Aged to Perfection

I was really pleased that this week's challenge on CD Sundays is "Aged to Perfection"  because the new CD-ROM I bought this week, The Wine Buffs from Katy Sue Designs, includes that exact sentiment, so it gave me the perfect excuse to play with my new toy.

There are some great shaped cards on the CD, and I decided to take a short cut by printing a wine bottle shaped card and then turning the card over to print the backing paper. Unfortunately I put the card back in the printer the wrong way round and ended up with the inside of the card lined with upside-down wine glasses. I rescued it, though, by printing a new backing sheet and bonding it to the card with spray adhesive (making SURE it was the right way up!) before cutting it out.

There are lots of labels to choose from for the front and back of the bottle - I went with two that tied in well with the challenge, and then added a blank label to the inside to write on. A couple of "cork" sentiments  added with 3d foam were all it needed to complete a very unusual card.

Meal Planning Monday - May 27th

Not exactly a plan for the week this week, just for three days. But first, a look back at last week's plan. Well, it DID seem like a good idea at the time - but it made us realise why we don't use packet and pre-prepared ingredients. After three days of food that tasted of nothing but salt, we abandoned the idea, and it was a relief to get back to "proper" food again!

This will be my last meal plan for a while, as the next few weeks sees us doing a lot of travelling and very little eating at home. And when we ARE at home, we'll be trying to use up odds and ends in the fridge so we can leave it empty.

But first, three days of normal routine, and the meals will be

Monday steak, bought from the farmer's market, with new potatoes sautéed with garlic and thyme, and an endive salad.

Tuesday spag bol with the rest of the endive

Wednesday Cauliflower, butternut and chickpea curry with rice

Despite not being a whole week, I'm linking up to Meal Planning Monday at At Home With Mrs M

A recipe for humour

I bet you thought this was going to be a food post, didn't you? But actually this week's Less is More challenge is a recipe - and the recipe is Humour, so that's the theme of today's card.

It's very hard to create a CAS card that is humorous, and I didn't have anything suitable among my stamps, but I've just got a new CD-ROM called "The Wine Buffs" and some of the cartoon toppers on it have a simplicity about them, with plenty white space, so I've incorporated one of them into my card, along with a  "wine cork effect" sentiment from the same CD.

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!