Cooking for one (Mark Three)

Farway

Bright morning, but porridge breakfast with sliced banana anyway plus blob of L's yoghurt this time

Cracked on with today's leek & tattie soup, I had a niggling worry that there were not any Chicken 0xo cubes in the cupboard, found two packs of 24:o so must have subconsciously stocked up at some time when on offer.
Those should last a couple of years:D

The soup is simmering at the moment, final ingredients [milk + soft cheese]will added at stage two later

Lunch will therefore be HM leek & tattie soup, with LO bread dunked in
Ditto for dinner

PN & Unr, my local Morries has a quite hour for those who hate the bustle, lights, noise etc.

They use half lights, no tannoys, all very peaceful when I stumbled in once.
I think I saw on TV a shopping mall in Reading doing similar so I assume it is fairly general if you can find it

Only saying in case you may find it useful if places local to you do this

Caron, hope the flat gets rapidly sorted rapidly, sounds like it was priced well

PasturesNew

Farway wrote: »

PN & Unr, my local Morries has a quite hour for those who hate the bustle, lights, noise etc.

They use half lights, no tannoys, all very peaceful when I stumbled in once.
I think I saw on TV a shopping mall in Reading doing similar so I assume it is fairly general if you can find it

I've seen it advertised. It is at 9am, from memory. 9am on a Saturday morning... hardly a good/quiet time for getting in/out easily as it's a bit of a peak people/traffic time.

Not near a Morries.

I also wonder what happens if you get there and it's been dropped, or is being ignored.

"People" are so noisy these days... and they don't even know they're noisy.

I have to shop when I need something, when I CBA to go, when I think I can "bear" the concentration/decision-making involved... if I'd gone out of my way to be at a distant store, at an arbitrarily chosen (and unpreferred) time.... I'd have a meltdown if it turned out there were belligerent/noisy farquers there

unrecordings

We tend to try & get out before 10:30am Tues/Weds/Thurs which present optimal conditions - Waitrose or Tesco, but not Sainsburys or Morrison (both horrific in my experience). Funnily enough our local Waitrose experimented for a short while with muted lighting, but it just made the place seem eerie and of course it was harder to read labels/prices etc

caronc

Good morning everyone,

Thanks Farway, yes it was priced very fairly. I do think things are a bit simpler legally up here and getting a Home Report survey/valuation done at the outset (mandatory in Scotland) definitely helps .

I'm another one that can't cope with SMs even if quiet, too many visual triggers. Small shops are okish and thank goodness for online deliveries.:cool:

We are forecast for some very wet weather over the next 24 hours, it's dry at the moment so I'll be getting bin run etc. out of the way before it starts tipping it down.
My sis appeared yesterday evening bearing a lovely bunch of hydrangea blooms for me as wee thank you for helping her out with some complex paperwork/admin recently.:D They smell gorgeous.
Dinner is a Nigella meets Nigel combination of spiced fried hake with a broccoli & pea puree. I'm looking forward to it and it will be a nice change from how I usually cook these ingredients. Lunch will be a wrap with brie & salad.

[Deleted User]

Thanks for comments, yes I do have good neighbours. Still taking it very very steady, got a bacon rasher from fridge and last egg with toast for lunch and some fish cakes and jkt spud for dinner, both easy peasy with not much in the way of cooking involved. Touching wood at the moment, not quite looking like the old person crossing road signs, doubled over, but had to get zimmer frame/walker out for kitchen, one of those wheelie trays for living room (step into kitchen) and walking stick for inbetweens.

caronc

Glad you are improving whmf and getting about even it means using aids you'd rather not. Better to use them than not manage to do things or even worse fall and injure yourself. <<hugs>>

Farway

caronc wrote: »

Glad you are improving whmf and getting about even it means using aids you'd rather not. Better to use them than not manage to do things or even worse fall and injure yourself. <<hugs>>

So true, I know some folk don't want to appear "frail" and so take a tumble instead. I use my stick when outside even though I could do without, it's for the "sometimes" moment when a slight off balance catches me out

The soup turned out tasty as expected, only slight snag was me mishandling the stick blitzer and sending a mini tsunami across the kitchen worktop:o

Plenty left for later. I dunked bread in it, the sort of thing one can do when CFO but not when out fine dining

Renewal for car breakdown cover arrived, looks like I'll be doing a bit of research prior to making "you're 'aving a larf" phone call.

It's over £100 more, no wonder they hid it away on page two of blurb telling me how wonderful it all was

This weekend is turning out to be a "financial sort out" one swapping some of the suppliers of services around.:money:

Brambling

I'm just sitting with a cat, a cuppa and a two finger dark kit kat having done most of the prep for dinner. Key lime pie is chilling, salmon marinating, veg is all chopped for stir fry and pressure cooker is out with sauce made for the short beef ribs. And bathroom is cleaned

My mother's stick was always somewhere she wasn't :cool: and when asked why the wheelchair she had been given was in the shed she would say I'll use it when I'm old, she was 90 :rotfl: it only got used when we refused to take her out to hospital appt etc without it.

There's a mains water leak just around the corner from home the second on the same stretch of road in two days, luckily my neighbour warned me when I popped out so I was able to a avoid what she called a slightly chaotic situation and go the long way, the water pressure is a bit low but at least I have it otherwise my sister would be hosting dinner

Didn't really have a proper lunch, I kind of forgot I was picking at tomatoes, sugars snap peas, cheese and a packet of crisp as well as the veg as I chopped

Dinner will be the above with rice and noodles with bean sprouts

pattypan4

I bought a microwave cooking thing from lakeland, it is a pouch and I piled fresh (from the freezer) sardines in, plus various veg, some herbs and a 1tsp water, flipped the lid over and bunged in the microwave for 6 minutes, left it for 2 afterwards and just ate it. It was blooming lovely, all tender and no fishy smell in the kitchen. Just saying, for us singles a one-dish cooker is a godsend. Sometimes you find something that really helps us get on with life and cooking healthy. I feel full and happy to have eaten properly instead of toast with something


I have a red cabbage in the fridge, looks like a small drumhead, I am going to have to make braised cabbage tomorrow and might as well make up the last costco brownie mix pack, it is sunday after all and anyway I give most of the yummy brownies away. Cooking 2 things in one oven makes sense. I am trying to reduce a few freezer contents, I have an organic meat order coming in 11 days and have made an order for turkey for november. I portion the turkey breasts and vac pack and use all year. I am going to need one empty freezer drawer. I`ll have to do a freezer sort next weekend


I am sorry about your back whm, I hope steady progress in getting mended

caronc

Good evening everyone,
Yikes re the soup tsunami Farway - a little always seems to go an awful long way when it comes to mess.:eek:
Smashing sounding food Brambling - hope you have a lovely evening:).
Handy sounding gadget pattypan, as you say it's the small things that can make a huge difference to being a CFOer:).


I can completely understand how reluctant people can be to use aids. I remember how horrified I was when I had to start using a stick back in 2016, if only I'd known by the end of that year it would be rollators and rails I might have appreciated it more!


A wet day has turned into a cold & wet evening, we've a weather warning for severe rain coming in by midnight and lasting for most of tomorrow. I lit stove once it started to get dark and unless we get an unseasonably warm spell reckon that we a daily event until next Spring! I made sure while it was dryish earlier that my indoor log pile was well stocked, if it's horrible tomorrow I won't need to worry about bringing logs in from the store. I feel as though I've had a reasonably productive dayI made sure while it was dryish earlier that my indoor log pile was well stocked, if it's horrible tomorrow I won't need to worry about bringing logs in from the store, turned a tray of roasted tomatoes into over 1L of passatta (my buying that bigger meshed sieve made such a difference:D) and made, though I say myself, the most gorgeous broccoli & pea puree. I had to seriously resist scoffing most of it while checking the seasoning . Despite my nibbling there's plenty left to have tonight with the hake and with the fishcakes I've planned for Monday. On his last visit my younger son [STRIKE]offloaded [/STRIKE] gave me a present of a 1.5L slow cooker as he wasn't using it and his kitchen is tiny so it was taking up much needed space. I'm giving it a test drive tomorrow with a boneless lamb shank that is currently defrosting in the fridge. I'm still swithering what to cook it with but will decide tomorrow though at the moment a lamb & barley stew possibly with a dumpling or two is looking like a goer . With all the lovely cuts of meat I currently have in freezer that need slow cooking I'm hoping it works well for making one or two portions of things. While I'm happy make larger batches of things like soup and ragu I prefer to make smaller amounts of stewy/braised things so I can vary what I make.