I’m feeling very virtuous today, cooking-wise. I have a big pot of vegetarian chilli simmering, which will be tonight’s dinner as well as being numerous dinners to come. My freezer has been getting a bit depleted of late, but this will fix the problem. It should be rather a nice chilli, too – I ran out of bulgur wheat so I’ve used barley instead, and I had no celery, so I added extra garlic and capsicums. And then I decided to break open my new tin of chipotle chilli in adobo, yum. Most exciting of all, my dried red beans are so fresh that they actually taste delicious all on their own! I had no idea that beans could have such a lovely flavour without any help. Most promising.
Then, I decided to be cunning yesterday and defrosted some of my frozen mushroom and nut burgers and then went out to the garden to pick chard. I’ve blanched the chard, and am using it to make weird little chard and mushroom and nut dolmade things which will be tomorrow’s lunch. The recipe is basically 1 burger’s worth of filling per person divided between four blanched chard leaves per person and wrapped up. I’ve made a very simple tomato sauce by sautéing some garlic in olive oil with oregano, adding a couple of tins of tomatoes, and simmering it all for a while. A spoonful or two of sauce in a little baking dish, a spoonful on top of the stuffed chard leaves, and a little grated cheese on that, bake everything until browned, and lunch tomorrow is going to be divine. Especially as it will probably have the amazingly good brussels sprouts in cheese sauce that went with the failed roast on Sunday (we will not talk of the failed roast on Sunday. The best that can be said of it is that we had enough leftover roasted vegetables to have roast vegetable and chickpea salad for lunch today and yesterday.).
Best of all, I ended up with way too much tomato sauce, and several leftover chard leaves, and I have a random eggplant and a couple of random zucchini, as well as a lot of mushrooms, all of which sounds like the basis for an excellent vegetarian lasagne tomorrow night. Or maybe a moussaka? Either way, a bit of cheese, a bit of sautéeing,some fresh pasta, and I’ll be sorted.
Breakfasts this week are still oaty fruit crumble leftover from Sunday night (and one day, I promise, I’ll figure out what the recipe is), along with some yoghurt. When that runs out, I shall treat us to pancakes with stewed fruit, because there was this organic pancake mix that I had to try and cannot possibly regret.
And if I’m very good tonight, I might even have time to make some chocolate chip oatmeal cookies for our lunchboxes tomorrow.
None of this is challenging or all that time consuming. Most of it is stuff I make all the time and can do without thinking. But there is something very soothing about knowing I have all this good food in the house and knowing just what we’re going to be eating over the next few days. There are weeks when it seems impossible to cook anything at all. Right now, though, it all feels very easy.