I learned only fairly recently that hummus is not only dead easy to make for oneself but it actually turns out cheaper than buying it ready made in pots. Beyond a bit of olive oil, you see here the entirety of the ingredients. Chuck the peas (rinse them first), the lemon’s juice, a tablespoon of the tahini, a teaspoon of the garlic, some salt and the oil into a food processor. Turn it on, and three minutes later, you’re dipping.
Took the wife out for dinner. Out of this kitchen came — or going on the time, had already come — a couple of reasonably decent fish dishes. I don’t believe I have yet to meet a chef who looks like the roly-poly stereotype depicted in the cartoon (and that picture is really why I took the shot): I don’t believe most of them have the time to eat enough to get fat, to be honest.
Truffles have a marvellous flavour and I like cooking with them. But they’re also expensive, of course, so only tend to appear in the kitchen at certain points in the year — like, not long after Christmas, when the pot pictured here was one of my gifts. The grand opening has just taken place. Expect several truffle-flavoured meals in the next few days.
These various beetroot all came out of the ground within a couple of feet of each other. I’m sure they were all from the same pack of seeds…. I like the diversity of colour, also that this shot does imply they had all been in the ground ten minutes before it was taken: which was, more or less, the case. I think some pickling is in order.
I notice that almost exactly three years ago, on 7/10/21, I illustrated that there were still plums on our tree (albeit being eaten by insects). This year, those fruit were all gone by the end of August. But it’s time for the apple tree to pay off. It never matches the production rate of its neighbour, but it does just fine each year. On this shot I note also the matching car behind (yes, our kitchen is that close to the road).
If my name were Peter Piper, could it be said that, on this blog, if I (Peter Piper) depicted a pack of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers were in the pack that Peter Piper depicted?
If English is not your first language and any of that makes any sense, then I congratulate you.
Four pounds of blackberries, all foraged from the roadsides within 200 yards of home, have just been combined with four pounds of sugar. Four pounds of sugar is a lot. But, an hour or so later, there were six jars of very nice jam ready to see us through the winter. Making jam may seem a terribly middle-class thing to do but it ain’t hard, y’know.
The garden doesn’t produce vast amounts of food — believe me, self-sufficiency in vegetables is something we are a long way from achieving (though for a few weeks each summer we manage better with fresh fruit). But when edible products do emerge, they get used. We haven’t had fresh peas and beans for years.
Sometimes Clare gets the final choice of shot on a day and she says that this one has ‘nice colours and shapes’. It tasted pretty good, too. It wasn’t ever going to be an exciting shot today insofar as the most interesting thing that happened was a webinar on pensions: this says a lot about not only the day, but also where I am in my life at this point.
And so breakfast, and then home again. Had the shot not captured the eye of the woman in the kitchen, there would have been nothing to show here: though I guess his ears are shapely enough.
Being 42 