Days 14 and 15: batches and patches

Wednesday (day 14) was another busy one, and apart from catching up on the blog, doing some house-work stuff and driving over to see Marilyn to get my instructions for my next stint helping out, I wanted to do some thinking about my meals for the remaining two weeks of this challenge.

On rising I had a good mooch about in the freezer. Firstly I decided on eating a mid-week curry, so pulled out portions of the cauliflower curry, dahl, sabzi and naan that I made last week and set them aside to defrost.  I also still have a portion of sardine fish cakes (for Thursday), two more portions of each curry dish, four of my stew and dumplings plus two pizza bases.  There is also another portion of veggie soup in the freezer and two more in the fridge - I'd got these out for Wednesday and Thursday but had been too busy on Wednesday for lunch and forgot that on Thursday I'd be at the quilting group.

I think I need to make at least two more large pots of soup, two or three more loaves of bread, several portions of Shepherds pie (maybe) and perhaps a nut roast or a bean chilli.  If possible I'd like to make some cake or dessert, to feed the sweet tooth I seem to have developed and to supplement the several packed lunches that I will need over the next couple of weeks.  So Thursday will need to be a shopping day, and the weekend will involve a fair bit of time in the kitchen.

Thursday is the day I go to the Chryston Quilters' Group.  I've been several times now, but each time I haven't quite managed to get my act together enough to take the projects I actually want to work on with me, so the bag with my crazy quilt has accompanied me, and today I was pleased it did.  There is something very satisfying about working with rich fabrics, embroidery thread, sequins and buttons, especially when all I have been thinking about lately is plain fare.

Anita brought in a bag of trimmings that she thought might be useful as embellishments, and

Morag brought me in a pancake and butter, which felt like an embellishment of an entirely different sort!  (And delicious it was too, Morag, thank you!).

As a result of this unexpected treat I didn't get around to eating my packed lunch (cheese and pickle sandwiches) so decided to have these with a bowl of soup and the last remaining piece of chocolate zucchini cake for dinner tonight.  Which of itself turned out to be serendipitous as what I was defrosting as fish cakes turned out to be more curry!  (Note to self, label containers before they go in the freezer).  I think Friday will be another curry night.  I'm beginning to think that batch cooking is the way forward!

On the way home from the group I stopped off to do some shopping.  One of the real delights of autumn as far as I am concerned is squash: butternut, acorn, crown, patty pans, turban, and of course, pumpkin.  As we approach Halloween shops are beginning to lower their prices, anxious that they will be left with huge containers of unwanted 'lanterns'.  I'd have loved to buy locally-grown, from Arnprior Pumpkins for example, but their £5 for a small pumpkin as against the newly reduced 99p for a similar size from Lidl really doesn't provide a real choice. I also bought nuts - cashews (unbelievably) being the cheapest on offer, dried cannellini beans, tinned tomatoes, carrots, yoghurt and coconut milk.

I'll need ordinary milk by the weekend and probably tea before the end of the challenge.  Just over £11 left.  With these ingredients and what I still have in the kitchen I can see soup, nut roast, and maybe a sweet pie on the weekend cooking list.

The first job on returning home though, was to get some bread on for tomorrow's packed lunch.  Those who know me well and have visited Chez Willis know that I have an enormous collection of cook-books, which is odd for someone who has spent most of the last ten years zapping convenience foods in the microwave, but some are very well used.

I love my bread machine, and I love this cookbook.  Since I retired I've been working my way through all the recipes, writing my comments, amendments and (I hope) improvements on the various recipes as I go.  Tonight the recipe of choice is for the rice loaf, a white loaf enriched with egg (thank you chickens) cooked rice (extra was cooked in anticipation on the mid-week curry night) and with added millet (just because I want to use it up).  I've also started to try the recipes that produce just dough for shaping and cooking in the traditional way rather than in the bread pan, the very successful naan breads from last week are an example.  I also understand that the machine can be used just to bake cakes that have been traditionally mixed, so that might be on the cards this weekend too.  I am not sure if using the bread machine is more economical than putting on the small oven, but it is certainly a time saver.  While it is doing all the hard work, I can be turning more left over sock work into another scarf.

If you'd like to sponsor me for this challenge and support  'Start-Up Stirling' you can do so here!