Duck Stew

I didn't mention, yesterday me and Totty had a nice cosy lazy day in, the weather was rubbish, so we had a Sunday lunch. That in itself is a bit of a rarity.

We had the normal, nice veggies, bit of stuffing, that I sexed up with a bit of garlic. Totty had duck that I roasted.

Now there was a lot of duck left on the carcase, which was fine. Totty had indeed had his fill at lunch time, and there was enough for a couple of weekday sandwiches.

I popped the carcase in a pan with four small onions just quartered, three carrots unceremoniously hacked up and thrown in and of course almost enough water to cover the whole thing.

That was left on a low heat to do it's own thing for a couple of hours.

This morning it was cool, so I put it in the fridge and revisited it when I got in from work.

What you can't quite see from this photo is that the liquid is jellified. so I would guess that there is a lot of flavour and goodness. I expected a lot of fat, but there wasn't.

So in a larger pan I fried off three small onions with a little oil. The pan got a bit dry, so I slugged in that bottle of wine that is having quite an outing this evening.

When the onions were looking to be a little transparent, I strained in the stock from the pan that you see above.

I picked off the remainder of the meat from the duck, and added a little of the smooshed vegetables to the soup pan.

At this point it is important to mention that I had a little helper. Yes that's Bean, giving me the evil eye and ordering me to give her some duck. Isn't it fantastic how a cat can look menacing and cute at the same time?

In went about a medium handful of pearl barley, and another slug of wine, lots of pepper. Four or five peeled potatoes and six peeled carrots, in large batons.

The whole lot cooked away to itself while I made myself busy doing other things.

Totty didn't proclaim his hunger when he got in. I wasn't surprised, because he did get in late and past the hungry time of an evening.

A quick whiff of this duck stew and suddenly his appetite returned.

Roasted Peppers filled with Eggplant, Summer Squash and Basil

This recipe calls for:

3 medium size red bell peppers, I used 4 regular size.
1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Halve the peppers longways and remove the seeds and membrane. Coat the peppers in the olive oil and seasoning and roast in a hot oven for about 7-9 minutes.

Filling
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup medium sized yellow onion chopped
3 Fat Garlic cloves (Original called for 5, but this is a school night!)
1 Medium sized eggplant, diced (original recipe called for Japanese this wasn't available)
3 medium size courgettes, diced
Small handful of black olives (the original called for "Gaeta" olives, I didn't have these and I have a sick soft spot for those dark ones in the jar.)
2 ounces Feta cheese, diced small (original called for "Fontina" but I've never heard of this)
Half a cup grated parmesan
3 tablespoons Basil (left out)

Heat oil in large frying pan, cook onions until transparent, add garlic.

When the garlic is looking cooked, the recipe is saying to add the eggplant. I found this all a bit too dry, so I slugged in some week old wine that I had in the fridge to add something extra.

Then I added the eggplant, stirred this about for a while, slugged in a bit more wine. In went the courgette when the eggplant was looking fairly well cooked.

The olives were roughly chopped up chucked in, as was the feta.

When everything had seemed well acquainted in the pan, I turned off the heat, added most of the parmesan into the mix and started filling the peppers with the mixture.

This is what it looked like in the oven. I cooked it for about 40 minutes because I was indeed lazy and I didn't precook the peppers.

I must say, that it didn't look as pretty as I would have liked. When Totty came in he said that it looked fantastic.

The overall taste was nice. The filling wasn't overly cheesy, which is a gripe that I have with a lot of vegetarian food.

I think that if I make this one again, I will add something to the filling, perhaps some thyme, and perhaps a pepper and olive oil dressing drizzled over the top to lift the flavours.

Cooking the Whole Book

OK, so one of my goals that I intend to share with who ever reads this far is my cooking through one of my cook books, "Fields of Greens" by Annie Somerville.

YIKES!

Well, there is a very good reason for this. All of us who have a real interest in food, have a huge pile of cook books. Books that we turn to for inspiration, and books that we look up old favourites. Often we make one or two, things from a book.

So, this being my favourite cook book, I intend to cook EVERYTHING in it. I will of course make substitutions for ingredients that I can't get, or for things that I just don't like.

Since I have owned this book, I have made just two things out of it, the Winter Vegetable Curry (page 190) which was delish, and I had a little spate of making my own sourdough bread, including starting my own culture (page 312-315). I don't intend on repeating these.

I would also like to add that my kitchen is tiny, and to have two people in my kitchen area is a stretch. I know that you can make spectacular food in a small area, you just have to be creative with space, and meticulious about the order in which you do things.

OK, so the actual book is 3.7cm thick, that's including the cover. The pages measure 3.2cm, so that's not too bad. Let's be honest here, cookbooks have nice thick pages. Without the appendix, that's 2.5cm of pages to cook through. Doesn't sound too hard.

So, where to start?

This week I will try to do two, maybe three things.

I will make Polenta (page 278) and Roasted Peppers Filled with Eggplant, Summer Squash and Basil (page 268) and possibly Fall Risotto with Chantrelles and Late Harvest Tomatoes.

Seasonal everything would be fantastic, but because I don't have a car, I am relying on local high street supermarket, I will make do with what I can lay my hands on!

All Bagged Up!

My sewing career has gone through fits and spurts.

Whenever I feel inspired, or the circumstances are good, I sew. The rest of the time I wish I sewed, or that I sewed more.

At the moment, my circumstances are right for sewing.

Indeed life has been good since I moved to Ireland this year, so I have completed a few pieces.

The first thing that I made since I got my machine was this beige striped shoulder bag.

As you can see, there are free form flowers on the front. These were made from the selvages. I like the way that they add a rough edge, and of course use up some of those left over scraps, that would otherwise go in the bin.

Yes it's a lot rough around the edges, I am not particularly patient finishing things off, but it's a good first project after years of doing no sewing. The bit that I like to boast about the most is this. I drafted the pattern myself.

In the future, I will return to this bag, and add an insert to the base so that it holds a little more shape. But for the mean time, I am very happy with my first project in about 6 years.

What is important these days anyway?

OK, stay with me on this one.

Yes, that is a pile of clean dish cloths. To be more accurate, it's a pile of my dish cloths. I use them about the house, for just about everything. If anything gets spilled, out comes a dish cloth. Need something to wipe your face with, clean the kitchen surfaces, damp dusting, you name it. I mostly don't use disposable paper products out of the bathroom.

As a planet, we are running out of resources very quickly. In my life time, if I don't witness oil running out, I'm sure that I will see it's prices soar so as to be far too expensive for most people.

It's little things like my dish cloths that have the potential to make a difference here.

Every time that you buy something, a lorry has to bring it from the factory, to a distribution centre, to the store, and a lot of the time, you come along in your car, on your own, and drive home.

So, I am trying to make less of an impact buy having these handy little cloths clean, dry and ready to use. They simply go in the wash with everything else.

I'm not saying that I am a green goddess of the environment. Indeed, there is a lot more that I could do to reduce my impact on the planet.

My point is this. I do something, every day that might be considered environmentally helpful.

It could really slow down the depletion of oil reserves, and reduce the damaging effects of human population of the Earth if everyone did a little more.

The other thing that I do regularly that is very important, is use a very common, inexpensive way to get to work.

Coffee

About three years ago, I decided to take my love of good coffee to another level.

I bought an espresso machine and grinder.

"Right", I thought to myself. "Thats the most time and money that I am ever going to spend on coffee."

I couldn't have been more wrong.

After a couple of months of buying very fresh beans, I dipped a toe into roasting coffee at home. Now I'm not saying that the coffee that I was drinking before I started home roasting was bad. It's just that I now have more controll over how my coffee tastes. And that is a beautiful thing.

At the time, I was living with my parents, and I felt that I had to go outside rain or shine, to roast coffee. Seeing as they are tea drinkers, I think that was fair.

I started off, with a popcorn maker, progressed to about 4 popcorn makers. Then I struck gold!

There was something better out there for home roasters who didn't want to spend hundred's more on coffee equipment. a heat gun.

Yes indeed, the very gun that you use to strip paint, could be better used to roast coffee. So now, once or twice a week, my house gets filled with the most fantastic coffe smell.

At the moment, I am using an Ethopian coffee.

Even though I have some of the most fantastic coffee at home, I would be happier with an updated espresso machine, and a few more coffee gadgets to play with.

Oh well. Coffee Nirvana is a long way off.

Bready bread Goodness Me!

Hello, so here is the recipe that I promised you yesterday.

It’s a very modified recipe that I got from www.allrecipes.com. The instructions that came with my bread machine were rubbish, I did pay only €35 for it, so I can’t complain too loudly. I didn't mind having to look around for a good recipe.

I like the bread machine section there, because it has a very handy function that allows you to scale any recipe to fit your machine. It was a bit of trial and error and then some success, just like life.

The fluff about my machine says that it will make a loaf of 1.5kg and, at allrecipies.com I use the recipes scaled to 19 servings. Something that I will say about some of the recipes on allrecipes.com, and indeed a lot of American food sites, is that they are very heavy handed with the sugar.

That's my opinion, and you are very welcome to it.

Bread for the bread machine

INGREDIENTS
1⅓ cups water
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
¼ cup and 2 teaspoons oil, sunflower, groundnut, grapesead or olive oil.
2 cups strong white flour
2½ cups wholemeal bread flour
½ cup whole rolled oats
1 tablespoon and ½ teaspoon active dry yeast

DIRECTIONS
Place water, sugar, salt, oil, bread flour, oats and yeast into pan of bread machine.
Bake on wholemeal bread setting with dark crust selected.

As you can see from the photo, the bread is a little lop sided and sunken on one side, I am still tweaking the quantities. I will let you know of improvements as they happen.

Last night when Totty came home from work, it was sort of late, and there wasn't anything ready to go in the fridge. So we were quite naughty and went to the chip shop. So we had chipper, chip shop sandwiches with fresh bread, and a big mug of milky tea each, to wash it down with. Of course we spread real butter on our bread.

I would have taken a photo, because this is real food porn of the highest degree. I didn't because we scarfed down the lot, far too quickly to even think about sharing!

Rant of the Day

So I was sitting at work, I have a very dull, office job, this afternoon. I was at my desk, basically sitting it out until 5.30, we have all done it.

Anyway, one of my work friends comes by and we start chatting. Lets call her G for our friendship's sake, this is a rant after all. She starts telling me about how she has mortgages on more than one property.

Now this is such a huge matter of contention for me.

Me and Totty rent. Why do we rent? Well in Dublin, where we live, property is so expensive because there is a shortage of places to live due to the population increasing. Dublin is basically a building site, I can't go out of my front door without literally seeing a building site or very recently completed apartments.

Now most of this building work is necessary. I admit.

But far too many are getting rich off it. FAR FAR FAR too many people are getting rich here.

People who are buying to let apartments are keeping property prices high. You all know who you are. Greed isn't big and it's not clever.

It's the skanks like me and Totty who are fairing badly. We just don't feel that we want to afford to buy a place because, we just can't justify getting a €450,000 or more mortgage for basically a hamster cage of a house.

There I have said it, the apartments that are being built are rubbish. Why is our generation accepting living conditions that are WORSE than our parents raised children in?

It makes me so cross I want to pull a face like this.

This picture is so apt. I could rant about this until I am blue in the face, and it wouldn't make a farts worth of difference.

GRRRRR.

I will leave you on a much calmer note. This morning before I left the house, I put my bread machine to make a loaf to be ready for just after I got home. So I came home to the smell of baking bread. Yum.

I will post more precisely about what I put in my loaf tomorrow. For now, here is the loaf. It's not one of those pretty pictures of food, it's a photo of really tasty food, at least I hope, I'm yet to take a slice and make sure.


Actually that's why it's not a posed picture. I'm hungry.

Looks nice doesn't it? I just about manage to make enough bread in my bread machine, so that we don't eat shop bought bread. Both me and Totty feel better for it. No artificial nasties. And for good measure I add some oats in, which is apparently good for helping to lower cholesterol.

One more calming thought. Here is my cat. Her name is Bean, I can't remember why we called her that, it just felt like the right name for her.

Bean was a rescue cat, that's really the most responsible way to get a pet. When we got Bean, she didn't do much, now she runs the house, and even takes a little pride in giving us both back chat.

I guess it's progress.

OK I'm off to eat some bread.

Hello Crewel World

Heya, so this blog is about me, my life, food, cooking, love, sewing and whatever else comes to mind.

What I am going to try to do is share with the world photos of my sewing projects,

Also I am going to attempt to cook all of the food in my fave cook book "Fields of Greens: New Vegetarian Recipes from the Celebrated Greens Restaurant" by Annie Somerville. It's a medium length story, I will tell you about it one rainy day.


Let me tell you a little about me.

Well, I am English, I live in Ireland, and have done so for less than a year. I moved here because my man, who shall be known henceforth as Totty, lives here.

I have a job, yaaay for having enough money to pay the bills. That means that I will never be rolling in money.

I am very happy in life. I have enough of everything that I need. Enough love, a fab place to live, enough food. What more could a person honestly ask for?