a lot better. (DISCLAIMER - I have never tasted anything from off the pavement outside the kebab shop)

I cut the tomato into wedges and mixed it with the green beans I'd cooked earlier (are you keeping up at the back?) and a few Kalamata olives.

Finally I diced the butternut squash and made a risotto using the chicken stock I'd made earlier and some fresh sage. 

                                   

We had all that lot (well, there IS still some left, we're not quite that greedy) with some salad from the garden and a few slices of salami.

So now I either need to go shopping or create tonight's dinner from some scraps of cold chicken, Cheddar cheese, a bit more salami, the rest of the mayo,  red pesto,  Chinese leaves, cabbage and  chicory. Oh, and that antique lettuce. 

Where did I put my car keys?