Lemon “Honey” Mustard Quick Bowl

 Hello lovelies! It has gotten HOT here. Like Wicked Witch of the West hot. Life without air conditioning is no joke. I want to get in and out of the kitchen as fast as I can.

One of our successful formulas for a meal includes potatoes boiled in strong vegetable stock, beans, whatever veg we have in the cupboard (usually onion, red pepper, carrots) and kale covered in a dressing or sauce. There are endless variations on this and they come together quickly.

I saw a friend had made a “honey” mustard dressing over crispy potatoes in her air fryer. We don’t have an air fryer and damned if I am turning my oven on for ANYBODY even though I know how to make crispy potatoes in there. Nope. Na-uh. No way. Too hot.

But I did think I could do a “honey” mustard sauce over our standard potatoes/veg/beans/kale combo.

This was delicious and we would definitely eat it again.

Lemon “Honey” Mustard Quick Bowl

400g new potatoes, diced

Vegetable stock to cook the potatoes in

1 onion, sliced into rainbows

garlic

¼ of a red pepper

Half a carrot, cut into matchsticks

Tin of beans, drained and rinsed (chickpeas would be great. I used borlotti as that is what I had. )

100g kale –several handfuls

Sauce:

Juice of one lemon

2 TB wholegrain mustard

1-2 TB liquid sweetener (agave, maple syrup, golden syrup)

Salt and pepper to taste

 1. Cover your potatoes with cold water and a stock cube and bring to the boil. Boil until able to be easily pierced by a fork. Drain reserving about ¼ cup.

2. Meanwhile cook your onion in a splash of vegetable stock from the potatoes. When softened, add the garlic, pepper, carrots and let them cook down.

3. While the veg cooks, mix up the sauce in a little bowl and set aside.

4. When you drain the potatoes, add in the kale and the beans to the veg mixture and cook with the ¼ cup of stock you reserved when you drained the potatoes. When the kale is bright green and reduced, add in the potatoes and the sauce and stir to coat. Taste and see if it needs more lemon.

5. Serve in a bowl. Bonus points if you can make your carrots look like the mark of Zorro. 

Love Food, Hate Waste

I cannot bear to waste food.FACT.  Back when we lived more abundantly in America we were not as careful as we are now about food waste.  Food was bought and sometimes eaten and sometimes not. We threw away about half of it uneaten as it went off before we used it. You know what I am talking about--that limp lettuce or furry cucumber lurking in the back of the fridge. Who am I kidding? We didn't really eat vegetables back then.

Sad but true. Before going vegetarian and later vegan we ate lots of processed food and very little fresh. But the fresh food we did buy often did go off due to lack of interest. These days, we eat so much fresh fruit and veg (I eat vegetables that I never knew even existed! I adore foods that I once sneered at!) and because we are on a tight budget since moving to Cymru, I am super careful with my planning to make sure nothing goes off--that we get our money's worth and anything left (peelings and scraps) get composted. Later this week I plan on doing a retrospective of what we ate this week to show how food gets used up and how for a small amount of money each week we can eat really well.

But even if these days we are more aware of food waste, it is still being wasted. The website Love Food Hate Waste says an estimated 400 tonnes of household food and drink waste is produced every year in Wales, the majority of which is sent to a landfill. That's over 600 million pounds worth of good food and drink being wasted by Welsh customers every year. 

That's just for Wales and we are a tiny country. Just imagine what the food wastage is in a country as big as the United States.

It is not just household food waste that is worrisome. It is the food waste that happens when shops have perfectly good food that has reached it's sell by date but is still perfectly edible that they legally have to throw away. Some shops even pour bleach over the food in bins to discourage people from dumpster diving.   This is such a shame because there are people here and all over the country who are starving--who cannot makes ends meet under the Tory government austerity cuts. Parents who have children to feed and have to decide between food for their kids or heating their home in winter. According to the Trussell Trust over 900,000 adults and children have received help from a food bank in the last year. This is triple the number of people  who have needed the assistance of a  food bank from the previous year. And let's be honest--it is probably not going to get better with another five years of Tory government.

But what can we do? Well, for a start we can follow France's lead. The French National Assembly has passed legislation that states that French supermarkets will be banned from throwing away or destroying unsold food and must instead donate it to charities or for animal feed. 

That's a bloody brilliant idea. I plan on writing my MP about this idea to see if we can get it discussed in Parliament.

But you know what would really eliminate hunger?  Honestly? Going vegan.  You could feed the entire world on one-third of the farmland we currently use because most of the land is used for animal grazing or for growing food for livestock. But that's a story for another day.

May our goal for the future be that no one  in the world has to go to bed hungry when there is food that can be eaten.

Hat's off to France and may the rest of the world follow your example.

Spidergrrl, or the Pot of Basil

I love my husband. He knows me well and he knows what tickles my funny bone. He said that one reason our marriage runs so smoothly is that I am so easily delighted.

 

As blog followers know I’ve been trying to grow a herb garden on the kitchen window. I have bought plants and replanted them into terracotta pots and have managed to keep them alive for nearly a month (which has to be a record for me).

 

After payday I purchased a pot of aromatic basil for the windowsill garden. I dutifully replanted it in a larger terracotta pot and placed it beside its brethren on the window. When Spiderman came home from work he commented about it. I replied with stars in my eyes and discussed the possibility of vegan pesto….mmmm pesto. I thought he had taken no notice.

 

The next day he was in the kitchen cooking rice and I was on the sofa reading. I walked into the kitchen and let out a SHRIEK!

 

There was a skull on my basil plant!

What did this mean? Was it now the Herb of Death? And then I twigged it.

 

I laughed and laughed.

 

And laughed and laughed.

 

I squealed with mirth and did a little hoppy dance around the kitchen (which if you know the size of our kitchen you know this was no mean feat).

 

It was a reference to a poem by Keats called Isabella, or the pot of basil which was featured in some of my favourite Pre-Raphaelite paintings. You can read the poem here http://www.bartleby.com/126/38.html   If you can’t be bothered to read all LXIII stanzas of that poetry nonsense then read on for a summary.

 

In the poem, Isabella falls in love with the poor clerk named Lorenzo who works for her brothers.


Click to enlarge and see the detail

Lorenzo and Isabella was the first painting by John Millais that he exhibited for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. You can see one of her angry aggressive brothers in the foreground cracking the nuts and kicking the dog.

 

Her brothers murder Lorenzo and leave his body in the woods and tell Isabella he has abandoned her. His ghost appears to her and she goes out to find the body. Being only a weak woman she cannot carry the whole body back so she cuts off his head and puts it in a pot of basil. Like you do.

click to enlarge and see the detail

This is my favourite painting by Holman Hunt, another member of the PRB. It shows the bit where she goes mad, watering the basil with her tears. The brothers take the pot and find the head of Lorenzo and having been exposed as murderers went with “blood upon their heads, to banishment.” Without the pot and the skull of her beloved, Isabella cries until she wastes away and dies.

 

I loved it so much I was afraid that watering the plant would dissolve the sticker so we put a layer of clear sticky backed plastic (that’s contact paper for my American peeps) over it to protect it. .I don’t know if that will work. How well does anything stick to damp terracotta anyway?

 

If you are a literary type and you actually read the poem by Keats and admired the paintings then you might be interested to know that Hans Christian Anderson also wrote a story with a similar theme entitled The Rose Elf in which the girl places the skull in a pot and covers it with a sprig of jasmine. The story says, As the girl became paler and paler, the twig stood there fresher and greener. Eventually the girl dies from grief and the evil brother takes the beautiful pot of flowering jasmine to his bed chamber. The Rose Elf speaks to the souls that inhabit every flower as well as to the bees and the evil brother is killed by them in revenge. Because Hans Christian Anderson was all about comeuppance.  You can read it for yourself here: http://hca.gilead.org.il/elf_rose.html

 

I love my pot of basil.

 

My husband knows me well.

 

He knows both a literary and art reference will make smile.

 

I love that he knows the reference and knows that I will know the reference.

 

I adore my Herb of Death.

 

Thank you for making me cackle with laughter.

 

 

Going to pot

As I wrote last week, I have been very inspired by Jack Monroe keeping fresh herbs on her windowsill--even in her most extreme poverty. I figured, if she could do it then so could I.

 

The problem lies in the fact that I have never successfully kept anything alive and that was when my Mum lived close by and was giving me enormous amounts of help. Now she lives half a world away (we are separated by an ocean) and I’m sorta on my own except for a few emails and frantic phone calls for advice.

 

Even if I have no talent for growing, I have absorbed enough lectures about horticulture to know a thing or two. I could tell that the cheap herbs in pots that I had on my windowsill were root-bound and therefore would not fare well unless something happened. But what needed to happen I had no idea as I’d never gotten that far. Mum said they needed to be re-potted, in a slightly bigger pot. 

Ah. That meant buying a bag of compost and some pots. That meant looking at whatever local shops I could to find what I need. There was no convenient Lowes to go to for all your home and garden needs. After bringing a ruler into Wilkinsons and measuring the diameter of all the terra cotta pots (they were all listed in centimetres and I’m still an inches and feet kind of gal) and then emailing Mum for advice we settled on the 6 inch pots. She said terra cotta was best from a gardening standpoint, I thought they looked nicer from an aesthetic standpoint. I bought three at 75p each.

Finding an affordable bag of compost that didn’t weigh as much as me was a bit of a problem. I finally found a bargain bag of soil with some peat for £1 for 15 litres of compost.  I genuinely have no idea how heavy it was as it was measured in litres, but I was able to carry the bag home on my own, so not that heavy.

 

The next problem was the fact that we don’t actually have a garden or any outside space as we live above the church offices in the centre of town. Sure there is green space right outside our flat, but it is community green space. I figured I needed to do my planting indoors.

Mum had also recommended that I get another parsley plant as the one I had was a bit scalped from over use. She was afraid it would not grow back so I invested £1 in some parsley from ASDA. This kind was the curly leaf kind, the last kind was the flat leaf kind which I couldn’t tell the difference between that and the coriander so I had to put sticky labels on the pots. Now I can tell the difference. Plus Mum tells me that curly leaf is stronger than flat leaf so I can use less and stop risking giving it a crew-cut.

 

 So I did what my Mum suggested and put some broken shards of a plate in the bottom of each pot to help with drainage. I did this by putting a saucer in a ziplock bag and beating the crap out of it with a hammer. It was very satisfying.

 

Then after replanting and major kitchen cleaning (the compost got  *everywhere*) it looks like this:

 

Isn’t that gorgeous? I am really pleased with my work and got phone confirmation a few hours later that I had managed to do it right. She thinks that the coriander may have had a bit of a root shock after I loosened the rootball, but as of typing this it has perked up enormously.

 I have enough space on the windowsill and plenty of compost left (despite how much I managed to spill everywhere as I was planting) for another pot so I may pick up a basil in a week or so after payday.

 

But I am hoping that some of her green fingers have worn off on me and I can keep these herbs alive. Which, by the way, are pronounced HERBS not ERBS because there’s a fecking H. (thanks to Eddie Izzard for that joke)

 

So there. 

Please grow.

Thanks Mum.