Potluck Supper

I'm blogging early today as I'm going away again for a few days and I already know (partially) what I will be eating this evening. 

Mr VST and I are going to a fancy dress/ potluck supper tonight. It will be my first potluck but definitely not my first fancy dress. The whole potluck thing is an American idea where everyone takes a dish. I have made a leek, mushroom and feta tart and a white chocolate torte. I've also cooked a box of Linda McCartney sausage rolls to take with us and we've packed a jar of Mr VST's home made pickled onions. 

The leek tart is a VST own recipe which I will post later and the chocolate torte is kind of this one but with a hobnob base instead. 

Pasta pesto

I wasn't going to bother with dinner tonight. My digestive system is letting me know that I've eaten far too much and far too much junk over the last week. Mr VST suggested we finish off his home made pesto and it sounded like a good idea. If it is possible I think it was even more delicious this time round.

Bangers and Mash

I cooked for us this evening for the first time in what feels like ages! I made good old bangers and mash with onion gravy and served it with carrots and the last of the braised cabbage from the freezer.

Leek and potato soup

For lunch we finally had a good go at the cheese selection and cut the Christmas cake. We also had some of my Mum's home made mince pies. Both the pastry and mincemeat were home made. The pastry was so light it was amazing. Unfortunately this is due to large amounts of butter and vegetable fat! It also has some citrus peel in it. 

When we got home we defrosted some of my leek and potato soup that I had frozen from last week and nibbled on some of the goodies we had been given for Christmas.

Leftovers

The few days after Christmas have become a delicious blur of leftovers. We went visiting and had lunch with Mr VST's Auntie, Uncle, Cousin, her partner and their 10 week old baby and had a delicious vegetarian cottage pie with brussel sprouts and broccoli. For desert we had a chocolatey almond thing which was nice and then some proper home made mince pies and Christmas cake.

Back with my family we had some veggie sausages and bubble and squeaks followed by the left over trifle and Return to the Black Forest (I can never get enough of this stuff!)

Bubble and Squeak

I think this must be a uniquely British tradition, mashing together all the leftover vegetables into patties and then frying them. Bubble and squeak is a great meal, one I look forward to at Christmas. This year Mum mashed up the left over roast potatoes and parsnips with the carrots and brussel sprouts and added some eggs and cream. They were delicious. We had them for lunch with some left over mushroom wellington, mashed swede with parmesan and Yorkshire puddings. Second course was more Return to the Black Forest and Christmas pudding.

My first all-veggie Christmas

It's a question that we get asked quite a lot around Christmas - what do you have for Christmas dinner?

The answer to that is something different every year and all the trimmings. Usually there is a turkey cooking somewhere and either my Mum or Mr VST's Mum makes us something veggie as an alternative and then we have the same accompaniments as everyone else. This year there were five of us for Christmas dinner, three of which were vegetarians and so the meat eaters decided that they would have a veggie Christmas which made this my first all-veggie Christmas ever!

We started the day with buck's fizz, croissants and brioche.

We enjoyed our breakfast, prepared some vegetables and the main and then went for a walk in the snow before coming back and putting the veggies on.

My Mum made us mushroom Wellingtons for our main. It's another BBC Good Food recipe but to make it more Christmassy she used cranberry sauce instead of spinach. We nibbled on nuts before sitting down for dinner at about 4pm. It was a lovely relaxed day. I think it was something to do with not having a turkey to worry about!


We started with a lovely pear salad with the most delicious cheesy dressing.


The main meal consisted of mushroom wellingtons, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, a slightly unconventional Yorkshire pudding (which I made) carrots, mashed swede with parmesan and of course the token brussel sprout!

I tried to restrain my intake of Christmas dinner as I knew I had to keep some space free for the duo of desserts and then cheese and biscuits and Christmas cake but I couldn't resist another of the delicious roast potatoes. They were AH-MA-ZING!

We all had to have a (long) rest between dinner and puddings. After a rest on the sofa watching Dr Who we went back to the table for puddings.

I wasn't a big fan of Christmas pudding until this year. I always had some but never enjoyed it as much as I did as what has become the family's traditional alternative to Christmas Pudding, Delia's Return to the Black Forest. This year Mum used a Delia recipe for the Christmas Pudding too and it was absolutely delicious.

I can't describe how delicious both of these were and I can't remember if I managed to squeeze in any cheese or crackers but they were there so I probably tried but I know we didn't get around to cutting the Christmas cake.

'Twas the night before Christmas...

..and all through the house lots of creatures were stirring and having a mini Christmas!

We had a mini Christmas with my brother on Christmas Eve because he was spending Christmas day with his girlfriend and her family. Our Christmas Eve included a lovely meal, present swapping and a game of Who Wants to be a Millionaire (girls vs boys, the boys won :()

The meat eaters had smoked salmon fillets and the veggies had leek, mushroom and goat's cheese strudels. This was all cooked by my wonderful mother but the recipe for the veggie strudels was from BBC Good Food and can be found here. Both options were served with roasted new potatoes and green beans.

...and for pudding a lovely trifle. It was a Delia recipe with bananas in and home made custard. 

We didn't forget Father Christmas of course and left him some Bailey's, a home made sweet and one of my cinnamon mince pies as well as a carrot for Rudolph.

Korma

A take away with friends in Pill near Bristol this evening. A lovely vegetable korma, plain rice, dahl sampa, mushroom bhaji and peshwari naan and a quality street to finish - Stuffed now!




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Leek and potato soup

The Christmas eating has gone well so far this year. I kicked off my mince pie habit in November and haven't looked back. I have eaten an awful lot of sweet stuff the last three weeks and although I was cooking for one this evening I fancied something proper. There was one lonely leek left in the fridge and so I decided to combine it with some butter, two potatoes and some veggie stock and make myself a lovely soup. I had it with a little block of Wensleydale and cranberry cheese and some crackers and it really hit the spot. 

Pasta, pesto and roasted veggies

I didn't end up having Mr VST's pasta and pesto for lunch today because I didn't cook myself any pasta and also because it is quite garlic-y and I didn't want to make my clients or work colleagues suffer my garlic breath all afternoon!

As we are going away for Christmas I am trying to use up all the food in the fridge and to avoid buying anymore as it will just go off. Somehow I ended up with lots of green peppers so I roasted them with some red onions and mixed them into some pasta with lovely home made pesto.

I then decided to use up the bananas in a banana bread but that's another story.....

Gingerbread Cake with Orange Icing

I made this gingerbread cake to take to our Kernow Christmas meal. The recipe called for '2 tbsp stem ginger (from a jar), chopped'. I had seen some root ginger at the local market stall and thought that this was the same thing, halfway through the recipe, I phoned my mum to check and she informed me of the differences.

The recipe called for two tablespoons of stem ginger, I used about a tablespoon sized lump of the fresh ginger anyway. I also don't like the taste of ground ginger so much so I used a teaspoon and a half of ground ginger and made the rest up with mixed spice. 

I baked it and it took about ten minutes longer than the recipe suggests. The orange icing was easy to make and I didn't grate the orange rind as they suggest in the picture but it turned out OK. I was worried that it didn't look as good as the picture, it's different maybe even better and it tastes pretty good too. 

Winter vegetable stew and awesome dumplings - left overs

Six inches of snow was all it took for justice to grind to a rolling halt today! Court didn't get started until about 10.30-11am and they sat through lunch which meant that I did too. I had taken some left over winter veggie stew for lunch but didn't get a chance to get back to the office to eat it so lunch consisted of biscuits and chocolate coins from the weekend.

When I got home Mr VST and I went snowboarding for an hour which was great! I discovered that clearing snow and snowboarding are the way to burn calories in this weather.

As I didn't get the chance to eat my stew for lunch I had it for dinner instead.

Mr VST really fancied some pesto and so he made some with the basil that was growing like crazy on our windowsill. He used this recipe and I had a bite and it was GOOD. I'll be having some for lunch tomorrow. 

Lunch with the in-laws

My stomach will soon be HUGE. I had my third multi-course meal in as many days for lunch today and am unable to run off the monster amount of calories due to the icy conditions. Back to low fat simple meals and no naughty snacks in January I think.

As a result of this I've only been able to drink tea and eat some gingerbread cake for dinner so I'll blog about my lunch instead.

To start we had crackers with mushroom pate and cream cheese, followed by homemade veggie sausage pizza with yummy potato skins and carrots and then apple crumble and custard to finish.

Some might think that this is a little strange. It is perfectly normal for Mr VST who is famous for his pizza and broccoli combo, now you know where he gets it from!

Kernow Christmas

Saturday night's meal was part of our Christmas celebrations with friends in Cornwall. We were lucky enough to be made a roast dinner consisting of roast beef (for the meat eaters), roast potatoes, peas, roasted butternut squash with a creamy chilli sauce, parsnips roasted with parmesan and gravy and Yorkshire puddings. It was truly delicious.

This was followed by puddings, yes plural, my gingerbread cake with orange icing, a chocolate cheesecake and berry crumble and cream. I had a bit of all three and could barely move but it was worth it!

This was then followed by a board games, chocolate, secret santa, more board games and cheese and biscuits!

Work Christmas Meal

Some people dread their work Christmas party but not me. I'm lucky enough to have a great job that I love and  lovely colleagues, who are all very different characters but genuinely fond of each other.

We went to Carluccio's for our Christmas meal but started with a few mulled wines in a local pub first (at about 4pm).

The meal at Carluccio's was a 5 course extravaganza. We were greeted with prosecco and Christmas crackers (with chocolate Santas in them) followed by starters. Lots of people had the antipasto but I went for the spicy parsnip soup which was nicer than I was expecting. It was quite delicate in flavour and a very light soup rather than the thick creamy stuff that I make.

This was followed by lasagne de verdu, a lasagne made with mushrooms and courgettes which was nice but pretty average. I was not disappointed by my pudding though. The chocolate bread and butter pudding or pasticcio di cioccolato as it was called was absolutely delicious. It had just the right amount of chocolate.

We were then served coffee and chocolates and cheese at the same time! I'm not a big coffee drinker but the chocolate was delicious. The cheese was served on plates for two which had giant crackers on and three small blocks of cheese, one was a hard, taleggio type cheese, there was a soft port salut type cheese and a blue one too. I did try the blue cheese but I still don't like it. This was served with celery and honey. I've never tried honey with cheese before but it was good!

We also had rather a lot to drink and I wasn't feeling my best this morning when I got up to go to work and it didn't occur to me to check that I was actually needed. Turns out I wasn't and I could really have done with a bit more sleep. Oh well. Feeling very Christmassy now and am off to another Christmas party with my friends in Cornwall this evening.

What did you do for your work Christmas party this year?

Winter vegetable stew and awesome dumplings

When I went to the veggie stall today they didn't have any courgettes or aubergines to go with the peppers and mushrooms that I usually put in my stew but they did have a winter veg pack with 6 carrots, a swede, two onions, and two parsnips (all for £1.50!), so I decided to experiment and go with the flow!

I remember these vegetables being quite bitter when I was younger and I have avoided them on the whole since then. I was very surprised at how delicious my stew was. I also added a bit of mature cheddar to my dumpling mix. They fluffed up like crazy and made delicious light, fluffy dumplings.

Cottage pie with sweet potato mash

Made this before going out for a walk and then ate it when we got back and it was really yummy. The mash was a little sweeter than normal though. I bought my sweet potatoes from the 'Continental Shop' which is packed full of delicious and exotic goodies. The potatoes were labelled sweet-potatoes but had a darker skin than normal and when I peeled them they were white inside rather than the usual pale orange colour. I've googled it and I'm not sure whether they were a different kind of sweet potato or whether they were yams?!Whatever they were they made a cracking sweet mash for my cottage pie.

Fudge-tastic!

So the only Christmas goodies that I have made but not yet blogged about are the batches of white chocolate and Bailey's fudge and dark chocolate, orange and Morgan's Spiced Rum fudge.

I may have mentioned before that I discovered the white chocolate fudge last Christmas and it went down a treat! I then made it for my wedding guests as favours. Me, my Mum and little sister made 110 bags of it (about 5 batches) over the bank holiday weekend.

I decided to make some more this year as Christmas gifts.

I thought that I'd experiment and make some different flavours so I used dark chocolate and Morgan's spiced rum and orange juice. It went down well but it wasn't as creamy as the white chocolate and Bailey's.

Veggie Mexican

Had veggie Mexican for dinner tonight and then baked and maked some more fudge (a batch of peanut butter fudge and a batch of white chocolate and Bailey's) and a batch of cinnamon mince pies - phew! I'm tired now.

Leek and potato frittata with ratatouille

Tonight's meal was a variation on a summer staple for us. In the summer I made it with spring onions but today I made it with leeks instead and it was lovely. In the Summer we had it with salad but it's Winter and although salad is available in the supermarkets with no seasons and its cold outside and I don't feel like eating cold food so I thought I'd make a kind of ratatouille on the side. I fried off a small red onion, some aubergine and mushrooms and then added a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and tin of chopped tomatoes and let it simmer down. The result was really yummy, I'm just not sure it went with the frittata!

Delia's dark chocolate and orange biscuits

Last weekend I started making and baking for Christmas. I decided to make some goody bags for my Grandparents and Aunties and Uncles. Into the goody bag went a combination of peanut butter fudge, dark chocolate and Morgan's spiced fudge, Bailey's and white chocolate fudge and Delia's dark chocolate and orange biscuits.

I'm sure I've mentioned it before but I'm more of a Jamie than a Delia in the kitchen. The biscuits are one of Delia's recipes from her Christmas book I believe. I made them about 5 years ago one Christmas with my little sister and they were the essence of Christmas in a biscuit! They are a bit fiddly though. The orange flavour comes from the grated rind of two oranges and the juice of about one of them. You cream together fat (in my vegetarian case cookeen, vegetable fat, butter, and caster sugar and then add an egg and flour you then mix in the orange rind and dark chocolate chopped into little pieces and mix in the freshly squeezed orange juice to make it all stick together.

They seemed to make forever to make (it probably didn't help that I was making a million other things at the same time!) and my oranges weren't very flavoursome, on top of that I forgot to put the chocolate in so I melted it and dipped the biscuits in it instead. The end result wasn't as good as I remember to be honest.

Weekend Posts - Friday, Saturday, Sunday

This vegetarian ate a lot over the weekend! There was a big family gathering in Wales to celebrate a big birthday for my Mum as well as three other December birthdays and my Uncle coming over from New Zealand with his wife. Lots of celebrating and eating was done.

So Friday night we ate at The Angel in Llandeilo. Mr VST and I shared some delicious nachos with salsa and cheese and then I had a spicy mushroom and bean tagine (with chips) and Mr VST had some stuffed mushrooms both of which were delicious and for pudding we shared an a chocolate fudge cake with ice cream. There was such a lovely warm, friendly, Christmassy atmosphere in there, it was a great way to start the weekend.

Saturday all the family and a few friends came over to the cottage we were staying in. Everyone brought some food with them and WOW! Although there were 26 of us altogether there was still too much food! We baked some potatoes and I made a vegetable chilli but there was also meaty chilli, cheese and biscuits, chocolate muffins, birthday cake, cherry lattice, apple crumble pie. This meal was then repeated for lunch on Sunday!


Nothing better than lots of good food and good company. A lovely time was had by all.

Jacket, beans and veggie sausage

I always find it difficult to decide what to eat when I'm on my own. It doesn't seem worth cooking and leaving loads of leftovers just for me. Mr VST always goes for something 'naughty' when he's feeding himself, usually pizza. I usually delve into the freezer. This evening I went for a jacket potato, baked beans and a Linda McCartney sausage.

I didn't always eat like this when alone. When I was a student I would make big batches of lasagne or shepherd's pie and freeze portions. What do you eat when you're cooking for one?

Mince Pies with Cinnamon Pastry

And for dessert I had a fantastic combination of mince pie and custard. It was heaven, I've been meaning to have it since I made these on Sunday night and have been so busy that I've just gobbled down a mince pie on its own instead. 

I was a little disappointed with my last batch of pies, the pastry was nothing special so having seen a recipe in the Sainsbury's magazine at the hairdressers that had ground almonds in it so I googled away and found this BBC recipe for Almondy Mince Pies. I still has a jar and a bit of Tesco Finest Mincemeat left to use and I wasn't that bothered by the almondy taste so I just used the pastry recipe and it is AMAZING! Cinnamon is my flavour of the Winter and it does make your mince pies a funny colour but it's worth it. 

And here is my mince pasty - equally as delicious!

Curry made with everything in the fridge!

I knew I had some veggies in the fridge and I thought I had enough for a curry but when I got in there as well as the usual pepper, courgette and aubergine there was a lonely parsnip and sweet potato too. I added all this to the mix with some mushrooms and then, not content with using everything floating around the fridge, I delved into the freezer to use up half a can of chickpeas that I had frozen (other half used in lentil soup). It was a great mix, I added the usual korma curry paste and all tasted good!

Mushroom and rice one-pot

Wow it really is cold out there tonight! I had a bit of an adventure out there in the cold while Mr VST made us a lovely Mushroom and Rice One Pot. Just what I needed when I got back.

Quorn mince tortilla stack

Thought I'd try a new recipe for meat-free Monday today. I don't know why I feel the need to make extra effort for Mondays as all my days are meat free but I'm sure I've had curry a few times on a Monday (it's so easy!). So tonight I went for a new recipe from my Quorn Kitchen cookbook. Not too difficult to make and surprisingly tasty, its one I'll be making again and it even looked like it did in the book!

It's quite high in calories per portion though which is the only thing that put me off. The recipe says to put cheese in each of the layers and to be honest I don't think it needs it so will try it without next time, just putting some on the top.

From English to French!

...Lunch that is. Of course the French would never use vegetable stock only beef would do but for us veggies French onion soup made with swiss bouillon stock is just as delicious as are the giant cheesy crutons!

Bangers, Mash, Onion Gravy, Braised Cabbage and Peas

A Sunday evening feast! Absolutely delicious of course and much needed after my weekend of making an baking. My back is still aching from standing all day! My goodies look (and taste) pretty good though, I'm pleased with them. I'll post about my baileys and white chocolate and dark choc, orange and rum fudge and my cinnamon mince pies when I can.

Chips

After a day of internet shopping, making and baking I couldn't be bothered to cook so Mr VST went to the chippie and we made our own chip butties...

The perfect English lunch

Mature cheddar, apple and chutney need I say more?

Ms Dahl's Peanut Butter Fudge

I'm a bit of a fudge-aholic since discovering this recipe for Baileys and White Chocolate Fudge last Christmas and so when I came across this recipe for peanut butter fudge I had to try it under the guise of making it for other people for Christmas of course!

It was extremely easy to make, no boiling cream and sugar for 45 minutes like the other recipe and it is delicious, very peanut-y but not quite as melt-in-the-mouth creamy as the baileys and white chocolate one.

I only caught a glimpse of one of the TV programs but the delicious Miss Dahl's recipe book is on my Christmas list so I hope all her recipes are as easy and tasty as this one.