make your own

Falafel-ey Good!

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

So I’m a huge fan of making everything from scratch and some things are really so very simple, it does make you wonder why you ever bought them from a shop before! So here is a (sort of) recipe I’ve handed out on countless occasions to different people over the years. Much loved by veggies and meat eaters alike, and also a favourite with kiddiewinks.

One of the very best things about this is that I always have everything I need to make this in the cupboards so it is a perfect fast food when there looks like there is nothing in the fridge! They’re absolutely lovely cold so are perfect for picnics and go really well with a little home made hummus (also easy peasy lemon squeezy btw). Dang that’s another post I must write: The delights of homemade hummus. Yum. Dammit, I’m making myself hungry writing this.

Back to the falafel… It’s easy to scale up the recipe here. I use one tin of chickpeas as a starting point. It’s easy then to use another tin and double the other bits below or I’ve used kidney beans or butter beans on occasion too which are also grand.

A tin of chickpeas drained well 

A red onion

A couple of cloves of garlic (to your taste)

Some ground coriander, cumin, parsley and paprika. Again to your taste. Probably half a teaspoon of the two Cs then a quarter of parsley (fresh from your herb garden dans la summer months of course) and a sprinkle of paprika and a little salt and pepper.

Then a heaped tablespoon of flour and blitz in your food processor until it’s smooth-ish. Mix done. You should be able to shape it in your hands without it being too wet. Add a touch more flour if it’s a bit soggy. 

  
In fact these aren’t far off of a simple veggie bean burger if you added a little shredded carrot and green pepper, some sweetcorn and used a tin of mixed chilli beans (in water not sauce!) Can you see where I’m going with my approach here? There’s really nothing to it, just chuck it all together!

The above (one tin) makes four burgers which I shape and fry lightly on each side for 4-5 minutes until well coloured. Great in a burger bun with a slice of grilled halloumi over the top and some spicy summer relish. Or just on their own with some homemade herby potato wedges and serve with creme fraiche with some freshly chopped chives over the top. Ding dong fabulous.

You could add in sweetcorn, mashed sweet potato, spinach, anything you’ve got lying about really.

I will confess to recently purchasing a dirty fryer (a mini version of the ones you get in restaurants) recently. So if you want real proper little round morsels of Middle Eastern deliciousness, then the above mix will make 8-10 perfectly sized balls which you just pop into your fryer at 190 for around two minutes until golden brown. Drain and serve. You will not get better anywhere I can wholeheartedly promise you. 

  
Have a go and post your photos below of your work! It’s so easy I promise and takes literally five minutes flat. Barely longer than ripping open a packet! As I said before, they are great cold the next day so try putting into a pitta or a wrap with loads of fresh salad and some hummus. Glorious. Falafel-ey good in fact.

Oh no, not another bloody courgette! 

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

I feel that today needs a little fanfare really. It’s the day of my first courgette of the year. First of many I hope. As a longstanding vegetablearian I truly love these versatile veggies.

But my poor hubby, a caveman-esque manly meat eater with a great love of all things steak, did get fed up of the things last year.

The glut. Ah yes, you know it? The London bus syndrome of the vegetable world. You plant your seeds in March, then mother them daily until BOOM they become unruly teenagers one weekend when your back’s turned and the first fruits appear. Then they all arrive at once and grow at an unrivalled rate of knots.

So over the years, I have devised many many ways of using these little babies in all sorts of recipes… I’m not saying I sneak them in as such… Well yes, you’ve got me, sometimes I do. Don’t tell the hubster.

He suggested that I write a book. Oh no, not another bloody courgette! was born, in my mind at least. Basically this is what he would say to me every night when he got in from work from the onset of July’s first harvest.

Last night we enjoyed our first one of the year, it was sensational and in the form of one of my very favourite things, Zuchinni Fritti. I’m eagerly awaiting the next one and as supply becomes more plentiful, I shall stuff and batter up some flowers too. Prosecco chilling in the fridge? Check.

I’m going to list my recipes here as you’ll be needing them as we hit the season of plentiful harvest and I’ll write them all up as soon as I can with links to each one… So please sign up to my blog and keep checking back here for more recipes!!!

*Courgette and feta fritters

*Roasted courgettes with onions, halloumi and herbs

*Courgette and goats cheese quiche

*Courgette and pepper frittata

*Stuffed baked courgette boats

*Courgette soup

*Chocolate courgette cake

*Lemon courgette cake

*Zucchini fritti (healthy)

*Zucchini fritti (less healthy!)

*Courgette flowers

*Courgette and pesto tagliatelle

*Courgette lasagne

*Paneer & vegetable tikka kebabs – great for a BBQ

*Courgette & broad bean summer salad

*Courgette & goats cheese crostini

*Sweet courgette & apple chutney

*Spiced courgette chutney

*Spicy summer BBQ relish

I’d love to know if anyone has any more genius ways to use them… Please do share.

And one day I really will write that book I swear…

Bon appetit! X

We’re jammin’, we’re jammin’

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

We hope you like jammin’ too… 🎶

The fruit season is upon us, and I keep being bombarded on a daily basis with photographs on the allotment sites on Facebook of people with bucket loads of fruit asking what to do with it all. 

Not. Jealous. At. All. 

Sadly, although I’ve had a pretty good strawberry crop from my first efforts this year, the earwigs seem to think that I am offering some kind of Michelin star strawberry restaurant for them all. As soon as the strawberries go that perfect deep ruby red, Mr Earwig and chums have a nibble-a-thon and destroy the lot. I’m not quite sure what to do about it but I think I’m going to have to move all the plants elsewhere for next year. 

I have to confess to having serious jam withdrawal. Since we moved to the new house, my preserving pan has been confined to the larder cupboard but this weekend, I simply could not let the sunny days pass without doing some jammin’. So I trotted off to the PYO farm and picked a cardboard trug load of strawberries to replace the ones the earwigs stole. 

I’ve made plenty of jams in the past but never strawberry strangely and I need the perfect homemade one to serve with an afternoon tea I have planned in a couple of weeks. Some friends of mine have just got engaged and are coming round for tea to celebrate… I am planning scones and cream and jam and earl grey and bunting, the whole works. This is quite some celebration, he’s 93 years young. 

Everyone says how hard it is to get strawberry jam to set as strawberries are naturally low in pectin. So I decided to use jam sugar (not preserving sugar) with added pectin as well as the juice of a lemon. Seemed like common sense to me. 

Here is my recipe:

900g strawberries, freshly picked – take the stalk out and chop roughly 

800g jam sugar 

Juice of a whole lemon 

(Put a saucer in the freezer now)

Stick all of the above in a preserving pan and start attacking it all with a potato masher. I can’t abide lumps so this is for those who prefer a smoother consistency jam. Keep going until it’s all one big liquid bubbling away then keep stirring (wooden spoon) and keep boiling for ten minutes. Don’t stop stirring or you risk it catching on the bottom of the pan. 

They say you should boil to 105 degrees but I’ve got two thermometers and can never get above a hundred. So once you’ve hit ten minutes, grab your cold saucer from the freezer and pop a little bit of the jam mix on. If it starts to solidify and ‘skin’ straight away, it’s done. If not, bubble some more and check every minute. It certainly shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes total. 

Once you’re happy with the set, skim off any froth from the top with a large metal spoon and pop in half a teaspoon of butter.

 
Re jars, I am all about recycling so mine are old ones with labels soaked off, put through the dishwasher then in the oven at 100. Use a teatowel to get them out! I ladel my jam into a glass jug then pour into jars, do up the lid, then turn upside down to cool. 

Pop your dirty pan and equipment straight in the sink with washing up liquid and it will clean up perfectly. Leave it and you’ll be scrubbing like a mad person. 

That’s it, done. No problem with the set at all, in fact it’s pretty darn perfick as Pa Larkin would say. And the flavour is out of this world good. Now that I know how amazeballs this recipe is, I shall make a swimming pool sized load next week. 

 
Happy summertime peeps. Hopefully there will be some raspberry jam on the cards soon too… And maybe black currant? And then it will be blackberry season!!! Excited much? Heck yes. 

Must.Make.Scones.Now 

Ooooh, how I love a leftover.

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

How I love a leftover! Does that make me a User-Upper I wonder? Thrifty McThrifterson at your service Sir, how may I help?

Anyone who knows me will know that I have a great love for a leftover. Now I’m not just talking Christmas day dinner made into bubble and squeak the next day, (which is something to behold with a fried egg on top), I’m talking non food items as well.

I was genuinelly appalled this week to read that families in the UK throw away an estimated 20% off of the fresh food they buy each week. What an astonishing waste. Conversely I was taken aback with positivity reading that supermarkets in France are being fined for destroying unsold food and so are donating to charities or finding another use for it. It’s certainly a start and a move in the right direction.

Too many people go home and think ‘what do I want for dinner?’ I know people who go to the supermarket almost every day in fact. For me, it’s ‘what do we have and what needs using and how can I use it as the base for my dish tonight?’ Some of the best meals are made with random fridge finds and I always make enough for lunch the next day. It drives me mad seeing people buying plastic sandwiches for lunch when you can have something amazing with literally no more effort, just stick it in a plastic tub and off you go.

Back to green peppers and red tomatoes and Ready Steady Cook.

I think it’s important to have all of your store cupboard staples to hand and by these I mean things like tinned tomatoes, chickpeas, kidney beans, dry pasta, rice, couscous, quinoa then all of your herbs, fresh and dried. Frozen peas and sweetcorn too and I keep ’emergency’ frozen butternut squash too, that’s a revelation.

Random veg in your fridge you’re not sure what to do with? Pasta bake or vegetable lasagne. Cook them all off with tomatoes and herbs and stir through freshly cooked pasta or make a cheese sauce and get out that old packet of dry lasagne sheets from the back of the cupboard and layer up. Nom Nom Nom.

Got a limp pepper lurking in the bottom of the fridge? Don’t just bin him, chop him in half longways and stuff with couscous. Top with feta/halloumi/goats cheese, whatever you have. Triumphant.

Nothing much except far too much milk which runs out of date tomorrow? Macaroni cheese. That’s also great when you have leftover cheeseboard items lurking in your fridge. I’m very much a fan of Delia’s all in one cheese sauce method btw, though it goes against every ounce of my learning at school the ‘proper way’ to make a roux. Or a Michel as I like to call it.

My courgette fritters are a staple favourite and were born from a user-upper meal. You can change the ingredients slightly depending on what you have about. Sometimes I swap onions for leeks or feta for halloumi. Totally depends what’s in. I’ll post a how to when I make them next.

Aside from the food stuff leftovers, did you read my post Do you wanna shorten curtains? See that left me with a huge width of beautiful Laura Ashley Corby check fabric. Not quite enough depth to make cushions, but I couldn’t just throw it away and a few days later KABOOM! – the idea popped into my head to make a matching draught excluder. Just the thing for a 390 year old house.

So I measure the door, mock up the rough size in lining fabric, re-measure, all looks good so I go and find an old cushion inner that’s a bit flat loitering in the airing cupboard and cut him open to give me all the stuffing I need!!! I knew there was a reason I hadn’t thrown him away. Then I make the cover, cutting it 1cm bigger all round than the inner. Pin and then sew three edges on the reverse side, turn it in on itself so you have the correct side out. Put the stuffed liner inside, and to seal the last edge, turn it in on itself and seal across. If it needs more than a sponge down and a full on wash in the machine, it will go in just fine so I can’t see the point in making a removable cover.

Here he is! Taaaa-daaaahhhh! Matches the curtains perfectly and he was sort of free, made with just leftovers. Made in less than an hour and looks brilliant, I’m so chuffed. And nobody else has one quite like him 🙂