It’s that time of year again. Time to set myself some new food challenges for the coming year.
I really enjoyed last year’s tea challenge, so I’ll try to keep up the trying new teas and writing reviews of them thing. This month’s tea is an actual fruit tea – my tea ball was full of dried fruit! – with the excellent name of Pineapple Dream, and sadly, so far, it is not a dream, or if it is it’s a sort of vague wistful half remembered thing, rather than a vivid and evocative one.
Otherwise, my main challenge is that I’ve made a list of 23 recipes that I’ve been wanting to try and intend to attempt to cook them over the course of the year. Realistically that’s just under two recipes a month, which should be totally achievable, as long as I don’t get distracted by other shinier projects!
As is my wont at this time of year, I have been doing a clear out of my ‘ingredients’ cupboard – a narrow kitchen cabinet, that I use for keeping all the interesting ingredients that either aren’t opened or need to be kept in a ‘cool dark place’ and therefore can’t be decanted into my cute little jars – making a list of what needs used up and meal planning accordingly. I’ve particularly enjoyed making a mushroom risotto with two different kinds of dried mushrooms – shitaki and oyster mushrooms aren’t the conventional options for this, but their interesting textures are a nice contrast to the softness of the risotto. I also enjoyed the excuse to get some ricotta and use up the last of the dried wholewheat tagliatelle that was hiding behind the bread machine. (Spinach and ricotta tagliatelle used to be a staple dish in my house, I’m not sure when it fell out of favour, but it was all the tastier for being something a bit different. I can’t even blame the wholewheat pasta, I like wholewheat pasta, it’s vastly preferable to bread as a way to include more wholewheat in my diet.) The rest of my efforts have mostly been making stir-fries to use up my many kinds of noodles – apparently after my stellar efforts at cutting down on my noodle collection in early 2021, I’ve fallen back into bad habits – and using up the ends of jars of cashews and pine nuts and the like and replenishing them.
In an attempt to give my recipe challenge the best chance of getting off to a flying start, I made a list of the ingredients that need used up in the coming months and picked a certain amount of recipes that would facilitate that. (Some of them being recipes I had bookmarked already whether in tabs or in actual recipe books, and sometime even the recipe that I’d bought the new and interesting ingredient for in the first place.) I’ve also tried to choose a selection that varies in season – making sure I have both winter and summer appropriate recipes – complexity – both big fiddly put a day aside for it recipes and quick and dirty, can be knocked out before or after work – and type – not just meals, but soups, bread, cakes, a couple of accompaniments. There’s also a decent number of recipes from chefs I already trust – Nigel Slater, Meera Sodha, Jack Monroe – alongside more adventurous stuff. Hopefully all of that combined will give me a better chance of success.
Cupboard Life 