Farewell Spooky Season!

Healthwise I've haven't been puttering along so well the past week - flares and C-PTSD flashbacks/night terrors are a horrible combination - so food hasn't been remotely fancy, in fact, one evening last week we had McDonalds (trying out world heist menu stuff which was fine) and then Monday night we had it again. It's not ideal and I tried to make best choices possible but I'm not going to keep beating myself up about it. This happens incredibly rarely considering we're a neurodivergent, chronically ill household. 

It didn't help with good decision making that we were low on easy frozen options such as prepped burritos, etc so after the fast food extravaganza I made some bean, cheese and brown rice burritos using the pinto beans and brown rice recipes from Amy and Jacky. 

I find my rice turns out better with a 1.25 cup of broth/water but otherwise follow the recipes as they are. The pinto beans in particular are great and a low-cost meal option - we use them for burritos, enchiladas, burrito bowls and nachos. 

PB assembled sixteen burritos and ten went to the freezer, six to the fridge. The freezer is very full at the moment but mostly with meal parts rather than all-in-one stuff and it's a chest freezer which makes organising/meal planning a bit of a pain. One day we'll be able to remodel the kitchen and bring in our beautiful american style fridge freezer combo in from the garage...

Feeling a bit naughty after our fast food/eating out spree, I remembered I wanted to try the Bistro Broccoli Chowder from Appetite for Reduction which is an excellent cookbook for anyone wanting to increase their veggie intake. It read like it would be very flexible and easygoing so I raided the fridge, roughly chopped and threw everything into the slow cooker on low for eight hours. 

Originally it's prepared on the hob but spoons are in short supply so slow cooker it was. I used dried dill instead of rosemary, dairy milk instead of vegan and less potatoes/more parsnips because that's what we had on hand. It is incredibly difficult to go wrong with a basic veggie soup though - and a soup this did become thanks to my immersion blender - my chunky chopping was too chunky for a pleasant chowder anyway. Really wholesome and warming, we had some baked-at-home rolls and sliced cheddar with it on Wednesday and there's plenty in the fridge ready for the rest of the week. 

Heading into the chilly times now... 

 

Urgh Season.

While I love autumn, it definitely has a huge drawback: the start of urgh season. My immune system isn't what it should be, I hate being sick with a burning passion and I seem to catch everything no matter what I do. Urgh! 

The only thing to do is just to ride along with it: hydrate, rest and nourish myself the best I can. Unfortunately PB has also succumbed to whatever germ cloud is floating around so the energy struggle was real over the past few days. 

Luckily there was some leftovers from the previous post prep in the freezer (sticky toffee oats and salmon pate) and since we've both been poorly sick, we're in the soup zone! My plan was to make the Vegan Cauliflower Soup from the I Love My Instant Pot: Anti Inflammatory Diet Recipe Book. 

Intially it turned out a little thin in consistency for me (although I admit I like my soups thick...more a puree really) so I added a tin of new potatoes (judge if you wanna but they are useful to have on hand) and that sorted it. I definitely want to try some other recipes from this book now.

Dinner on Monday was something different, we'd found a couple of packages of dry udon noodles so I set to finding something easy and pantry friendly to use them and found Japanese Style Tuna Noodles recommended on a reddit thread and I had most of the ingredients so I set to work:

Japanese Style Tuna Noodles
Sam Sifton, New York Times Cooking, with modifications.

Ingredients:

Dressing:
1 tablespoon canola oil (based on advice from aforementioned reddit thread, this is half of the original amount. I also used the last dregs from a bottle of olive oil instead) 
2 tablespoons sesame oil (I used pure but I'm sure toasted would be okay too)
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon soy sauce (again, not specified but I used light soy sauce. I think dark would be too overpowering here)
1 teaspoon sweet miso (I had no miso on hand so I used some vegan fish sauce instead, a scant teaspoon)

Everything Else:
250g udon noodles (this is the size of the packets I have)
2 tins of tuna in spring water, drained and fluffed up
1/4 cup wakame seaweed - this I didn't have on hand but you could substitute with nori sheets or edamame, probably? I didn't have those either!

To Serve:
Sliced spring onions
Furikake and/or toasted sesame seeds (you can toast your own, of course)

Prep: 
1. Soak the wakame if using according to package instructions, otherwise prepare nori by shredding into fine ribbons and/or preparing the edamame. 
2. Boil noodles, again according to package instructions.
3. Whisk all dressing ingredients together and put aside. 
4. Drain tuna, put in bowl and place aside. 
5. Drain noodles well then put into bowl with tuna and add the veggie component if you've added one. Pour dressing over and toss to coat. You can do a fancier presentation by just dressing the noodles and veggies then putting the tuna on top but this is nothing fancy so I didn't. 
6. Serve with toppings of choice.  

As the weights of my pantry ingredients (noodles and tuna) were slightly more than those specified in the original recipe, I may increase the dressing recipe by half next time although it was a lovely light dinner that came together quickly and felt very different for a pantry/quick meal. 

It's horribly inauthentic but you could use linguine pasta instead of udon noodles as I know not everyone has the option of using them due to cost/location reasons. I think we bought these as an aldi special buy some time ago (?). I ate some leftovers cold the day after and can confirm the flavours hold up well.

We also had some orange juice to use up as PB was finding it was causing a lot of acid reflux for him so I scaled up this Orange Juice Muffins with Greek Yogurt and made thirty six (!) muffins which are now in the freezer ready for (many!) mornings ahead. Greek yogurt is an absolute game-changer for muffins which I always had a touch of difficulty in getting them light and fluffy but any muffin recipe that uses greek yogurt is always a winner for me. 

Today was a bit different, PB took a day off work and we went to see the Wallace and Gromit exhibition at The Harris which has finally reopened. Original models, sets, storyboards and concept art (A Grand Day Out was originally going to be very different...) and it was a brilliant opportunity to look at objects crafted by multi-disciplined artists with such a staggering level of detail. Nick Park has done much for the city of Preston and this exhibition is another feather in that cap. 

Back to food! We decided to have lunch at Kimji which is a Korean place we've been to a couple of times. We were going to try the bentos on the lunch menu but we were waylaid by the specials menu (every time we go, this happens!) which was Halloween themed so we ordered a charcoal bao buns to share and a portion of Jjajangbap each but unfortunately they had no Jjajangbap left but they did very kindly let us preview the next special - chicken katsu - which was very nice. 

Spicier than you'd expect from a katsu but that actually made the dish for me since we have mild katsu at home fairly often. The charcoal bao buns were delicious - I preferred the texture of these and I'm not sure if it was due to the charcoal content changing the recipe or not...Kimji never disappoints. We're always too full to attempt a dessert even though everytime I go there that's what I want to try the most!

Afterwards, we wandered down to an Asian supermarket for some supplies (sesame oil, gochujang, miso, wakame, etc) and perhaps they are between deliveries but it didn't seem to have quite the usual level of choice in stock. Prices have gone up a fair bit too - recently an Asian supermarket has opened up much closer to us and it's much cheaper there but they're still building their stock range so we'll see how it develops there. Then across the road to Moon Moon, a Chinese bakery, where we bought a slice of Japanese chiffon cheesecake and a slice of pandan + mango swiss roll for later on.  

A very tasty and fun day! 

The First Half of October

The autumn chill is something I welcome much more on an emotional level than a physical one since being diagnosed with fibromyalgia. That chill seeps into my joints like nothing else and my temperature regulation seems to finally just give up, throwing up hands and letting whatever happens, happen. I am, still, an autumn person though. Cozy socks, books about little animals acting human, a crochet blanket project and of course, the food. I'm much better at devising (and executing!) autumn/winter meals and tend to start coming undone in the summer as my gotos are too much effort in the heat or unsuitable. Hopefully with this blog acting as a little record and encouraging push to try new things, that'll change but autumn we start with. 

Because I live in a neurodiverse household and live with chronic illness, cooking isn't always the balm it used to be. Planning, prepping and actually cooking (then cleaning, storing, etc) become much bigger operations when you're operating on a physical spoon budget so I tend to prep batches when possible, invest in equipment to cut down on physical activity and store as mindfully as I can using the fridge/freezer. I'm not perfect, no-one is, and there are still times when we resort to takeaway or an easily thrown together dinner of readymade tortellini and pesto. 

Anyway, plenty of time to go into the living that happens around food, what did I make this past weekend? 

I did split up the prep over Saturday/Sunday/Monday simply because of the current flare I'm going through. I thought about easy ways to feed ourselves first and foremost. Cost is always important but we don't overly eat out and try to cook from scratch so we tend to have a weekly spend of around £50 pounds, more if we need to do a stock up and we have costco membership which we visit infrequently and more for household items than anything else. Any food our dog needs comes from his set aside budget. 

A rummage in the freezer revealed a boston pork butt (heehee) which I cooked in the slow cooker following Midwest Foodies recipe but omitted frying onions (like I said, flare) and added onion powder to the rub to make up somewhat. I shredded the meat, discarded the broth (again, flare but this was regrettable!) and made a batch of sage + onion stuffing. Along with some bake at home rolls from lidl (surprisingly good!) this has made plenty of sandwiches for us. 

For breakfast/dessert options I prepped these sticky toffee baked oats with the alterations of using peanut butter instead of almond butter (cheaper) and blending the mixture entirely in my Magimix foodprocessor. This does cost some texture but for ease, I was okay with that. I ended up increasing the recipe by 1.5 to use up another banana so have frozen some portions for the second half of the month. So far, really tasty and filling! Highly recommend this. 

The final prepped item was salmon and walnut pate made using a new to me ingredient (tinned salmon) which I made in my beloved Magimix using sunflower seeds instead of walnuts (since I had lots on hand, I often use them in pesto making) and less olive oil than the recipe asked for. Delicious though I'm interested in using herbs/spices next time to make some mini flavoured pots up. Been spreading this on toast and crackers. 

No recipes/sources for the next couple of things, I'm afraid (one is from a youtube video I cannot find again and the other is a facebook recipe which...same) but on Sunday, PB made wildflower honey fudge after we bought some at the end of last month from a farmer's market. Very sweet! We have plenty stashed away in the fridge...and probably will be eating fudge until Christmas...

Finally, I threw together a rice pudding in the slow cooker yesterday since we had some gold top (from the fudge making) to use up. Recipe was as follows:

1 cup pudding rice
4 cups milk (any kind you like/have)
1/4 sweetener of choice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract 
1 teaspoon spices of choice (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, mixed)

You cook it on medium (I don't have a medium setting so did high) for an hour then turn it low for three hours or so. If it starts looking dry before done, add another cup of milk (which I did). The issue really is that rice pudding does need a bit of stir and this didn't turn out to be a set it and forget it (apart from turning the temp down), it probably could have done with a good stir about half an hour in and then infrequent stirs after that as it came out a bit claggy/clumpy. I do think this is more likely down to my slow cooker simply being high or low with no medium but something to consider if you try it. 

As of today there is still pulled pork left which I'm thinking of making enchiladas with tomorrow and tonight, PB is doing his famous baked potatoes with tuna + sweetcorn mayo on top. Delicious!