Vegetarian Cottage Pie

Posted on January 21, 2014 by nicdempsey

Apparently this month there is a campaign, to encourage people to go vegan for January. To which the only reply I’m capable of making is “absolutely not.”

My stance on all forms of diet, is that I’m happy if they work for other people and  I will try and accommodate people’s particular needs, guests who tell me they don’t do sugar, will get eye rolls but I won’t serve them meringue and so on. I do eat a lot less meat than I used to and I don’t like to eat food that is too processed (unless, I’ve done the processing or it’s ketchup!), so I eat butter, not margarine, I don’t eat soy yoghurt or milk. Vegan ‘cheese’ and ‘meat’ substitutes do not and will not feature in my diet or yours if you come to dinner.

However, if you tell me that you don’t eat meat, you may get this if you come over for dinner.

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Cottage pie is one of my comfort foods and I’ve played about with it before using cauliflower instead of potatoes for mash. This time I played about with the bottom, using a lentil sauce instead of meat. I used this recipe to make the sauce and topped with mashed potatoes and cheese and called it done.

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It was really good, the sauce is quick and easy, it’s made up of ingredients I normally have in my store cupboard. If you were thinking of going meatless, this would be a perfect introduction especially for children and if you are thinking of going vegan, just leave out the cheese!

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Weekend Tasks – What I Did

Posted on January 20, 2014 by nicdempsey

The things I didn’t get done this weekend are the things I sort of knew I wouldn’t get to this weekend. However, the house is tidy and that’s good enough for me!

Kitchen

  • General clean (sort out the recycling and rubbish, mopping the floor and general cleaning)
  • Sort out the picture wall

Cooking

  • Food prep for next week.

photo

Bathroom

  • General clean (mop floor, change towels, empty bin, clean bath, sink and toilet)

Bedroom

  • General clean (sweep floor, change bed, dust, general tidy)

Living Room

  • General clean (sweep floor, dust, tidy sofa, put things away etc)

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Hall

  • Hoover
  • Dust bookshelves and poison bottles

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General things

  • Shopping
  • Washing (clothes wash, white wash, towel wash)
  • Ironing
  • Wash make up brushes
  • Water plants
  • Back up laptop
  • Charge kindle, ipad and camera batteries
  • Handwashing
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The Weekend and the plan for the week

Posted on January 20, 2014 by nicdempsey

The weekend in pictures

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Dinner at Christelle and Mikes

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Teaching Christelle how to make doughy things

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The finished products…

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Early night, in bed with books and a drink

There are no photos of housework or of my being ill. Stomach bug and/or something I ate, you don’t need details..

This week, once I have recovered from bug, is about work and home. I have friends coming for dinner on Thursday (it’s the new Friday!), Friday Night Pizza at Ma’s on Friday and the only thing I have planned for the weekend is a haircut (the joys of being able to see from out of the fringe!). I’d like to get some bigger house projects done at some point but I’m really just enjoying the house being tidy and doing very little, yep, I’m lazy, always have been not gonna change now!

What are you doing this week?

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Weekend Tasklist

Posted on January 18, 2014 by nicdempsey

So weekly tasks are pretty much the same every week. This weekend, I’d like to finally sort out the pictures in the kitchen but as I’m not at home as this post goes up and will be at Christelle and Mike’s for most of the day, making bread, it’s doubtful that I’ll find the time. We’ll see.

Kitchen

  • General clean (sort out the recycling and rubbish, mopping the floor and general cleaning)
  • Sort out the picture wall

Cooking

  • Food prep for next week.

photo

Bathroom

  • General clean (mop floor, change towels, empty bin, clean bath, sink and toilet)

Bedroom

  • General clean (sweep floor, change bed, dust, general tidy)

Living Room

  • General clean (sweep floor, dust, tidy sofa, put things away etc)

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Hall

  • Hoover
  • Dust bookshelves and poison bottles

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General things

  • Shopping
  • Washing (clothes wash, white wash, towel wash)
  • Ironing
  • Wash make up brushes
  • Water plants
  • Back up laptop
  • Charge kindle, ipad and camera batteries
  • Handwashing
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Friday Night Cocktail

Posted on January 17, 2014 by nicdempsey

This week’s is a complete departure for me because it’s got vodka in it. I’m not a big vodka drinker and didn’t have any vodka at home until Christmas, when I got given some. This vodka is special, it’s Black Cow and it’s made in Dorset from milk.

Blueberry vodka sour

Honestly, I can’t tell you that it’s better than x vodka because it’s smoother or whatever, I don’t know enough about how most vodka tastes and I’m not exactly a supertaster.

But anyway there’s a bottle of vodka in the drinks cupboard and there was a jar of blueberry syrup from making the blueberry granola breakfast pots at the weekend.

Blueberry vodka sour

I’ve been drinking it a like squash, diluting the syrup with water and adding a squeeze of lime juice, which tasted pretty good. Then I added booze! I like sour tastes and for me this works better with a little less syrup but most other people prefer it at the levels below, so feel free to play with the amounts.

Blueberry vodka sour

What

1 1/2 ozs blueberry syrup

1oz of lime juice

2 oz of vodka

ice

How

Put all the ingredients in a rocks glass, mix, add ice, drink.

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Friday Links

Posted on January 17, 2014 by nicdempsey

Hello and happy Friday! I’m so pleased to get to the end of the week! Plans for the weekend include teaching Christelle to bake, reading and sleeping in!

Here are this weeks links and I should warn you that some of this stuff has made me a bit cross and there is an epic rant at the end which you can skip for the sake of your blood pressure….

1) Pictures from Mars. I have no desire ever to go into space but there is something astonishing about photos from another planet.

2) This from Kate. Unfuck Your Habitat. It’s true for me, if my house is under control, I feel like other aspects of my life are too, it’s been an inspiration for me this week.

3) More on Housing and what all the political parties are doing wrong. If Ed Milliband really thinks that his toughest job will be re-building the middle classes, then he has no vision and is as fit to run the country as the Tories are, which is to say, not at all.

4) Dude, where’s my North Sea Oil money. Thatcher, the gift that keeps on taking..

5) The Downton bill is for all daughters. No it isn’t, I can see what she’s saying here, but I really can’t get worked up because some upper class women can’t inherit wealth and titles that they didn’t earn or deserve and their brothers can. So this bill is to make some women equal to their brothers and to hell with the rest of society. Sorry, I just can’t find it in me to  care. Now if we were going to get rid of all of them, I’d be with her…

6) Michael Rosen on the death of his son and grieving and the bedroom tax. Just for this..

 “with poverty there often comes a disruption of place. Migration, war and developers do a lot of disrupting. You leave your home, or your home is destroyed. If you don’t move, the person who owns it can move you. There aren’t many paintings or statues for you to commemorate this. The up side of this is that you live for now. The down side is that it all seems to confirm that your life is of less value than people with big country houses.

The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure. This government has inverted this and used the power it has over those who live in council housing to cut their standard of living.”

7) Suzanne Moore on the parents versus not parents thing that seems to be going on. Yep..

8) Is teen romance fiction bad for teenage boys? Or things that make me really cross. Why do we need to have a discussion about the impact of books, that are mostly written for and by women and girls, on boys. How about we talk about what these books do to girls? The writer of the piece references Twilight (they always talk about Twilight) and The Mortal Instruments all of which feature some very pretty boys. They also have demons, vampires, and all sorts of weird stuff in them. I’ve read both books and the very real worry I have about Twilight is that girls will think that having no agency and doing things that risk your life because a boy doesn’t want you (or seems not to want you) is romantic and normal behaviour, not that a boy won’t feel as attractive as it’s ‘hero’.

Anna and the French Kiss features a hero who is really short, The Fault in Ours has Gus, with cancer and one leg and towards the end of that book he’s really not physically attractive. That’s two books off the top of my head, I could, if pushed come up with loads more.  I read a fair few YA books, read quite a bit of romance as a teenager and you will tear my Georgette Heyer books from my cold dead hands but romance is fantasy, real men and teenage boys aren’t like that. Something, I knew when I was 15 and most teenagers, male and female, know now.

However the framing of this, as bad for poor boys, is infuriating.  Are boys subject to similar beauty myths as girls? Yes, I think they are, they’re also under pressure to act like ‘men’, to boast about sex they had never had, to pretend to have answers that they didn’t, I think that they are exposed to images and ideas about sex that I find horrifying but to be more like the hero of a romance novel. Don’t think that’s up there…

Here endeth the rant…

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The Day in Food: Preparation

Posted on January 16, 2014 by nicdempsey

For me one of the keys to eating healthily within my budget during the week is preparation, if I don’t have breakfasts and lunches ready to go, then it’s far to easy to end up in a coffee shop buying croissants. I love croissants and I think that they have their place in a healthy diet but that place is not Monday to Friday. Last weekend, I menu planned and made food preparation a key goal and  it showed up in what I ate on Monday (and the rest of the week but I only have pictures for Monday!)

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First things first. Coffee and water.  I’m a creature of habit, my mornings run so much better when I do things in a certain way. So I heave myself out of bed, make the bed so I can’t get back in it. Lay out my clothes for the day. Then straight to the kitchen to make my coffee, I pack my lunch, drink a pint of water and then go and shower. I drink the coffee post shower, while I’m doing my make up and it makes the day better.

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Normally, once I get to work, I fill up my water bottle, grab a glass and make myself a cup of lemon and ginger tea. Coffee is vital to my mornings but I do try to make that the only caffeine I have during the day and I love my lemon and ginger tea. The water bottle is 750ml and I try to drink at least two a day, with the office air con, the more liquid I take in the better. However this morning, I got into the office and called into something else so it was 10am before I got my water, although I’d managed to grab a teabag and make my tea for the meeting.

Blueberry Granola Breakfast Pot

After the meeting, I was so hungry and it was to eat breakfast, which was blueberry granola yogurt pot.

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Lunch was leftover leek, anchovy and goats cheese pizza and a green salad.

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And a pear. On Monday and Wednesday the office gets a fruit delivery and I try and grab a couple of pieces to get me through the week.

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Also more water and more tea.

Vegetables and Roasted Carrot Hummus

 

Afternoon snack was vegetables (celery, carrot and mushrooms) with some roasted carrot and chickpea hummus.

Breakfast Banana Muffin

 

At about 4pm, I staved off my slump with a breakfast banana muffin, which gave me just the boost I needed to power through until hometime.

Vegetarian Cottage Pie

 

For dinner I had vegetarian cottage pie, which was amazingly good, I was going to have it with peas but I’ve run out so I just did that end of the day maths and decided that there was enough veg in it, so I didn’t feel too bad. I also had another couple of glasses of water but forgot to take photos.

I can’t pick a best thing because it was all good, although I think the cottage pie may have edged it because it was such great comfort food.

What’s the best thing that you’ve eaten this week?

 

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What I’ve Cooked – Other People’s Recipes

Posted on January 15, 2014 by nicdempsey

I love to cook and I think I’m pretty good at it but one of the joys for me is that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, there’s something beautiful about the way we take a recipe and change it to suit our tastes or cooking styles. Or we’ve cooked a recipe for so long that it’s become ours and we forget was the original recipe was because we’re so comfortable with it, we don’t need to read how to it, we just know.

That said, I’m aware of how many of ‘my recipes’ start as another person’s great idea. The internet makes that worse because there is so much out there. I’ve done quite a bit of cooking and planning over the last couple of weeks and I thought it would be interesting to link to the recipes that I’ve used that aren’t mine, credit where credits due and all that.

Cheese Stars

photoFrom Back to Her Roots. I’ve mentioned these before and made some changes to the recipe but they are good, you should make them.

Chocolate Fridge Cake

Chocolate Fridge Cake (with Ginger)

This is actually one of mine but I changed up the raisins for crystalized ginger and used all plain chocolate instead of half plain, half milk. Much more interesting.

Banana Breakfast Muffins

Banana Breakfast Muffins

From Utterly Scrummy Food For Families. No major changes to this recipe, I used greek yogurt* because that what I had. These are brilliant, easy, feel like a treat but full of mostly good stuff. Next time I’m going to add some walnuts for some added protein.

Chicken and Chorizo

Chicken and Chorizo BakeFrom Nigella Lawson. I made (halved the recipe) this for Mike and Christelle when they came to lunch last week, simple, tasty and quick. I would also serve with some bread next time to mop up the juices (and let’s be honest the fat!) from the chicken and chorizo but we ate a Mont d’or after that so we didn’t need extra bread!

Carrot hummus

Roasted Carrot and Chickpea Hummus with Veg

From Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I love carrots so of course I was going to try this, but I added chickpeas ’cause I love them!

Five Seed granola with optional cocoa nibs

Blueberry Granola Yogurt Pot

From London Bakes. Only I was about 50g short of oats, so added extra seeds to make up the weight because I’m lazy and couldn’t be doing with re-calculating the recipe (yes, I’m a very lazy cook – if you didn’t know this already, this must be the first time you’ve been here!). It’s great and is currently doing great things to my breakfast!

What have you been cooking recently? Which are the blogs or cookery writers that you use most often?

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Blueberry Granola Yogurt Pots

Posted on January 14, 2014 by nicdempsey

I have an issue with breakfast, I’m not keen on eating it, unless it’s pain au raisin! If you’re been reading this blog for a while you’ll be aware of how many times I’ve rebooted breakfast to keep me interested in eating it. I’ve make oatbakes, protein pots, eggcups and I’ve done granola and yogurt before but this is more grab and go solution that’s working for me at the moment. It also gets me some calcium which is an area of my diet I know I’m deficient in!

Blueberry Granola Yogurt Pots

I take 400g frozen blueberries and simmer them with 1/4 cup of brown sugar and the juice of a lemon. Once it’s cooled down, I strain off some of the liquid (more on what I do with that later this week) and divide the blueberries into five jars, which I top with greek yogurt*. The jars go in the fridge and in the morning when I’m packing up my lunch, I take a jar, add some granola and pack to eat at my desk. For the moment that’s breakfast solved!

Blueberry Granola Yogurt Pot

* I now buy 2 pots of low fat basics yogurt from Sainsburys and strain them, I then get about 500g of ‘greek’ yogurt and it costs 90p as opposed to £2.50 and I like the taste better!

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Weekend Tasks – What Got Done

Posted on January 14, 2014 by nicdempsey

This week was a great week for organising myself and the flat, I got to see my friends and sort myself out for next week. I didn’t do the ironing, so I’ll have to do that tonight but I got everything else done. Which is my definition of a good weekend!

Kitchen

  • General clean (sort out the recycling and rubbish, mopping the floor and general cleaning)
  • Clean oven

Cooking

  • Food prep for next week.

Bathroom

  • General clean (mop floor, change towels, empty bin, clean bath, sink and toilet)

Bedroom

  • General clean (sweep floor, change bed, dust, general tidy)
  • Clean window and mould growing around window.

Living Room

  • General clean (sweep floor, dust, tidy sofa, put things away etc)

photo

Hall

  • Hoover, lots and lots of hoovering of pine needles

General things

  • Shopping
  • Washing (clothes wash, white wash, towel wash)
  • Ironing
  • Wash make up brushes
  • Wash hairbrushes
  • Water plants
  • Back up laptop
  • Charge kindle, ipad and camera batteries
  • Pick up dry cleaning
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