Family, food, travel, gin and a touch of hysteria…
Currently Browsing: Veggies
Posted by
English Mum |
Jun 1st, 2009
Sunbathing, salsa and the garden luge. With cackling.
So it’s bank hols here in the Republic and yesterday dawned the most beautiful, hot sunny day. There’s nothing quite like a sunny day in Ireland. Not only is it very unusual and therefore all the more welcome, but the whole greenness of the place gives it an almost luminous, lime green glow. The kids started off mucking about spraying each other with water guns, then hubby disappeared to...
Posted by
English Mum |
Mar 23rd, 2009
Chicken and asparagus risotto
Ah, Mother’s Day. A day for eating cremated bacon sandwiches whilst smiling broadly and going ‘mmm, delicious!’, drinking the half-cup of dodgy tea that was delivered to your bedside whilst secretly worrying how long it’s going to take you to remove the other half that’s been slopped up the stairs, and being the recipient of approximately fifteen hardly squeezes and twenty five...
Posted by
English Mum |
Mar 8th, 2009
Sunday lunch: roast lamb, layered potatoes and rice pudding
Sunday lunch, then, and even though I say so myself, this one was rather a cracker. Given a unanimous 10/10 (unheard of in our house) and with the added bonus of being one of the easiest too. First up then is the main course:
Roast lamb with creamy layered potatoes
½ leg lamb (about 1kg)
1 kg potatoes
50g butter
300ml milk or cream
So for the lamb, just preheat the oven at about 180/gas 4, rub all over...
Posted by
English Mum |
Feb 20th, 2009
Parmesan chicken
So I sometimes think my little carpet monsters don’t know when they’ve got it good. Take last week: #2 went out shopping with D-next-door and seriously, dearest reader, you’d think he’d won the flipping lottery:
‘D gets curly fries! And chicken nuggets! And spicy wedges! And we walked straight past the fruit and veg without buying anything!! And we got chocolate fingers!’,...
Posted by
English Mum |
Jan 26th, 2009
Bubble and squeak: step by step
All this talk of recession has done me no end of good, y’know. For one thing, I’m trying to use up all the stuff we had left over in the freezer since Christmas (I’m down to two massive bags of frozen prawns and the kids are sick of them, but needs must, eh. Green Thai prawn curry anyone?). And I’ve hardly been out shopping at all, save for a couple of trips for school essentials...
Posted by
English Mum |
Dec 17th, 2008
English Mum’s trouble free surgically enhanced turkey
Golden rule first then. Christmas day is is a happy, family day. If you’re cooking, don’t stress about it, just think of it as a big roast dinner. It’s just a roast and some veg. I mean, open any food magazine or cookbook and there’ll be a different way to cook your turkey on every one – timetables for this, that and the other and enough information to turn you several different...
Posted by
English Mum |
Sep 3rd, 2008
Gardening news, steaks, potato wedges and rhubarb crumble
So I’ve had ups and downs with my first year of vegetable patch ownership. For example, the sweet peas went completely mental but didn’t give me a single bloody flower, the pumpkins, coriander and basil all died (too cold? we didn’t really have any sunshine) and the cucumber covered the whole plot in huge leaves and spidery tentrils, but no cucumbers (well how was I to know it was a...
Posted by
English Mum |
Jun 24th, 2008
C’s vegetable soup
So I often get emails asking after Little C and Lou. D battles cheerfully on, holding down a full time job as well as combining Mum/Dad duties at home. It’s now, unbelievably, nearly two months since their Mum died and with the added childcare pressures of the summer holidays, it’s a wonder he doesn’t spontaneously combust.
Happily, Little C and Lou are cheerful, muck-in with everybody...
Posted by
English Mum |
Jun 21st, 2008
Hubby’s Evil Chilli Couscous
So last night we all sat down for a nice family meal to celebrate the end of term/prizes/the promise of good reports to come (#2 looked slightly green at the mention of those), etc. I made little meatballs with my lamb kebab mixture, which I baked in the oven, along with some of #1′s famous tomato sauce.
Hubby, generally a stranger to the kitchen (unless there’s scrambling of eggs or anything to...
Posted by
English Mum |
Mar 24th, 2008
Roast beef with garlic roasted butternut squash
So yesterday, then. I knew J and C were coming to lunch so I popped down to the nice butcher’s on Saturday to get an enormous leg of lamb (I appreciate I have plenty next door, but they’re all still attached and somewhat fluffy). Oh dear. The horror stories I read in the paper about lamb legs selling for 50 euro a pop due to Easter being so early were neither confirmed nor denied as they were...
