My friend Jean gave me a (subtle, of course) nudge last week, about the dearth of recipes bursting forth (or failing to burst forth in this case) from aviewfrommykitchen. Hmmm, must do better.
I have no excuse for this, other than terminal inertia, brought on by having no fixed timetable for anything at all. Not to mention that our meals of late have not exactly been inspiring – there are only so many recipes you need for cheese on toast or bangers & mash.
I haven’t been entirely idle – I signed up for sourdough-baking school and my sourdough starters have never been so well-tended, or so well-used. Our kitchen is permanently coated with a light dusting of flour, and I seem to endlessly have chewing-gum-style dough stuck in my hair. We have home-baked bread almost all of the time, and our next door neighbour also gets to share – she is a key worker and deserves treats; a girl’s got to keep body and soul together in these difficult times. I also feel guilty every morning when, from the safety of my duvet, I hear the sounds of her de-icing her car, something I admit that I have never done in my 57 years until last week (even then I managed to re-ice the windscreen by very foolishly using the screen washer when we were part way down the drive to the main road – the water froze on contact with the screen, completely obscuring my view, and I nearly smacked straight into the guy from two doors down – ooops).
Continue reading “‘Dal’ soup with spinach”
I have set myself a challenge of going to the supermarket an absolute maximum of once a week (though I do allow myself a quick dash into the village store to get fresh milk and fresh fruit in between). Robin is staying at home apart from our daily walk on the Bissoe Trail, owing to his advancing years and marginally dodgy ticker, so I figure that the fewer times I expose myself (and ergo him) to our new friend Corona, the better for everyone.
More cold weather, more soup. I could happily live on soup – there are so many variations that each one is like having a completely different meal. From something fast to throw together after work, like 
Despite the mostly inclement weather, we’re enjoying being back in Cornwall, and it is especially novel not sharing our house with the plumbers, carpenters and electricians. We quite miss them though – they are a happy and helpful bunch – though we don’t miss the early morning start time. They were here last week finishing off a few bits and pieces, but I think that is everything now until the summer. Robin is muttering about ‘getting up the floor of the conservatory’ to install underfloor heating, as that is our only dining space and it can be parky at this time of year. Personally, I favour a large rug. The thought of having the floor up fills me with horror. I am hoping he will have forgotten about it by the summer. 
I’m having a mangetout crisis. More accurately, I am having a NOT-mangetout crisis. I bought a large bag of what I thought were mangetouts in the greengrocer, but, when I got them home, they turned out to be something that is somewhere between a mangetout and a fully-fledged pea.
‘Greetings from snowy Cornwall’ is not a phrase that is uttered very often – we don’t get a great deal of snow around these parts, what with our southerly latitude and the Gulf Stream being just slightly to the west of our garden. Unfortunately the warming influences of the North Atlantic Drift are being ever so slightly outdone by Storm Emma at the moment, and we are stranded at the top of a lethal sheet-ice hill, surrounded by several inches of snow.
Christmas appears to be almost upon us, though it will be a quiet event in our household this year. Last year we went to Prague, having spent much of 2016 to-ing and fro-ing to various distant bits of the world, so we promised ourselves a much quieter year in 2017. That didn’t exactly go to plan, what with buying and renovating a house in Cornwall and going backwards and forwards between here and Turkey, so we shall be very grateful not to have to shop for – and entertain – legions of guests, or to be cooking (or eating) mountains of rich food. We have friends coming for the new year, but we’re looking forward to spending the next few days builder-free, not doing chores and generally chilling out by the fire with a book. 
We are back home in Turkey and I have an entire kitchen at my disposal: working oven, tick; working hob, tick; fridge on the same floor – indeed in the same room – as the rest of the cooking facilities, tick. Food in the fridge? Errrrr, scratch that.
Still no kitchen, but things are moving along. Today, the carpenters magically constructed our built-in seating area, which is exactly as I had pictured it in my head. I showed them a photo of the kind of thing I wanted and they built it to fit the space – the seats even lift up so that we can store our outside cushions beneath them. When it comes to anything that involves a drill or a screwdriver, shall we just say that it’s better if I just stick to making the coffee, and it always amazes me that people can just knock up something like this from some apparently random pieces of wood in the space of a few hours. 
I realise I have been somewhat remiss at posting recipes of late, but there haven’t been too many exciting things coming out of my cooking cupboard – and certainly nothing remotely photogenic. My challenge is to cook things using no more than two pans, as I only have a two-ring electric camping hob at my disposal. Unfortunately, the choice of temperature seems to be ‘nuclear hot’ or ‘off’. No simmering then – I could kick myself for not remembering to bring our rarely-used slow-cooker over from Turkey. 
aviewfrommykitchen.com 