When cooking in bulk goes horribly, horribly wrong...

I'm a great fan of cooking in bulk when I can - what's not to love about only having to cook something once and the prospect of a quick tasty meal to be saved for another day?

A while ago I made a large batch of Million Vegetable Mince from my cookbook 'Mince!' by Mitzie Wilson. I've had the book for years and it's where a few of our staple meals are from. Plus quite a few of the recipes lend themselves to cooking large quantities to freeze for later.

I won't go into the recipe but it's essentially blending up tons of veges and adding them to the mince mix to bulk it up and make it go further (it's probably also to disguise the veg if you have a vege-phobe in the family!). I added the mince into pots with a few boiled baby potatoes and had it for lunch for a week. It was lovely but - look away now if you're eating - after tucking into it on the first day I noticed that the mince wasn't as good a quality as I'd thought and there were nuggets of fat and gristly bits. Eurgh.

I soldiered on as it was all I had for lunches but by the end of the week I was feeling a little ill.

A couple of weeks later I decided to make it again but I had the brilliant idea that I could swap the meat for Quorn. I tend to swap cold meats for Quorn slices as the thought of sliced meat gives me the heeby-jeebies sometimes, so I thought that it was a pretty safe bet that I'd like the mince even though I've never had it before.

I'd also had some celeriac mash at the dinner with my family the other week and thought it was quite nice so I decided to make the mince with a celeriac and sweet potato mash. I've also seen a lot of recipes on Pinterest about cauliflower mash. Now, I've never been fond of cauliflower. In fact I've been known to call it the 'Devil's vegetable' because I hate it so much but, as it's been a few years since I 'd last tried it I decided to be try it in the mash - thinking the taste would be disguised by the other vegetables.

I followed the recipe, just adding the Quorn mince instead of 'real' mince and blended the celeriac, sweet potato and cauliflower in a separate bowl after boiling. I tasted a bit of each and they tasted quite nice so I happily dished up the food into pots ready for lunches.

I was quite excited the next day to eat my lunch and was feeling rather pleased with myself...
...That was until I started to eat it.
I managed to choke down two mouthfuls but that was all.

The mince tasted like cardboard and the mash was bland. And it had lumps of cauliflower as A: I don't think I'd cooked it for long enough and B: that meant it didn't blend well.
I threw the rest away.

Now it left me with a problem. I hated the food but the Quorn was more expensive than even the extra lean meat that I could have bought - particularly as I bought two packets. So I was left with food we couldn't eat and I felt too guilty to throw away.

The yellow arrows mark all the pots I had!

In the end I had to admit defeat. I was so disappointed.

How about you guys? Any disasters with cooking experiments?

New watch

In my last post I mentioned that my watch got broken in the garden. I've been wearing a watch for about twenty years and quite honestly I feel naked without one so while I'm waiting for mine to be fixed I needed to get a replacement.

I had a look on ebay and there were a few I liked but I didn't want to wait for delivery and I didn't fancy trawling through the jewellery shops in Newport so I fell back on ol' reliable Argos. I wasn't really impressed with the range but then I was only buying a quick and cheap one to tide me over until my 'actual' watch could be repaired.

After probably about an hour of comparing (I'm very picky) I ended up with this one:

 

It's pretty, feminine and has a traditional leather strap. SBB thinks the face looks too big for my wrist and I have to agree, but I still think I'll keep wearing it every now and again.
The bonus is that I bought it with Nectar points so it was 'free'!

Back into the garden!

I do love spring, don't you? In fact, it's my second favourite season - autumn being the first. I love the sound of birds singing in the trees, new flowers popping up out of the ground...

 Ah, isn't it lovely? Oh. Wait.

 The pesky little bugger burst right through the webbing!

 And here's another. This is a huge bulge in the gravel border.

The red arrows point to all of the flowers 'springing' up. I'm not sure where they've all come from. The border down the side of the house has been dug over several times and sprayed liberally with plant killer. The most annoying thing is that I like spring flowers! I enjoy watching them grow. I just wish they wouldn't grow in (and OUT of) the gravel border that I've spent good money on.

I also had a go at an old bush in the front garden.

Before

After

 

I wanted to dig up all the roots to start cleaning the ground properly but it was one of those bushes that, anywhere the branches touch the ground they sprout roots. I bent the spade. I broke my watch. I gave up.

I've had this watch for about twelve years and all I've ever had to do is replace the battery. I'm a little bit gutted to say the least.

An overdue introduction

It's past time that I introduced two very special little ones!

 These are some early pictures of my fur babies - they're only about 10 weeks old in these two photos.

 So let me introduce you. First we have Cillian, our beautiful little boy. He's a little camera shy but when we do get photos of him they're so worth the effort:

And then we have Pancho, our little princess. She's stubborn and spoilt and utterly gorgeous! She, unlike Cillian, loves the camera. I just have to say 'Pancho, pose!' and she will:

They're both mini lops and they've just turned three years old. They're not from the same litter and we bought them from a breeder in Shoreham-by-Sea - I'd love to give you a link to her website but she seems to have taken down it down.
Look for more cute pictures and antics in the future!

Birthdays and gardening

Yesterday was my 28th birthday - I kept expecting to feel different or that sense of being special that I used to get when I was younger but it just felt like a normal day.
We went food shopping in the morning and then headed out for lunch at The Wight Mouse Inn - we went with my parents, my mum-in-law and my nan on my dad's side. It was a lovely meal and the place had some great quirky touches to it.

Really want one of these!

Chocolate cake! Yum!

The view from the carpark

We missed our turning on the way home so ended up going through Kingston and and Chillerton - there's some lovely countryside. It was a shame that SBB had to nip off to pick up some keys because it would have been a great afternoon to go out for a walk.

Time to say goodbye....

(Imagine that being sung by Andrea Bocelli)

Well, it was time to say goodbye to my beloved shower curtain. Yes, I said shower curtain. You see, our old shower curtain was specifically picked to match the red walls of our bathroom. (Love, love LOVE my bathroom so much! Ahem. Anyway...)

 

I loved it because it was bright and cheerful. Plus it really perked me up in the mornings. But years of use and washing meant that it was losing its waterproof coating and it had gone a a bit pink at the bottom. I tried to deny it but, alas, had to admit defeat and throw it away.

The one we bought to replace it was this one:

I thought I'd love it because I have a small obsession with rubber ducks but when we hung it up it just had too much white. We've had it for a couple of months now and I'm still not completely happy with it. I suppose at the end of the day it's JUST a shower curtain but I miss my old one.
Also, am I the only one that thinks there's something creepy about the light blue duck? It looks like it has teeth and that is scary on so many levels... Particularly when one is - ahem - vulnerable...

Plus it now doesn't match our bath mat.

 

If anyone hears of a place to buy brightly coloured stripey shower curtains let me know!

New books

Happy Monday!

I had a little delivery at the weekend. Amazon was running a three books for £10 offer. Three books for a tenner? Yes please!

These are the ones I chose:

I'm so excited to get stuck in!

How about you guys? What are you reading/ which new books have you bought?