Cooking for one (Mark Three)

[Deleted User]

Good lunch out yesterday, l/o for tea. Bought measuring spoon, am pleased with it. Decided to do fish tonight and am now deciding whether to make some sliced potato and courgette rings to make sort of scales, bit fancy, or some pepper style coating/marinade. Do like to experiment, I had never had aubergines until last year, just did not like the look of them, always look muddy, but did try and now have made a mousaka style dish as they are quite a mild sweetish flavour, not as imagined. Also never bought courgettes or blueberries until grandson talked me into it, now have blueberries on porridge ever day and have grown courgettes this year. Never too old to learn or try new things (couc cous, sour bread etc etc).

caronc

Good morning everyone,
I don't how I'd cope if I was selling my house, I'm not sure I could emotionally detach myself from it enough not to get stressed out. I'm finding selling my Dad's hard enough .... I think you've done fab PN to stay so calm.:A
It's a horrible day here, gale force winds and we have weather warning in place for heavy rain from lunchtime. I've done the bin run and that will be as far as I go today . My groceries have been delivered and put away I'm just waiting for the meat order now which should be here in an hour or so. I've treated myself to a pre-made prawn salad for lunch not something I would normally do but it started with me popping a bottle of iced tea in the virtual basket and thinking about buying a scotch egg. I realised that the egg & tea came to £2.10 and as part of a meal deal I could add the salad usually £2.50 and pay £3 for all three items! Yes I could easily have made up a similiar salad myself but I reckoned 90p for a "pay day" treat was fine by me:D. This afternoon I need to do my finances and over the weekend decide what to do with my Nationwide accounts now the deal has finished. I'll also set the vac pack up and get the meat portioned and into the freezer. The brambles I picked yesterday have been steeping in lightly salted water to get rid of any bugs, I need to rinse and sort these and get them into the freezer to as well as the Greek lasagne and other bits. If you hear a strangled scream and a lot of muttering later you'll know my freezer tetris isn't working:rotfl::rotfl:.

Dinner tonight will either be a gammon steak with pineapple or a smoked haddock fishcake. I'll decide later which option I fancy.

PasturesNew

The sausage casserole got put on, in a fashion.

The original plan was to toss in a tin of spuds, sliced. But having gone through the motions of peeling the sausages, cutting/rolling them into balls; slicing the peppers; peeling/slicing two onions .... I really CBA any more, so I just opened the soup and tossed it in. I did think "you can always add the spuds later", but that won't happen.

It's smelling/tasting gorgeous. It's been on 2½ hours now. Not sure what I'll have it with, can't remember if I used the last of the rice or not. There's always chips and there's always pasta and there's always spaghetti... have to see what happens at the moment I'm hungry enough to scoff a bit.

The peppers were three colours, so I retained a few bits of each, to brighten up a naan pizza topping over the weekend. I'll hook out some of those sausages/onions, add the fresh pepper slices and that'll be a nice pizza topping with a bit of cheese added over the weekend.

EDIT: Had a little dip in and cheeky taste. Served myself a tiny finger-bowl sized dip dish of one sausage worth and 2 tablespoons of sauce. Bl00dy lovely it is.

Then I had two crumpets and marg for lunch, followed by a kit-kat.

Farway

Normal Friday, into L's only needed milk but found a YS MFO Chicken chow mien, so that came along as well. I think I'll freeze that because I've still got yesterday's YS pie to cook


Bit dull today, with a breeze, so pie seems ideal


Lunch was last of the YS rolls, with cheese & tom filling
Dinner will be some the YS pie, probably with chips & LO mushy peas from yesterday
The mushy peas are L's, not bad really, so I bought a replacement tin this morning

Wednesday2000

It's still quite warm and sunny here. I am really looking forward to having crisp Autumn days, hopefully soon!:)

I had a yummy wrap for lunch.

I'm having a Quorn fillet thing with lots of roasted veggies and a side salad for dinner. Trying to lose some more weight now I have a friend reunion thing coming up in a couple of weeks.:D:p

PasturesNew

Farway wrote: »

Normal Friday, into L's only needed milk but found a YS MFO Chicken chow mien, so that came along as well. I think I'll freeze that because I've still got yesterday's YS pie to cook


Bit dull today, with a breeze, so pie seems ideal


Lunch was last of the YS rolls, with cheese & tom filling
Dinner will be some the YS pie, probably with chips & LO mushy peas from yesterday
The mushy peas are L's, not bad really, so I bought a replacement tin this morning

A thoroughly good line up

I find the L1dl straight cut, 95p/1.5Kg chips cook up well .... but I recently had to make do with thinner 4ldi ones, which weren't too bad either (similar pricing/pack size).

Not a fan of the 4ldi or L1dl mushy peas - or any brand so far - but I still buy them because they're cheap. Mum used to make ours, steeping them overnight - and I often think of doing that, but then it's a question of quantities involved.... so I never get round to it. At least with a cheap tin it's just 2 meals' worth and under 20p without any prep or planning at all.

It's cloudless blue skies here. Scorchio with a slight breeze.

Brambling

Evening all from sunny West Dorset :wave:

Just a quick hello as I've worked out hotspotting from phone to iPad all without a small child to help :rotfl:

Lovely weather here with just a wet evening on Wednesday and family haven't driven me to drink yet . No cooking as my bil is really fussy about what he eats so I refuse to do any, just KP duty for me. Lots of walking and the sea air seems to be working as the cough is a lot better

Farway I was a little late in leaving on Sunday 7.30am it seems i wasn't the only one with the same idea, traffic not helped by a cycle race on the A27 and then a long queue to get off the M27 into Dorset :cool: but luckily not too hot when I arrived just after 11am

Enjoy your weekend

caronc

Good evening everyone,
Glad you are enjoying your holiday Brambling and it's so far so good on the family front:cool:.
It's been a truly horrible day here weather wise though at least the strong wind has died back.

My "finances" remain undone as my bank's website was running so slowly I abandoned ship.:mad: Importantly I could see my pension went in as expected and the rest I can catch up with.:)
Meat order arrived (it all looks wonderful) and bar some rump steak & bacon it is now portioned and in the big freezer. I didn't have to play freezer tetris though my smaller freezer is almost at the completely full stage after I added brambles, 4 portions of pastitsio, a tub each of meat sauce and bechamel and a bag of macaroni noodles:eek:. I'm embarassingly pleased that I didn't have to disrupt the storing system I spent so much time on a few weekends ago.:D However, I accidently ordered two heads of celery in my shopping instead of one :o so will need to chop and find space for a bag of that plus the batch of passatta I need to make over the weekend. I think these will need to go on what I have called the "holding shelf" in my big freezer that I had more or less cleared so I had somewhere to open freeze things. Still I'm not complaining the celery was on SO and I use a fair bit of it and the garden beans have been more prolific than I thought they might. I'd much rather have good store of food and I'm very thankful that unlike so many folk I'm not struggling to put food on the table. In my working life I came across far to many people who literally didn't know where their next meal was coming from and despite what some of the press might portray for the vast majority it wasn't through bad life choices.:( One thing I noticed when I was popping stuff in the freezer is that I have two big chicken carcasses in there taking up lots of room, I must get them out and make stock with them which will free up a good bit of space on one shelf of my big freezer. I'll reduce the stock down so it doesn't take up too much room when I stash it.



I enjoyed my bought prawn salad for lunch, it felt like a proper "treat". The salad had lots of different elements, just small amounts of each but the sort of thing that to replicate as CFO generates lots of LOs/use ups. When I was working I used to buy lunch rather than take a pack up on "pay day" and it's something I'll look at doing again in future.
Smoked haddock fish cake with oven chips, roasted tomato and peas for dinner. After the mushy pea talk I'm tempted to open a tin but I'm not going to use them up over the weekend and really don't want to freeze or even worse waste them. :eek:

PasturesNew

caronc wrote: »

I accidently ordered two heads of celery in my shopping instead of one :o so will need to chop and find space for a bag of that ... Still I'm not complaining the celery was on SO and I use a fair bit of it ...

I don't buy/use celery, but I did buy some the other year to make a nut roast for Xmas. I wrapped it in foil in the fridge and it kept more than adequately for over 2 months before I finally pushed myself to using up the remainder.

Yesterday I ate a portion of the sausage/onions/peppers, bl00dy lovely it was too. Two more in the fridge to get through. I cooked some basmati with that. Just one portion of basmati left in the packet and that's another opened packet I don't have to deal with when/if I move and put everything into storage.

pattypan4

The hm watercress soup is hanging over my head, did not fancy it but was not about to waste it. I bit the bullet and had half after my muesli, so it is eaten for today and rest tomorrow. I sliced my big sd loaf and it is in the freezer after testing a slice, yummy and I never had to make it myself


Costco rm falafels with the LO prepped veggies, the veggies will go in the steamer together including part cooke small spuds. They were nice steamed. At least that is an easy meal, big wash is out and I have an event to attend early afternoon, will be sure to show my face, rush around and get back home. I need a day off, the aches tell me I have been working too hard