fur knickers no coat

I’m really enjoying reading this book – The Abel & Cole Cookbook – on organic produce written by Keith Able, the owner of ‘Britain’s largest organic box delivery scheme’.  I’ve got the paperback edition and love the relaxed, friendly writing and the little stories that start each new section – one for each of the seasons. The book is colourful with non shiny pages – it has full page colour photos, many of them taken in the authors’ home and the recipes are fairly simple with minimal ingredients.  The recipes are a mix of vegetarian and non-vegetarian – all no nonsense and all with good, fresh organic ingredients.

5 Recipes that particularly caught my eye:

• Sweetcorn & Feta Salad   –   p. 93
• Grilled Chicken Salad with Raspberry and Walnut Dressing   –   p. 68
• Borlotti Bean and Squash Stew   p.135
• The Southwest Burger   p.129
• Beef and Pointed Cabbage Pie   –   35

It was really hard choosing just 5 there’s just too many.   A lovely book that I know I’ll be coming back to time and again.

10/10

My little blog’s just over a year old now (happy birthday Blog) and I’ve been thinking for a while that it’s time to open up and invite a Guest to add a posting.  So that’s what I did and  …

well,  are you in for a treat – they just don’t get better than this!

Coming soon …

Watch this space …

P.S. It SNOWED yesterday – and no I’m not joking!

Some girls love shoes – I love cook books.

I have loads of them but still can’t resist the temptation to buy the one I ‘couldn’t help but open’ – while ‘accidentally’ browsing in Waterstones. I always manage to tell myself I really must have the new “so and so” book that has just come out, as if my life depended on it.

This love of cookbooks has always been with me, right from the very first day I had to make the first meal when I left home to live in a one room bedsit. Forty odd years later and naturally lots of books have come and gone – some are missed, too.    Life takes over … house moves, the odd accidents and just boredom has made the choice of books on my shelves ever changing and always interesting. Food fashions, changing diets and needs influence the books too. It’s too many years to remember when I decided to be vegetarian after being bought up in a meat eating home. In those days only the ‘weird, sandal-wearing hippies’ were thought to be vegetarian and books on the subject were hard to come by. They arrived though giving me all the nutritional information I had to learn for a meat-free existence.

So not only has this life-long love of cook books helped me fed my family they have built up a knowledge of the importance of a well balanced diet whilst still enjoying what we eat. I’ve decided that my cook books deserve more than just sitting on their shelves and I thought it may be interesting to feature one of my books every now and then and share some of their lovely secrets!

See you soon my invisible readers.

xXx

Tonights’ dinner and it was tastier than it looks for ‘healthy’ stuff – worth eating again even though the thought is boring!

Seriously, a healthy but tasty meal.

9°C Windy, Grey

We had this tonight – a mish-mash really but it went down a treat in the end.  We ate it with pasta AND (can you believe it) tortillas – a hit and recorded here for that reason!

• 1 onion – finely chopped
• 1 teasp. olive oil
• 1 clove garlic – crushed
• 1-2 chilis (any) – chopped
• 1 red pepper
• 1 other colour pepper
• 1 courgette – chopped
• 1 jar pasta sauce
• 1 tin kidney beans – drained & rinsed
• Chili powder – 1 teasp. or to taste
• Pasta to serve – or tortilla with soured cream and cheese to serve (Mexican style)

1. Fry the onion, then add the garlic.
2. Add the chili & peppers – cook 2 minutes.
3. Add courgettes & chili powder – cook 2 minutes.
4. Add sauce and cook gently til you’re ready to eat.

Serve with pasta or (and) tortillas, sour cream and grated cheese – Mexican style.

**Ahhhh! Horror!**

I have to use THIS!  This is T’s camera – a fancy, lots of knobs and dials mid-range Nikon.

If I want to continue with my blog(s) I have no choice but to try and get my airbrain head round this fancy piece of technology and I’m not at all sure I can.  The reason I have have to do this, you may well be asking?  ….. well, here’s the answer:

Don’t ask – I don’t know.   All I know is, it is.  And I’m sad and …. well, that’s it really.

12°C Sunny Partly Cloudy

We’re back and hopefully we’ll have a full six weeks before going back again. The trip was a sucess as far as the medical stuff for Tom – the Cardiologist was happy with his progress and signed him off her books into the care of our doctor.  (That’s quite a joke really as you’d know if you knew our doctor).

The usual ritual of unpacking the suitcases has begun again which is as bad as packing. Well, maybe not as bad cos I can unpack those ‘little treasures’ I was able to find in UK.   (more…)

It’s that time again – time to start packing for the next trip back to the U.K. and it only seems like 2 minutes since we got back from the last one. I don’t like packing – at all.  No matter how often I have to do it I still ‘overpack’ – I’m always saying that next time will be different and I won’t take 27 T-shirts and 34 pairs of knickers for one week but I never manage to get it right.   Each time the cases come home with most of the stuff undisturbed and just needing to be re-ironed and put away into their respective drawers again.  Why do I do it …? I don’t know, just another one of those weird things about me, I spose.  Is there anybody else out there like me I wonder … ?

On a different note and whilst I’m here, an up-date on the weather/condition of the house is due so here we go.  The weather is slowly improving with the temperatures starting to stay above freezing 95% of the time.  The house is thawing out and the walls are beginning to warm up – one of the problems of living in a house with extra thick walls is that they take forever to ‘catch up’ with outside temperatures.  It is often colder inside than outside in the summer months.  The condition of the walls is not improving though and the black mould continues to grow – I think we need a very hot summer with the doors and windows open every daylight hour to dry the walls out properly.

Anyway, enough of that and back to this …..

(more…)

It was so cold in my kitchen the glass on the clock broke as the heating started to warm the room up.

3°C Feels like -3°C Dull

The water’s finally thawed out everywhere in the house now and any pipes that are going to burst would have done that by now. Good news is – the dishwasher’s fine.  Bad news is – so’s the washing machine.  ;~)

5°C Raining, Grey