Freezer Adventures

The time has come, the Walrus said, to rotate your freezer, there’s no space and we’re fully into the season of bulk cooks so it’s probably overdue. This year it was prompted by a very tasty veggie cottage pie that I always end up making far too much of – the recipe says it’s for four people, I say five hungry people, and six if you’re a being a bit more parsimonious. I carefully boxed up a couple of portions, only to discover that there wasn’t actually any space for them so some judicious defrosting and rearranging was required. I managed to squeeze them in by culling some of my frozen fruit – clearly I’d taken advantage of a three-for-two special as there were a couple of half-used packets lurking forlornly at the bottom of drawers – and turning it into a tasty slightly random smoothie. (The inexplicable single chopped pepper I found in a box went surprisingly well with the mango and other miscellaneous tropical fruits.) I’m not sure quite where the gooseberries came from but cooked with a little sugar and cinnamon they reconstituted nicely into a tasty porridge topping the other week. All in all I was quite pleased I only needed to sacrifice one tub of mysterious freezer burned rice dish to get my – properly labelled – excess cottage pie safely stowed away for a later occasion, but clearly a more concerted effort to turn the rest of the contents into things that I’d be more inspired to eat. 

October is often the season of cooking up my cupboards as the change of seasons brings about a corresponding change in my recipe repertoire and I find myself digging through the cupboards for a different set of ingredients. Revealing as I do, the many ingredients that, back when spring was incoming had ages left before expiry but are now rather more urgently in need of use. Some things are a simple one for one replacement – the emergency cupboard carton of tofu was perilously close to expiring so has become a nice stirfry and a new backup carton has been acquired – or because they weren’t suited to the season, but other things have been lurking because I either overestimated how much I’d use or how much I’d like them. As we move out of the season of couscous, chickpeas, and pretty pasta shapes, and into the season of big pots of soup, daal and chilli laden with lentils, beans and more chopped tomatoes than I can shake a stick at, it’s time to see what’s lurking unloved and find a new use for it. 

An additional factor I’ve had to adjust to, is that over the last couple of years, for entirely obvious reasons I’ve been out of the road for work considerably less than I normally would be. Correspondingly, I’ve been cooking more on the fly and using more fresh than frozen ingredients. As we’ve started heading back into the wider world more often and for longer, I need to readjust my cooking and ingredient sourcing accordingly. 

Last winter I experimented with various frozen vegetables, that I’d normally buy fresh, with the expectation that I’d be out on the road much more, but as that didn’t happen until summer, I’ve not really given them a fair shake. I already knew that frozen butternut squash was a boon to emergency soup making and that frozen edamame beans were always a welcome addition to stir-fries but I wanted to expand the repertoire. Frozen broccoli and cauliflower florets were an instant success, even if the blanching/freezing process makes them pretty bland tasting in their own right, stick some in a chilli or a pasta bake and they’ll soak up the flavours happily. Not much use in anything where they’d normally be the star attraction, but ideal if you just want to squeeze some extra veg into your dinner. The spinach that I got at the same time was a bit more of a mystery – what do you do with lumps of frozen spinach? They’re pre-wilted and my standard method of cooking spinach is to take fresh spinach and either sprinkle it on the dish or wilt it in the pot when everything else is nearly done.

It turns out that frozen spinach does actually keep it’s flavour rather better than broccoli so can actually be added to things where you’d expect to taste it. I recently made a saag paneer in my quest to either find a regular use for it or to at least use it up, and it worked really well. It would perhaps have been better if I’d thought ahead and defrosted the appropriate amount in advance, but it melted down happily into the curry, just making the cooking process a bit longer than I’d have liked, but it certainly stopped the saag drying out! So I think that one might be worth keeping in the freezer, if only in winter, even if I do have to consciously remember to use it up, as most of my ‘add spinach to this’ recipes are designed around having bought a bag of spinach for one recipe and needing to use up the rest of the bag before it melts! However, it earned it’s place by meaning I had all the ingredients I needed to make a big pot of curry in the house, and didn’t need to go out in the rain for supplies, and sometimes that is exactly why you keep such supplies in the freezer. It’s also pretty satisfying to replace a big lumpy bag of frozen spinach with a couple of portions of curry for future enjoyment. 

Seasonal Change (Mushroom Edition)

The seasons are turning, Summer is definitely over and Autumn is making it’s presence felt. Squash and pumpkins are available – it is definitely decorative gourd season – and slowly root vegetables are edging out the salad vegetables from the shelf space in the supermarket. I made my first pot of soup of the season last weekend and I’m once again thinking about getting back into baking my own bread. It’s also the time of year, especially if you’re me, when thoughts turn to…mushrooms.

I live in the north of Scotland, a beautiful part of the world, and we get a lot of light in Summer. In Winter though, we do not, and like most Scottish people I need to top up my Vitamin D in winter. (Official NHS advice there, if you don’t work outside, you probably aren’t getting enough.) Over the years I’ve learned to listen to my body and the first sign for me that we’ve crossed the rubicon of light versus dark, is when I start craving mushrooms. I enjoy mushrooms all year round but when I start catching myself adding extra mushrooms to recipes and the more exotic kinds start to look awfully tempting. I’m generally a chestnut and portobello girl, my favoured dried mushroom is porcini and I tend to keep an emergency tin of straw mushrooms in the cupboard for stir-fries. But outside of this time of year, I struggle to get excited for Oyster or Shitaki mushrooms, and only in Autumn do I find myself perusing mushroom forager blogs and looking longingly at illustrations of Chicken in the Woods and the like.

My first indication that the seasons are turning from Summer to Autumn, before the temperature has permanently dropped, even before damp has become the most common description of the weather, is generally that I start adding mushrooms to everything. I tend not to notice as its happening, perhaps I’ll have made a mushroom risotto and added a normal amount of mushrooms to a stir-fry or an omelette, but something generally happens to make me realise, we’re in mushroom eating season. Perhaps I’ll catch myself ordering a mushroom pizza – our local craft beer pub does excellent wood-fired pizzas, but the mushroom pizza is a LOT of mushrooms and ordering that is usually an obvious cue. This year though, it was the point where, while making a mushroom sauce for my pasta dish, I looked at the rest of the tub thought ‘those won’t last’ and instead of adding a couple of extra mushrooms, used the whole rest of the tub. I doubled the pasta while I was at it, but it was by any objective measure an excess of mushrooms, and yet it felt only a sufficient amount of mushrooms.

As someone who generally has opinions about chefs who vegetarianise a meal by replacing meat with mushrooms on a 1:1 ratio this is obviously a really blatant hint. (I like a mushroom burger, but putting a portobello mushroom between the halves of a burger bun with a bit of lettuce and some cheese does not a burger make.) So here I am with a lovely veggie cottage pie – loaded up with, amount other things, some very nice portobello mushrooms – baking gently in the oven and several different meals planned to use up the ‘wild mushroom’ selection I bought on special yesterday. (I’ve got a polenta dish and a nice noodle soup dish planned for starters.) I have a bit of a hit and miss relationship with Chinese mushrooms – my dried mushroom of choice is definitely porcini rather than shitaki, which I alway find a little disappointing – however, I’ve recently been introduced to the joys of ‘black fungus’, not the kind you don’t want to get in your lungs I hasten to add, but the other name for cloud ear mushrooms. The unlikely location for my introduction was the Hug and Pint on Great Western Road, who do a cracking Asian small plates menu, where I had a dish that also involved bean curd skin – tastier than it sounds – and salted black beans. Apparently in their fresh incarnation they’re as smelly as a ripe blue cheese, but reconstituted from dried they’re pretty mellow and not noticeably odorous!

While I was writing this I was reminded of the excellent book on fungi that I read early this Summer – I was travelling across France for work, it seemed an appropriate choice – Entangled Life by Melvin Sheldrake. It’s a fascinating book about the hidden myco-world beneath our feet, and looks at many of the uses that humans have put fungi and their fruiting bodies to over the millennia – from edible mushrooms and truffles, through recycling/neutralising pollution and chemicals, to medicine and altered states of being. Of course as a vegetarian I was disappointed that he didn’t really touch on the less common uses for fungi – mycoprotein is an increasingly prevalent part of the meat substitute market, one I normally encounter in the form of quorn. I’d hoped it might go into a bit more detail than I’d gleaned from casual googling – it’s a strain of fungus that is cheap to grow, nutritious and palatable to humans! – but I suspect that that was more a product of Sheldrake being of the ‘but why not just eat mushrooms’ school of thought which is fair enough. A good read nonetheless.

Baking Update

For a while there I didn’t feel I could justify making baking posts because I was mostly just continuing my adventures with the bread machine. I had guests come to stay a couple of times which proved my theory right on the delights of putting on a loaf first thing and having time to shower, tidy the flat and make some soup before my guests arrived just as the loaf came out of the machine. However as I was mostly just playing around with different packet mixes to see which settings gave the best results with a fairly consistent starting point. (I did discover that different brands, despite having nigh on identical weights and ingredients, produce vastly different results!) I have in the interim, developed opinions on the best settings to use on my machine and, while yes, I would still likely never have bought one myself, I am delighted with it and it has earned its space on my kitchen counter.

Then in March my colleague left us and as his last week involved him being on early shift and thus precluded us taking him to the pub, we had a coffee and cake morning for him. Lots of baking was done and cake eaten. And, because if I have a niche in baking it’s unusual savoury pastry treats, I dug out the pastry swirls recipe and made little pesto puffs for the occasion which the guest of honour proved particularly fond of so success! (I often find at these sort of occasions people overcompensate by making the sweetest, richest recipes in their repertoire, so making a savoury option as a contrast will go down well.) I actually made a double batch, one lot of pesto and one sweet batch made with nutella. They were a great success, except with a late arriving colleague who mistook them for cinnamon rolls and was somewhat discombobulated by the pesto when he bit into one!

And I started writing this entry about my baking progress and then never actually finished it! It’s been months, this file was labelled ‘march baking’, it is most definitely not April any more. However, I may have stopped writing about it, but I definitely did not stop baking. I didn’t bake as much as I might have hoped, but that has been impacted by different external forces, between work and the weather I haven’t had as much time for baking or other cooking as I would have liked, but I’m still managing to carve out some time.

Unless I’m baking for a particular event – the puff pastry swirls for my colleague leaving, or the brownies for the triathalon folks – then I tend to bake on a Sunday evening when I know I’ll be on early shift in the morning. I like to do a batch cook on a Sunday night more generally but it’s more vital when I’m going to be on earlies and there’s a high chance I’ll be too tired to cook anything too adventurous. As that quite often involves making a pasta bake or something similar – a big dish of cauliflower cheese, a pie or a quiche perhaps – I often motivate myself to do it with the thought that well, I have the oven on anyway, I might as well bake. I was reminded about this tendency this afternoon as I made three cheese and spinach muffins, these are particularly complex muffins, but my usual go-to muffin recipe is really quick and straight-forward and can be easily adapted to almost any fruit I have in the house at short notice. (I’ve even make them with frozen cherries before.) A while back I resurrected an old favourite by making Danish pastries, but with rhubarb I’d found on special. I will say that using up food stuffs that I bought on special, whether fruit or pastry, has definitely been a theme of my baking lately. I think if I were going to set a target for my baking for the rest of the year, it would be to try more new recipes because after an adventurous start to the year I’ve definitely been falling back on old favourites.

Gardening Again

After last year’s mixed successes on the vegetable front, I was feeling pretty confident about growing veg from seeds again. I had a good idea what was likely to grow well for my and where I’d gone wrong with a few others. (The peppers self pollinate as advertised, the tomatoes and cucumbers need a helping hand.) In fact a couple of my pepper plants even successfully over wintered on my kitchen table – three out of four of them survived the winter, though I had to sacrifice one of them to the gardening gods as they had a infestation of greenfly that they were passing back and forward between them. I and my trigger spray full of soapy water stand victorious on one front at least.

However after some early success – lots of little plants germinated – once they got to the seedling stage they all seemed to keel over fairly quickly.

From an initial repotting of three each of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and radishes I’m currently left with three radishes, two sad looking tiny pepper plants and one defiant tomato plant. For a while there I thought I was going to be able to be able to salvage one of the cucumber plants as while it had only four sad leaves it unexpectedly produced a flower! Without much serious hope of success I gave them a couple of good feeds with tomato feed, which I figured my more established pepper plants would appreciate even if nothing else did – which judging by the lovely looking bright yellow pepper one of them produced in response, they certainly did. The tomato plant definitely appreciated it’s feeding as it’s doubled in size in the last couple of weeks, now looking like a respectable tomato plant. Sadly the cucumber plant didn’t take the encouragement and keeled over, though one of the tiny pepper plants looks much more promising and the radish I accidentally fed looks considerably better but that could equally be the amount of actual sunshine we’ve had over the last month.

I might even attempt a second sewing of spring onions, and see if I have better luck with them, I always forget that they’ve got such a long growing season that if the spring sewing is a disaster they aren’t actually written off for the year I can just try again. Maybe it would be worth trying again with the baby carrots too. I’ve never had quite the success I had my first year growing spring onions when they thrived outstandingly in a container on the patio of my old place. I don’t even need a comparably bumper crop, just more than a handful growing to maturity would do nicely!

This year hasn’t been a particularly good one for herbs either, only my rosemary survived the winter – though surviving isn’t really the right term, it’s definitely thriving, if I didn’t actually use it in the kitchen it would definitely have taken over it’s entire window box – though the sage, mint and chives that I planted in the spring are holding their own despite the rather extreme weather conditions they’ve had to endure this year. Being a largely Mediterranean selection they’ve coped rather better with the heat wave than they did with the relentless rain and occasional hailstones that marked the early parts of this year.

I’d probably feel rather worse about my struggles if it weren’t that many of my colleagues have been bemoaning their own lack of vegetable successes, with the office consensus that the rubbish spring we had, had done for most of their veggies. Given how bland and disappointing so much of the veg available in the shops has been this summer, I suspect it’s a wider problem than just me, even if that does only make me long more for my small harvest of much tastier homegrown vegetables.

June Tea(se)

The month of June seemed to disappear on me in a blur of work and July has caught me unawares, however I did enjoy a new tea last month so it’s high time that I wrote it up. My latest tea is a Milky Oolong from T2. This was one of the teas I treated myself to back in January when I bought my tea ball and has been tempting/taunting me to try ever since. I’m always seduced by their cute packages – little cardboard cubes and cylinders – though the use of little plastic inner bags is a subject of small annoyances, they’re just so much more awkward to handle than the more common foil packages – perhaps it’s just their small size but they seem to have an inbuilt tendency to catapult tea leaves everywhere at the least convenient moment. And because the outer packaging is so cute – but not remotely air tight enough to keep the leaves fresh – I can’t bring myself to decant them into a more practical container, aesthetics over practicality I feel, annoying me all the more for knowing that I’m buying into it regardless!

Something that interests me about my recent adventures in tea drinking is what makes one tea the kind that I will make a pot of and happily drink cup after cup of it as I work on something else, and what makes other teas single cup teas. My little tea ball has proved to be an excellent investment, ideal for experimenting with new teas as I figure out how to best enjoy it – brewing time versus how many spoonfuls of tea per cup, but while some teas move quickly into tea pot territory, others remain tea cup only endeavours.

Unlike a few other new teas I’ve tried this year, this month’s adventure did not take many experiments to get ‘right’ for me. (Two little spoonfuls in the ball, brewed for 5 minutes, water just off the boil.) I wouldn’t normally make an oolong for anything like as strong as that, as it would acquire a bitter aftertaste that for me undermines it’s natural softness that is a big part of why I favour oolongs. However this one retains a mellowness, and in fact the buttery creaminess increases with brewing time, it’s not as refreshing a drink as many other oolongs I’ve enjoyed but nonetheless it’s been a definite summer beverage. I’ve been happily drinking it all month, yet it’s never occurred to me to make the leap from a cup to a pot. I’ll often finish a cup and go and make another cup, but two cups seems to be the limit. It is also, I note, a tea to be drunk with snacks or biscuits rather than with a meal. It’s a lovely post-meal pleasure in it’s own right, like a dessert when you’re not hungry enough for an actual dessert, a drink for curling up on the sofa with a book for a bit, or to sip between rows of knitting or paragraphs of writing. A tea that satisfies rather than leaves me wanting more.

May the Tea Be With You

Back in January, I blithely declared I was going to write monthly tea reviews. And then I just…didn’t.

I had good intentions in March, when I was at an outdoor craft market and discovered a tea stall, selling a variety of unusual blends. So often when I come across these kind of things, they’re properly tisanes or black tea plus additions rather than interesting blends of teas. However, joy of joys there amongst the usual suspects were a small selection of interesting sounding oolongs! I got to be decidedly nerdy about teas with the proprietor who shares my love for oolong teas, and came away with two lovely sounding new teas to try! Perfect for trying and reviewing for this project! Except that I opened my tea cupboard and was confronted by the numerous open and half-used packets and tins, and couldn’t in good conscious start a new one. I had good intentions to finish one of them, write it up for here, and try to trade off drinking and reviewing old favourites and new acquisitions, but unfortunately life happened and after some initial success using up some interesting tea bags that had lurked too long, other things took precedence.

This month, however, I decided to make a serious attempt at reclaiming my weekend ritual of pots of loose leaf tea and radio listening. This has been nicely encouraged along by the factor of the tea I fancied the first morning I attempted to restart the habit, was perilously close to it’s expiry date, so needing a concerted effort to be used up. Given how much I enjoy the tea, this was not a hardship. The tea in question is an Oolong, Tikuanyin – transliterations vary, I’m using the one from the packet, which came from a local Chinese supermarket here – which I first got a taste for from a delightful little sample set of Chinese teas that I got as a gift years ago. I liked it so much that I tracked it down and now buy it in more substantial packets. I recommend brewing it strong – in my case three generous tea spoons for a four-cup teapot, brewed for 5 minutes – though I have one of those tea pots with the filter baskets that can be removed so if you are a strain as you pour person then you may need to be a little more cautious on that front. I especially appreciate it as a tea that does not become bitter if it gets cold and that a forgotten last cup in the pot can be reheated with only minimal damage to the flavour. The flavour itself is a mellow, slightly smoky one, with a pleasant mouth feel and aroma that I can’t describe as anything other than comforting. It’s pretty much the platonic ideal of oolong tea for me, the gold(en) standard against which all others are compared.

In a Somewhat More Timely Fashion

After last month’s extremely last minute efforts to complete my cooking challenges, I was determined to get things done in a timely fashion this month.

Therefore, with the weather taking a decidedly stormy turn last week, it seemed the perfect time to make a big pot of something warm and filling. To that end I decided to make the Black Rice Congee recipe, I even bought a punnet of mushrooms especially. Despite the slightly off-putting cooking times – you need to simmer the rice on low for between an hour and a half and an hour and three quarters – it is a deceptively straightforward recipe. Garlic, mushrooms, rice, stock and some soy sauce to finish. It tastes genuinely amazing. The recipe suggests just serving it with pickled radishes, which I totally get, as I could have just eaten a big bowl of it straight from the pot, just as it came. However, having both cauliflower and sticky teryaki sauce in need of using up, I marinated, then roasted the cauliflower and served it on the rice which was pretty tasty too. The long simmering time turned out to be ideal as it allowed time for the cauliflower to both marinade and roast. Though I think I preferred my second option – it was a big pot of rice, and it lasted well – which was serving it with extremely cute bao – salvaged from the reduced counter in M&S in the wake of Lunar New Year – filled with mushrooms and hoisin sauce along with some fresh choi miu which I steamed quickly together. I’ve never cooked with black rice before – I bought black venus rice out of the health food shop especially for this recipe – and it’s so good, with a delicious nutty flavour and it turns a gorgeous dark purple colour when cooked. Despite the cooking time, this recipe is well worth taking the time over, a good recipe to have running on the back burner of the stove while you do other things in the kitchen. I suspect this would be ideal if I were making my own bao from scratch, and needed to leave them to rise for a while.

For reasons that don’t need explored at this juncture, last month some colleagues and I ended up in a heated discussion about bread. One of the less expected outcomes of that was that one of my colleagues – and former flatmate – offered me his breadmaker, as having recently remodelled their kitchen there wasn’t enough space for all the kitchen gadgets that he’s collected and doesn’t really use. (Back when we shared a flat we used to set each other off buying different kitchen gadgets on pay day – I even wrote about it at the time.) I’d never quite seen the point of a bread maker/machine. Or at least, I’d never seen the point of them for me. The great pleasure of making my own bread has always been pummelling the life out of a lump of dough and the breadmaker does that for you. (If you’re making enough bread that you never have to buy your own then it makes perfect sense, I can see that it would cut out a load of the faff, but I’m a loaf of bread as a treat bread maker.) What it hadn’t occurred to me would be a major appeal is that it deals with the bit of bread making that I hate – the getting it to rise bit. I fell out of the habit of making bread as much because I lived for four years in a very lovely house with high ceilings and unstable temperatures, and it was a menace to get the dough to rise. One of the main reasons that I love making soda bread – and why that’s what I’ve mostly made since my first enthusiastic adventures in breadmaking nearly a decade ago – is that it doesn’t need left to rise.

However, when one was offered, and I did want to make more of my own bread, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. If nothing else it would give me the opportunity to try it out, and if I didn’t like it, or never used it, well I could pass it on in turn guilt-free. It also easily answered the question of what I was going to bake this month. I decided to break myself in gently with a packet mix bread – a cheddar and sun-dried tomato one that I’d successfully made in the oven before – which helped with figuring out the settings, because I already had a baseline that I could use as a comparison. The result was a bit peelywally – I was over cautious about overdoing it – and a little softer than I prefer as a result, but overall it was a tasty loaf with a nice even crumb. It took somewhat longer than I expected but not appreciably longer than it would realistically have taken me to make it myself from scratch and required much less attention – I gave it far more attention that it needed, peaking through the window at it curiously every time it made an interesting noise – I can easily picture myself on backshift, sticking a loaf on while making breakfast, going off and doing various other things in the flat in the interim and having fresh warm bread for lunch. It’s just so easy, with minimum clean up, I can’t help but approve. I still prefer the long slim loaves that I get out of a tin in the oven, to the tall squat ones that I get from the bread machine, but if this gets me baking bread more often I will take it!

All in all it’s earned it’s place on the kitchen counter, even if I did have to rearrange half my kitchen to accommodate it!

Two Birds, One Stone

Having blithely set myself a couple of food challenges for the coming year in my first January blog entry, I found myself facing the last weekend of the month without having done anything for either challenge. Falling at the first hurdle! However, thankfully when I was looking through East doing some meal planning for the week ahead, I took a peek at the final section of the book – sweets. I was expecting it to be more puddings and desserts, but no, there were some delightful baked options, I could, in fact kill two birds with one stone. Most of them were rather more ambitious than I felt ready for on a stormy weekend at the end of January, but there was a nice and straight forward recipe for brownies, only seven ingredients, and I had them all in the cupboard already! So dark chocolate, sea salt and miso brownies were the order of the day.

To say that I’ve had somewhat hit and miss experiences with vegan baking would be putting it mildly, most of my own attempts have been miserable failures. (I think it’s the egg. There’s a lot of different properties that eggs have that are helpful in baking and most substitutes only manage a couple of them. Though based on this recipe, bloomed chia seeds do a decent job in brownies – which made them an excellent way to finish a packet of chia seeds.) There are, however, a couple of little independent coffee shops locally that have some excellent incidentally vegan baked goods these days that do not have that ‘vaguely disappointing’ element that I had previously associated with vegan baking. Besides Meera Sodha who wrote the book has been writing a ‘new vegan’ recipe column in the guardian for the last five years, I’m willing to trust her on this front. So I took the plunge. These were indeed a success, I was primed to like this recipe because my favourite chocolate is dark chocolate with sea salt, though if anything I could have done with a bit more sea salt, but I appreciate that could be a definite ‘your mileage may vary’ area for other people. I couldn’t really pick out the flavour of the miso in the brownies themselves – though it definitely added a delightful umami undertone to the batter. Coconut oil makes an excellent baking fat – very little flavour of coconut in the finished product – though next time I’ll cut down on the amount I use because they were a little greasy to the touch. They were generally crumblier than I would like, but the consensus from my colleagues that I shared them with was that moist brownies are better than dry ones, and if the falling apart bothers me, stick them in the fridge for a bit to firm up.

Which I duly did, as the rest of the box was slowly crumbling to bits whenever I tried to take one out – largely due to said box having been left on top of the microwave while I made a baked potato in it – and promptly forgot that I had done so for about 36 hours. So they are now excellent firm brownies that are also not too oily anymore. I suspect there is a happy medium somewhere in between probably involving me making them, letting them cool and then bunging them in the fridge overnight taking them back out in the morning and by the time I go to work they’ll be room temperature and perfect. Obviously I’ll need to make them again to test that, which is the opposite of a problem to have.

New Year, New Teas

Over the course of the pandemic, I somehow fell out of the habit of drinking loose leaf tea. Actually it’s been going on for longer than that, since I moved house in early 2019. Prior to that I had a routine around loose leaf tea drinking. On a Sunday morning, I would have a long lie, then get up, make a nice cooked breakfast/brunch and a pot of loose leaf tea, then I’d put 6Music on the radio and settle in with a book. Depending on the weather or my other plans for the day, it would sometimes be just the one pot, other times I’d make another pot and carry on that way for the rest of the afternoon. It was a nice routine and picking out the particular tea I fancied that Sunday was it’s own routine. It also meant I made steady progress through my collections of tea and whenever I saw a fancy tea on sale somewhere that I wanted to indulge myself in, I was limited by budget not whether I’d get round to drinking it.

When I moved house I carefully arranged all my lovely loose leaf teas in one place so they were all neatly organised. Unfortunately that place is the top shelf of one of my cupboards so while I can access them easily because they live somewhere different to my everyday tea, they have become ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and increasingly fallen out of regular use. I hadn’t realised how much until I was in Glasgow over the recent holidays and treated myself to a visit to one of it’s specialist tea shops. I stood in the shop contemplating the teas and realised that I was internally talking myself out of buying anything because I wouldn’t drink them. Which brought me up short. When had that happened? How had that happened? I hadn’t really considered being a tea lover as a major part of my identity, but I certainly didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t one any more.

So I determined to do something about that. Handily the shop also had a teaball with a pretty little measuring spoon attached in the sale, mostly so I could drink some of the tea while staying with my parents – I was correct in thinking they would be entertained with the ridiculous seasonal tea that was one of my purchases – and maybe start a good habit. To my surprise, and doubtless helped by my silly tea being surprisingly nice, I did in fact form a habit over the rest of the holidays, revelling in the pleasure of figuring out just how much tea I needed to put in the ball and how long it needs to steep to get the best from it. Since returning home I haven’t been drinking it every day, but it’s a particularly nice to come home from work and make a post dinner cup of something warming and comforting so the habit seems to be bedding in. So having set myself the new year’s resolution of getting back into drinking loose leaf tea, I feel confident determining to motivate myself along the way by trying – or ‘re-discovering’ – a new tea each month, hopefully working my way through my shelf along the way and finding new tea loves along the way. And because I know what motivates me as a person, I thought I would post reviews of them here.

To that end, what of the tea itself? Well when I said silly seasonal tea I meant it, it’s called Bread & Butter Pudding tea: a loose leaf black tea with bits of caramel, cinnamon, amaranth, vanilla, carob and chicory root. Made as per the tub’s instructions I found it to be one of those ‘flavoured’ teas that I generally avoid as they smell amazing but taste of nothing much, though thankfully one that was much improved by adding a little milk. However, by being a bit heavier handed with the filling of my tea ball, and leaving it to brew for a bit longer – 5 minutes vs the advised 2-4 minutes – created a more robust result that tasted as good as it smelled and didn’t need any milk. An indulgent winter holiday drink.

Hopefully, I’ll get back into my habit of Sunday mornings with a pot of tea and a book, but in the meantime, my little tea ball is facilitating my loose leaf tea drinking and hopefully will make me keener to experiment with new teas again in the meantime.

Finishing Some Things and Starting Others

It’s that time, once again, to look back at how last year’s blog challenge went and to set myself a new one for the coming year.

My main food challenge for last year was to cook a recipe each month that I hadn’t made before, with the side challenge to try a new ingredient each month too, and while I didn’t entirely succeed – the total was eight new recipes tried and four new ingredients – I think the challenge went really well for one reason. Most of the things I tried whether ingredients or recipes, were things that I wanted to make/eat again. I ended up mastering a bunch of techniques in the process, so I ended up making variations on new themes which made the rest of my cooking more interesting as it led to me adding new twists to old favourite recipes and being inspired to combine familiar ingredients in different ways based on the new ingredients that I did try. Each new thing took me down an interesting new rabbit hole of cooking adventures, so it was more successful on the macro level than the micro level but that’s it’s own kind of victory.

The outright successes: I mastered the art of cooking with jackfruit, discovered the joys of plantains, fell in love with my bamboo steamer, became much braver about roasting vegetables, learned to make bao and overnight eggs and made hoisin sauce from scratch!

One of the things I was trying to do with last year’s challenge, was to get around to trying recipes that I’d had bookmarked in tabs for ages and while I was pretty successful at that I kept being distracted by the shiny new cookbook that I treated myself to last January. So this year I’m going to indulge myself and use said cookbook – Meera Sodha’s East – to do a ‘cook the book’ challenge and make something new from it each month. Which frankly sounds more like a treat than a chore so seems like a good plan. I’ve already got a list of recipes from it that I definitely want to make: there’s her mushroom bao for a start, bao were definitely last year’s culinary success, and having made them successfully from kits I’m keen to venture into making them from scratch. There are also sweet potato cakes, beetroot and ginger soup and the sri lankan beetroot curry for that matter, shitake pho, bengali pumpkin curry, roasted paneer aloo gobi – honestly I could just work my way through the curry section – the rest of her seasonal pilaus, black rice congee, tempeh with pak choi, honey, soy and ginger braised tofu – even the paneer, spinach and tomato salad looks good and I’m not generally excited about salads. And that’s before we’ve got to the dals, let alone the desserts!

I also have a secondary challenge for this year, which is also a resurrected one from previous years, and that’s the ‘bake more often’ challenge. Unlikely many folks I know, the pandemic has caused me to bake less often. Why? Well, because one of the greatest pleasures of baking for me, is sharing it with other people. Apparently I just don’t feel motivated to bake just for me? While I got decidedly more adventurous with my pie and tart baking, and much more confident using my oven more generally, I essentially stopped doing the kind of everyday baking that I normally do as a matter of course. I think I could count on one hand how many times I made muffins last year and despite good intentions to make my own bread I think I made a grand total of one loaf of soda bread – though I did cut right back on rubbish supermarket bread which was the other part of that challenge. I miss being excited to share new bakes with friends and colleagues, so now that we can do that again, I want to start rediscovering my joy in that. Also, given how little I baked last year, the task of baking ‘more’ this year should be an easy win, and after the last couple of years I think we could all do with a few of those.