Soup, Sewing And Getting Stoned

Having carefully made my menu plans for the month, Bob mentioned at the weekend that the local clergy were coming for lunch today. We were supposed to be having soup and fruit, so I decided that I was not changing my plans. Then I was asked to do a day’s Supply Teaching. Yippee! But that meant making sure I’d prepared well beforehand for the lunch.

So on Tuesday night, I made some minestrone soup using what I had to hand – a jar of basic tomato and herb sauce, a can of chopped tomatoes, a can of baked beans, one onion, 5 small potatoes and 2½ carrots.

I chopped and sautéed the veg, and added half the can of beans and the pasta sauce. I blitzed the tomatoes and remaining beans, in the liquidiser, and put it all in my big Le Creuset pot.

A spoonful of frozen peas, and a large handful of macaroni went in too, along with some seasoning, a few herbs and a splash of Worcester Sauce. I let it simmer for half an hour. It tasted fine.

I’d picked up some cheese and bread rolls half price in Sainsbury’s on Tuesday afternoon, along with some budget yogurts and basic apples and satsumas.

I went off to work leaving the dining room beautifully set out.

In the event, not everyone turned up – so we have lunches sorted for the remainder of the week!

I have decided to keep more careful notes of food spending this year, and have been scribbling things in an old notebook for the past week or so. However I thought a proper book would be good. We needed a ‘one-off’ project for Sewing Club tonight, so I fished out some old [but unused] exercise books from a box in the loft, and taught the girls how to make fabric covers.

I think that having a neat little book like this should inspire me to be more diligent about my notekeeping. Thus far this year I have spent just £7.73 on food [I admit that I had a good stock of tins and dry goods]

There has only been one downside to the ‘eating up stocks’ – the plums.

The glut of cherry plums from the tree on the church car park, and the trees on the edge of the heath near Cornerstones meant we had; jars of jam, jars of chutney, cherry plum gin, bottled plums, and frozen plums. Now the plums in the jam and chutney were stoned before I cooked them. The plums in the gin were removed before it was drunk at Christmas. But the bottle and frozen plums still had their stones in.

Last week I made and froze two plum crumbles using one of the Kilner jars of plums. Unfortunately I didn’t think about the hassle of removing the stones as we ate our puds. An average of 15 sharp, tiny stones per portion! Bob and I have decided that any future plum dishes will have to be stoned prior to cooking!