Food: Better than Five a Day!

I love it when a meal comes together!

As a one-time chef I'm sometimes surprised at how hard I find it to think of something new to cook.  And it isn't as if I don't have a few resources to fall back on.  One of the hardest things to give up when we became rat race escapees was my cookery book buying habit.  As a bookshop employee, I took full advantage of a generous staff discount and bought a couple of new titles every month.  (Not to mention a wodge of fiction.)  In the last five years, I've only had the resources for a handful of purchases, which is perhaps fortunate as the designated cookery book and garlic hanging shelves are chocker-block.








It has taken a few years of having to rely on the veg plot to get to grips with menu planning.  Using what I have, rather than what I would like to have is now second nature, but boy did we eat some strange combinations in the early days.  What do you do when you only have two beetroot and an artichoke to play with?


We try and eat our essential five a day, or whatever it is right now, and try not to lean too heavily on supermarket fruit; my banana and orange growing still need some work.




Yesterday was a cracker, though.  Sunday is always easy, after all I have three courses in the evening to smuggle the necessary into, in addition to the fruit-fest which is our normal lunchtime fare.  For lunch we'd already munched our way through apples and cucumbers from the garden, plus plums, pears and the essential banana, so we'd firmly cracked the magic five.

Sunday main course was going to be leek and bacon pie - the new season leeks are coming along nicely and there is a good kilo or so in the freezer from the spring which need eating up to make room for other stuff.  My freezer is just three drawers of a fridge freezer; we looked at buying a freezer just for produce, but quickly realised that even the highest rated one for electricity consumption could well cost more to run then the value of the contents.  Buying an older, less efficient second hand one would be a total false economy and if not environmentally unfriendly, then certainly suspect!

So leeks give us number six and the pudding - blackberry clafoutis - number seven.  It is blackberries that I want to use to fill the leek-sized hole in the freezer!  I dug three fine carrots to go with the pie, too.

But the starter is where I had fun.  So what do you do with one globe artichoke, one small aubergine belleza negra and a handful of beetroot?  Mixed hors d'oeuvres of course.  The artichoke was prepped, quartered, boiled and dressed with olive oil, the beetroot roasted in the oven then dressed with a fruity raspberry vinegar, the aubergine was cut longways into four and also roast with loads of olive oil before being dressed with shredded basil and a squeeze of lemon.  A bowl of freshly cooked tiny green lentils cooked with a clove of garlic and a dried cayenne chilli completed the melange.

So we had 12 of our five yesterday, eight from the garden or hedges.  Does this mean I'm allowed chips and chocolate tonight?