Steel Kitten

How is the budget doing?

So how are we doing with the big goal, the ones that will put us in the poor house ;-)

Pretty good so far! We are 23 days into January - our fourth week - and are bang on budget. I set my groceries budget for £160 a month, and so far we have spent £114.51. This includes cat food and cleaning stuff. In fact, we have eaten better this month since being on a strict budget than we do normally because I’m trying to be very careful to ensure we get our five portions of fruit and veg a day and make the food as flavoursome as possible.

I base the food for the week around a roast dinner on Sunday evening. Whatever I cook, Martin has the meat from it on Monday and Tuesday for his sandwiches. Tuesday night I then make up something else for him to eat for the rest of the week, usually some kind of pasty or large sausage rolls with pickle or peri-peri sauce inside depending on whether he wants a traditional one or spicy little number. Then on Wednesday I cook up a Chinese. He seems to be addicted to green peppers in black bean sauce at the moment, so I thinly slice up whatever roast meat is left and do that with noodles and/or egg fried rice.

This all works of course because I don’t eat meat at the moment.

If I were eating the roast dinner along with Martin, there wouldn’t be enough meat to last for sandwiches or his Chinese on Wednesday. Instead I have the largest Yorkshire pudding known to man made in a cake tin. Then I pile a load of veggies and roast potatoes into the large yorkie with gravy. Occasionally if I’ve done some kind of pastry based pudding for Martin, I’ll do a veggie slice with cheese and have it without the yorkies and just vegetables and potatoes. This is a mushroom slice with a base of onion relish that I found ‘seasoning’ in the back of the fridge.

I do have a tendency to be a little lazy during the week with my food. If we’re having a big casserole with lots of veggies, I tend to have it too but only put in enough meat for Martin. Then I’ll mix my meat-less portion with couscous. I’ve found that rather than eat a lot of protein in the evning, I tend to eat quite high protein foods during the day, which fills me up and helps me avoid snacking.

So over the last few weeks I’ve alternated cheese and crackers, hummus and pitta bread, egg or cheese salads, lentil soup, beans on toast or in a jacket potato. I also try and have a coffee every day made with milk, as milk has valuable proteins in it too. I don’t like tofu or meat-alternatives like quorn, as I think they are very expensive for what they are and I don’t like the texture when I’m chewing it. For obvious reasons being allergic to nuts has taken out quite an important source of proteins for me. I’m a little concerned I’m not getting enough iron so I want to start taking a multi-vitamin on the days when I don’t think I’ve had enough.

Apart from that, food-wise we’re doing ok!

Merry Christmas!

Where did the last few weeks go?!

Sorry for not being around...all I've done is work and knit with precious little time for anything else, but sadly I did too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

I wasn't able to finish Martin's jumper - I'm halfway up the second sleeve with not much further to go, but I decided to 'give' him his present this evening so I could offer up the first sleeve and if it fitted finish the second in a concerted couple of hours and make it all up. Sadly it was just as well as I fessed up this evening, because after I offered up the sleeve I realised it was waaaayyy too long and I need to frog it back and lose at least two, probably three inches. 

So perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing to not finish. It would have been heartbreaking to have done all this work, sewn it up and then have to undo it all. At least I can get a decent finish on it now. 

Anyway, tomorrow I'm doing a simple turkey-based roast for us and hubby's parents, then on Boxing Day a roast beef lunch for eight with my family. As of 6pm tonight, everything that needs preparing for the two days is done. I have two trifles in the fridge - a sherry one and a cointreau chocolate orange one - just waiting for their respective vanilla and chocolate custards to go on top. There's two lots of red cabbage, a whacking great portion of Marie Rose sauce for prawn cocktails, around 40 pigs in blankets and then part of my niece's boxing day lunch so the flavours could mingle and develop for a while. 

Having a vegetarian niece is one thing, having a vegetarian niece with a peanut allergy is quite another. The shops are useless  when it comes to this sort of thing - everything revolves around nuts - so you really have no choice but to make something yourself under the circumstances. So I plumped for a greek spanakopita - spinach and feta filo pie using this recipe. Originally I was going to do Jamie Oliver's recipe without the pinenuts, but luckily I read through it first right to the end and realised that he's done something that almost all professonial chefs do - they forget we mere mortals do not generally have professional equipment. His recipe requires me to use a pan on the hob for a while and then put that straight into the oven to further cook the pie. That's fine if you have completely metal pan from top to bottom. I have what most people have - a teflon pan with plastic handle. So that recipe and way of cooking it was out and I searched until I found another. I think this one will be a lot tastier too as there is more varieties of cheese to give it greater depth. And of course, I'll sort out a separate pan of stuffing, tatties and veg for her without any animal fat. 

So, Merry Christmas one and all, I hope you have a wonderful, relaxing and peaceful few days.

I'm going back to my port, Morecombe and Wise and knitting by the open fire, and I'll be back in a few days, hopefully with a finished jumper to show you!!

In praise of the humble jam tart

 

I feel sorry for jam tarts. When faced with their glamourous and voluptuously decorated cupcake cousins they look like the pantomime equivalent of Cinders. But ask anyone about jam tarts and they'll admit they have a place in their heart.

I haven't made a batch for a long time, peferring to make larger cakes that could be portioned up or perhaps fairy cakes that could be iced. However, after making a batch of 24 jam tarts at the weekend on a whim, I was surprised by just how popular and well enjoyed they were this week. I made them Sunday night and by this morning there were two left.

Martin's father has had a regular supply while in hospital, and for someone who has a bird-like appetite and is a bit ho-hum about cakes, the jam tarts were polished off two at a time at speed about 10 minutes after we walked in the door. Martin obviously loves anything sweet and particularly liked these as they didn't crumble while he was eating them and he could carrying on sorting letters with his other hand.

So, in praise of the humble jam tart, here's the recipe I used based on a rich flan pastry. This has much more fat than a normal shortcrust pastry  and does make it more delicate and difficult to cut and shape, so you might want to try normal shortcrust or even a shortbread pastry base. You can also use different flavour jam, but beware! Don't be fooled by how cool the pastry on the tarts might feel after they've been on the rack for a while after cooking. The jam is still so hot after 20 minutes it is capable of burning and removing lip skin. I speak from experience ;-)

Jam Tarts using rich flan pastry (should make 12-16, although I like thin pastry so I stretched it to 24)

• 8oz plain flour
• 6oz butter/marg
• pinch of salt
• 2tbsp sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon water
• jam for filling

Sift the flour into a bowl with the salt. Cube the cold butter/marg and rub in the fat with the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the sugar, beaten egg and water and using a fork lightly work the pastry until it comes together. Lightly kneed (don't overwork it or the pastry will be tough) the pastry on a floured surface, warp in clingfilm and put in the fridge to chill for 30 minutes.

Lightly roll out the pastry on a floured surface, bearing in mind that it will be stickier than a normal pastry and more delicate to handle, and stamp out circles to match the size of your jam tart/fairy cake baking tray. Grease and flour the tray if necessary (mine always needs it as they have the odd scratch from over zealous evicting of cakes using a knife!) before lightly pressing the circles into each hole. Add a scant tsp of jam to the centre of each, being careful not to overfill the cases as the jam will leak out over the edges.

Put in a oven pre-heated to Gas Mark 5/6 and cook for around 15-20 minutes until the jam is bubbling. Gently remove from the tray and put onto a wire rack straight away.

Then WAIT for 30 minutes or so before attempting to scoff or risk losing your lip print and the skin on the roof of your mouth.

Pancakes, and liver and bacon hotpot

  

The day started off in a very yummy way and ended the same. Nothing beats Saturday morning pancakes, but we're both purists when it comes to what we put on them. Lemon and sugar only. Adding in fruit or chocolate or syrup makes it seem too much like a pudding.

Then later an immensely filling, but cheap and nutritious liver and bacon hotpot for dinner. 

Liver is a weird one isn't it.

You can split a room of people cleanly down the middle about it. You like it or you loathe it. I used to know someone who would gag at the mention of it. It's smell and taste is so powerful the feelings associated with it stayed amazingly strongly at the front of their brain. 

I like it, so does Martin, in fact sometimes I crave it, but somewhere along the way while I'm eating it my brain says enough now and my gag reflex kicks in. Maybe my body craves something in liver and when it knows its loaded up it says stop. 

Anyway, tonight I had the liver craving and knocked up a liver hotpot for us. It's a great cheap recipe but once a month or so is plenty for us!

Liver and bacon hotpot

400g of lamb's liver

2 rashers of back bacon, rind removed and chopped small

1.5lbs of potatoes, thinly sliced

3 big carrots, sliced

1 large onion, sliced or two medium leeks, sliced

2 tbsp of flour

400ml of chicken stock

1tsp of dried sage

Salt and pepper

 

Parboil the potatoe slices for 5 mins, drain and out aside. 

Brown the liver on both sides of each piece in a little oil for about a minute and put into the bottom of a casserole dish. 

Cook the onions, carrots and bacon in the same pan for about 8-10 minutes stirring frequently.

In the meantime, make up the stock and add the sage to it. Add the flour into the pan, stir in and then add the stock stirring.You should now have your vegetables in a nice thick gravy.

Season the mixture with salt and pepper then pour everything over the liver and arrange the potato slices over the top. Brush over a little melted butter. 

Cook at about 200oC for 45 minutes until the potatoes are browned. 

 Major yum.

A halogen oven instead of a cardi

 

I had a decision to make last Thursday.

I had earmarked £50 in my clothing budget to update my office wardrobe for winter. Now, I have to admit that last year’s winter office clothes are a tad on the tight side due to my eyes being bigger than belly recently, so I thought maybe I could do a few adjustments to zips and buttons, get a couple of cheap tops and then do a bit of a cover up job with a new long cardigan! That was before I went over to Cottage Smallholder for a mooch early one morning and saw Andrew.

‘Andrew’ is Danny and Fiona’s Halogen cooker (it’s an Andrew James model hence the name). I’d seen him before and been considering getting a halogen oven for about 10 months, but I wasn’t happy with the enormous prices for them – around £90-£120. I’m absolutely convinced of their moneysaving nature – they cook fast and because of this they cost less to run, especially when it comes to gas which is more expensive than electricity.  But the cost for me was prohibitive, and I wasn’t overly happy with only having a 12 month guarantee.

Then I read Fiona and Danny’s updated blog post about them buying a new halogen oven recently and how good value ‘Andrew’ was at the moment. I clicked through the link on their blog to Amazon to see the halogen oven I wanted with spare bulb, cooking accessories and a two year guarantee for the princely sum of £39. I was in there like a rat up a drainpipe. The postage was a bit steep, but still. Just shy of £50 and two days later ‘Hal’ arrived for me to play with. And I haven’t stopped playing since.

All thoughts of winter clothing were forgotten. I haven’t used my gas stove for a main meal since last Friday evening, although I did use some gas to quickly cook up some pasta last night and veg on Sunday (veg can take a ridiculous a mount of time in a halogen cooker so it's easier and quicker to cook them in other ways). But otherwise, scampi and chips, onion rings, bacon and eggs, roast chicken and potatoes, mexican bean burgers, steak and kidney pie, and an apple and cinnamon bake have all been cooked in Hal so far. He's defrosted and heated up chillis, bologneses and soups straight from the freezer and even has a self-washing facility – a few drops of washing up liquid and a couple of inches of water and Hal’s away.

Fiona and Danny have a fan oven and managed to shave 25% off their electric bill - I’m aiming for reduction of 10-15% on our gas bill this winter. And a reduction of half a stone in weight to be comfortable in my winter wardrobe from last year ;-))

Making pear cider - part 2

Day 1

Yeast starter added Sunday evening about 10pm. Everything mixed well. Some gas is being produced already and it has a frothy head.  It is necessary to leave a headspace in the demijohn during primary fermemtation due to the froth that is created.

Day 2 - evening.

Both demijohns are really frothing now and producing tons of gas. The airlocks are bubbling constantly. If you look closely at the right hand jar you can see bits. That was the champagne yeast demijohn and all of those bits were constanly in motion, rising up and then falling back down. 

Day 3 - fermentation is slowing down and there is a thick sediment. At 6am the bubblers were producing one bubble every 6 or 7 seconds. By late that evening they were producing a bubble every 15 seconds. It's almost time for racking. 

Racking - separating the sediment from the fermenting liquid - proved to be a bit fiddly. The siphon broke!  And it would have helped enormously if I hadn't have forgotten to bid on a set of 14 demijohns on ebay that were just round the corner from us, so I resorted carefully pouring off the cider from the sediment using 5 litre plastic water containers from the supermarket. They've done the job quite well and for a fraction of the price.

Of course I had to do a taste test too. Not bad at all! The champagne yeast cider was a little less flavoursome than the baking yeast cider, but the latter was a lot sharper. It will definitely need time to mellow, but at this point we were incredibly impressed because it was alcoholic!

The most important bit of secondary fermentation that I had to remember was to fill the demijohn to the neck as too much air can lead vinegar production not cider. To reduce the amount of headspace, I added some sterilised fresh pear juice (which had to be strained as the juicer is too efficient and added a lot of tiny bits of fruit) from newly squeezed pears. It also had the added benefit of feeding the yeast a bit more as they consumed almost all the sugar I add added during primary fermentation already.

Boy did they like the frsh pear juice! They frothed up all the way throught the airlocks in less than an hour, which was not the plan. So I took off the airlocks and put on ballons instead, which would at least contain the froth until it all calmed down. 

This morning I got up early and replaced the balloons with sterilsed airlocks as it was clear the feeding frenzy had calmed down.

So now secondary fermentation will take place for a few weeks to finish off all the sugars from the extra juice I added, however I am going to have to rack off again shortly because there is a sediment from the fresh juice lying quite thickly on the surface and now on the bottom. After that I will rack into food grade plastic bottles designed for sparkling drinks and let it mature for a few months.

If all goes according to plan, this cider may be ready to drink around Christmas-time, although some places recommend you leave cider to mature for nine months.

I don't think Martin can wait that long!

Making pear cider - part 1

 

 The pear juice just after having the yeast added. Oops...forgot the bungs for the airlocks so had to use balloons as a temporary measure.

With so many pears and apples coming off the trees and with my recent sudden craving for Bulmers and Thatchers cider I've decided to have a go at brewing my own this year. It started last weekend.

For obvious reasons I wasn't going to buy a scratter or press of any kind until I knew for sure I would like to do this again - they're not cheap bits of kit by any means. This left me with a couple of options - buy a whole fruit juicer or use my food processor to chop the fruit, let it hang in a bag over a bowl to drip and then giving it a thorough squeezing. I opted for the first idea being short of time at the moment and having a prodigeous number of pears to get through. 

 

The first lot of pears - about half my tiny tree. This is actually three quarters of what I had to juice - the rest were in a small box out of the picture.

I wasn't the only one it seems. I went to five stores and rang numerous others to find a reasonably priced juicer, but they were all sold out unless I wanted one that was three times my budget for three times less motor power. Er no. So that left me with plan B - the food processor and hand squishing. 

I didn't have a suitable bag so I improvised and used some stockings. Each litre of juice used four stockings-worth, each stocking used three food processor bowlfuls of minced pears, and each bowl took nine average sized pears. So a small demijohn of 4 litres took 108 pears. I have 14 litres so far or 378 pears-worth. 

 

Then I squeezed the squeezed stocking s a bit more using a baking tray, plate and some free weights left over from my weight training days.

 

To say I'm knackered is an understatement. I squeezed and pressed for around 15 hours across Saturday and Sunday. AND I have an equivalent amount of pears to press this weekend so probably another 15 litres worth to come.

Enough damgummit!

I'm never doing hand pressing again. Monday morning I managed to reserve one of only four whole fruit juicers delivered today to an Argos that is close to my work. Thank goodness for that...

Couldn't resist having a little go.

Anyway, I used this recipe here, mainly because it was easy, I understood it and it didn't blind me with jargon as many other sites to. However, I accidently added too much yeast - one packet is supposed to do about 23 litres as opposed to the 4 in each demijohn I was doing, so I added 20g/litre of extra sugar to each demijohn to give the yeast some more food. 

I had read that different yeasts produce different flavours so I thought I'd try a couple of options. In one demijohn I used champagne yeast, in another I used baking yeast and the third (not seen in the pictures) I used a 50/50 mix of the two. By the way, everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - was washed in hot soapy water, sterilsed in Milton fluid for 15 minutes and then rinsed. I wasn't going through all of that pressing only to have it ruined by bacteria or wild yeasts.

Disaster nearly struck when I realised after I poured in the yeast starter that I had airlocks but not a bung to put them in!!! I raided the birthday cake decoration drawer and found some balloons which would do the job until I could get some proper bungs.

However, I had *no* idea that the smell of fermentation was so unpleasant. I'm sure, like I did, you have in your mind that fermentation smells a bit yeasty, a bit like uncooked bread, yes? 

No. Fermentation gives off sulphur fumes so the whole bottom of the house has smelled of rotten eggs for two days. Absolutely rank. Apparently some yeasts produce more sulphur than others. I thought about moving the demijohns out to the garage, but I wanted to see what was happening in the jar every day so we've braved the nostril stinging fumes and left them in the kitchen.

Tomorrow - after four days fermentation and a distinct lessening of The Whiff - I have to rack the cider, which involves siphoning it off from the sediment at the bottom of the demijohn, topping it up with fresh juice and then leaving it to ferment further for a few weeks.

I shall report back when that is done.

The last of the jam making

 

Last week I filled my cupboards with jam made from  the last of the plums. I hadn't been able to do as many as I would have liked due to time contraints- about 20 to add to about 5 left from last year - but marmalade season will be upon us soon so I shall make up then. And of course I haven't yet done a hedgerow glean so I could well have a few more pots of jam to do then. 

 

While I was clearing room in the cupboards to fit all of the jam, I happened upon some of my alcoholic experiements from last year - the slow gin and the sloe...erm...I can't remember.

 

I think it might have been vodka in this jar (I remember wanting to do sloe vodka), but I'm just not sure because of course I didnt' label it. Twit. Anyway, that's bottled up now. In an old rum bottle that I haven't taken the label off. Just to confuse things further. Of course it could actually be that it is the rum in with the sloes because it begs the question of where the empty rum bottle came from. Whatever is in there, it needs a bit more time as it was a bit sharp. The sloe gin wasn't. Slurp. Yum. Slurp.

Oh and a bit of a warning. When you pour a whole bottle of alcohol in with the sloes, don't expect to get exactly the same quantity out. Spirits generally come in standard bottle sizes so I thought I was safe. Oh no. The alcohol extracts the juice from the sloes so you end up with more than a bottles-worth. And if you are like me that extra ends up on the work surface and on the floor while you stare in disbelief and try and work out where the excess came from. 

I'm attempting to keep the full bottle of sloe gin on the left for a bit longer to see what it tastes like next winter, but Martin made a lot of nomnomnomnom noises while sampling the half full one on the right and now has his eyes firmly fixed on my full bottle. I sense a struggle in the offing. 

Anyway, I'll be down to the supermarket this weekend buying bottles of gin for this years sloes and I intend to do an awful lot more bottles of it. I'd like to do six or seven, so I can keep half maturing for the next few years and drink the other half throughout the coming year, but that depends on the sloe harvest. 

Now, an honourable mention. My mother has been foraging.

Unfortunately, I was diagnosed as having a mild nut allergy a few months ago, but there's no reason why I can't grind them and use them with flour in cakes for Martin. 

Finally, there's been a lot action at Steeltowers last weekend besides the driveway being done.

I have finally decided to attempt home brewing.

The next post from me tomorrow will be about my forays into the shadowy exceptionally smelly world of making cider.

Decidedly pear-shaped

Well finally we had sample success with Georgie and he's been given a clean bill of health so far. One more test to go and if we don't hear from the vet we assume that one is fine. So cat-wise we're ok at Steel Towers now and I can turn my attention to something else.

As is always the way, just when I was confident that something was ok in the garden and take my eye off it, it proves to me that I was wrong. 

The pear tree. 

A couple of months ago it was doing fine and I was more concerned about the weight of the apples on their parent trees. What I didn't realise that was because apples are held so close to the branch on a short stem, they don't seem to put as much strain on their branches as pears do, which are long fruits which hang heavy on a long stem. Two months later three sizeable branches on the little pear tree have snapped under the weight of swollen fruit, one of them a main branch, so I spent half an hour putting right the damage. 

But what to do with over 150 pears from those three branches? None of them are quite ready yet, and some are incredibly small. The ones that are a good size are now in the shed on mesh sheets to let the air circulate as they ripen, which as they are Conference pears they will do so slowly. The smaller ones I'm making into Pear and Lemon Jam courtesy of a recipe by Fiona at Cottage Smallholder. 

Tonight was the first time I've ever made pear jam and I have to say I didn't think it would come together. It's nothing like plum jam - pears retain their shape almost right the way through cooking and only really soften towards the end, but even then they still don't puree like apples or plums. It makes for a jam with little jelly and tons of fruit that retains it structure.

However half way through making the jam the microwave threw a hissy fit and conked out, leaving me attempting to make jam in a large saucepan for the first times in years. Luckily because I had put in too much liquid (forgot to adapt Fiona's recipe with less water for the microwave) the resulting steam had triggered the machine's automatic cut out, but for a second I did think that yet another item in the house had broken. I replaced the kettle last week and the boiler is on the blink yet again, so it wouldn't have surprised me if the microwave was knackered.

Anyway, there's two pots of pear and lemon jam cooling down on the kitchen counter and tomorrow morning another two will join them. 

And then I have to begin stripping the plum tree. 

Our little takeaway secret

 

 

Now granted the lump of meat in the picture above doesn't look very appetising, but taste-wise it's out of this world. This is my homemade kebab meat and it is absolutely sensational.

I've always liked kebabs - in fact I think having been a student it goes with the territory - but I stopped eating them because it got to a point where I heard too many stories of kebab houses being shut due to festering slabs of donar meat being found by health inspectors. This was back in the early 90s when I was a student and I'm sure health and safety has come on a long way since then, but I still have the irrational fear of eating a dodgy kebab.

It was only when I happened upon a forum post about making your own kebabs that I stumbled across a recipe which has guaranteed I can get my fix of kebab meat and put off buying a takeaway on a Friday night because I'm happy to make this dish instead.

So where does the recipe come from?

A great book called The Takeaway Secret by Kenny McGovern

I bought it specfically for the kebab recipe and haven't actually done anything more, although the KFC chicken I have heard is wonderful. 

Anyway, I started off serving the kebab meat thinly sliced in a pitta with salad and chilli sauce. Now we have abandoned the pitta ensemble and have it thickly sliced with Mediterranean couscous, salad and homemade shallow fried felafel (below).

Major yum on a Friday night.