A Thai Feast

Last night, Pete's dad and sister were with us, and we decided to have a takeaway. We've taken Pete's dad to the local Thai a couple of times, and although it is very expensive, he really likes it. We can't afford to go there without him, so this is a good thing. They did offer to babysit if Pete and I wanted to go out on our own, but Bernard is very under the weather, and not at all settled in the evening at the moment, so it was better to stay in.

Given the choice, Pete's dad asked if the Thai did takeaway. We didn't have a menu, so he and Pete went up there in the car with instructions to get a set meal, as long as it included a green chicken curry. They came back with four (4) bags of food, which I found out today had come to £80. See what I mean about it being expensive?

There were two sets of starters, featuring quite a lot of fishy stuff, but I traded for satay chicken and a filo parcel of something meaty. The best was the red curry, with beef that just melted in your mouth. There was loads of food left, but Pete's sister scraped everything into one of the bags, and nothing could be salvaged. Such waste.

Poor sick baby had nearly a whole stage 2 jar of Lancashire Hotpot, and some dried apple for pudding. Today he has hardly eaten anything, but got hysterical with tiredness just now and was breastfed to sleep. Lambkin.

Friday Night Curry

Waitrose again: Chicken Saag Masala, Lamb Bhuna and Chana Masala. The chicken in particular was very good. But I'm feeling guilty about the laziness and all the packaging that this sort of dinner entails. I need to come up with a new idea.

Bernard is under the weather. At teatime he got very upset when I tried to feed him lentil and tomato mush, and blew such powerful snotty raspberries that he sprayed me in the face. Lovely. Once again he managed pudding without a protest, though: mashed cinnamon pears with crumbled Boots organic rusk. But he is sick and needs to get something down him, so I let it go. I'm soft.

Freezer Pizza

We didn't feel like trying very hard. Or I didn't feel like it yesterday, and didn't put anything in the slow cooker. So we had frozen pizzas from Sainsbury/Pizza Express. They were nice, but I'm still hungry, which is odd considering how much I've eaten today. Including three macaroons.

Chilli Beans with Sausage & Chips

The beans were the highlight of this meal. Another old family staple, created by my dad as a student and usually enjoyed with bangers and mash, but when Pete is given access to the oven, he likes to treat the potatoes as chips. The sausages were something from Morrisons' Best range, and very nice too. All that I have said about non-organic meat is moot when it comes to sausages. Meat moot. I like that.

Bernard had a finger food tea: chunks of sweet potato, fingers of grilled chicken, and tartines of buttered organic baguette. He didn't eat much, because he's had an exciting day and not enough naps, but studied everything hard and wiped it around his tray. I gave him some jarfood pudding, which has reappeared in vomit format several times this evening.

Nige & Lisa's Spicy Chicken with Cous Cous

Lisa gave me this recipe over IM yesterday, and I was delighted to have all the ingredients in my cupboard. Some sort of acknowledgement is also due to Nigel Slater, I suppose.

The chicken was marinaded this afternoon in garlic, chilli, cinnamon, cumin, olive oil and lemon juice. The couscous was left soaking. Then it all went in the oven in shifts, with some sultanas thrown in for good measure, and was served with a salad of rocket, watercress and spinach.

My dad was here for the evening, and had shown us about 90 slides from his recent trip to Sicily. We consumed some Sicilian Syrah with it, which helped with the photographs.

Bernard, having refused to eat his delicious sweet potato and pea mush at lunchtime, came home to prove to his Grandad that he really does like to eat. He had pasta with tomato sauce, which was the extra pizza sauce I made yesterday, whizzed a bit with the stick-blender. Not only did he eat it all with the wide-mouth like a baby bird, but he also had seconds. I use the little pasta shells that you can get for soup, and he used to spit them out at me but now he swallows them whole. Then I tried to put him in my new Ergo baby carrier. Hilarity ensued.

Pizza Danese

Tonight we went wild and put blue cheese on the pizza. This week I assembled it, in the more traditional mozarella-underneath format. I'm sure you will agree that this is the correct way for a pizza to be arranged. Not like last week's.



Bernard, sporting magnificent bruise to the forehead, ate a reasonable amount of sweet potato with egg yolk and red leicester, followed by warmed, mashed banana with rhubarb and raspberry puree. The sweet potato was baked in the oven, and tasted absolutely gorgeous. I'll be doing more of that.

Tortellini a la casa

I have a long history of tortellini. It was one of the first meals I learned to make, along with keema curry, spag bol, chilli con carne, and bangersmash&chillibeans, when my brother and I lived with our dad as teenagers. Tortellini seemed exotic yet easy, perfect for the domestically useless trio that we made.

Back then it was sold as dried pasta, and however long you cooked it for it never quite softened. We always but always made a tomato and onion sauce, with mattesons smoked pork sausage, crisped under the grill. Gotta love that greasy, additive-ridden sausage, with the skin curling up and the oil oozing out in synthetic dribbles.

I do vary the sauce these days, but it almost always still features the sausage.

Bad Lamb

We were going to have home-made hummus with tomato sauce tonight, but while I was at Morrisons I spotted a rolled, stuffed breast of lamb which seemed like excellent value. This afternoon I peeled potatoes and cut up cabbage, and we put the joint in just before going upstairs to put Bernard to bed.

As you can see from the picture, the lamb was mainly a fatty container for an awful lot of stuffing. Eating it was a question of extracting thin layers of meat from between the inedible parts. At least the gravy and the potatoes and the organic cabbage were good, and the house had a very nice meatroasty smell for a little while. I am really quite limited in my knowledge of meat, so maybe this was inevitable. Or maybe I should just learn when a price tag is too good to be true.

Bernard has been quite out of sorts today. For tea he had pitta bread fingers with home-made hummus spread inside, which he chewed on a bit but didn't consume much. Then I offered him the remainder of the jar of Boots Organic Vegetables & Turkey, which was opened at lunchtime, but he found it very upsetting, and screeched until I stopped trying to make him eat it. I mixed up some fromage frais with the hummus and he tolerated that for a while: just enough to earn his pudding. Pud was yesterday's banana slop mixed with rhubarb and raspberry puree, so a bit healthier, and more interesting to eat. He managed all of that, raising the question of whether he should actually be denied pudding if he refuses to touch his savoury course. Still, I tasted the turkey jarfood, and it was really bland. I wouldn't have eaten it.

Waitrose Ready-Curry

For the first time in my life I have become a regular consumer of ready meals. Waitrose microwave curries seem to be worth making an exception for. We originally tried the Meals For Two that come in a box; the Spicy and Aromatic was our first adventure in Readyland, and we were pleasantly surprised. The next week we tried a Mild and Somethingorother, which was okay but not as exciting. It occurred to us that we didn't need to buy rice or naan bread, as we have plenty of that sort of thing at home, so we then started to explore the individual dishes. I can't remember what we had last week, apart from the Bombay Aloo, which was yummy.

Tonight we had a Chef's special aloo mutter keema with tawa paratha, chicken jalfrezi, and aloo gobi saag. This was a somewhat quirky combination; the jalfrezi was exactly the right hotspicyness, and the keema curry very unusual, with little potato dumplings. Pete did the necessary, including cooking the rice and placing upon the table one jar of mango chutney (Sharwoods).

I notice that we did forget to get the bottle of wine out, and Pete has had a beer now, so maybe we will have that tomorrow. It's our last bottle: the Pouilly Fume that we were saving for a special occasion. That occasion is the occasion of our running out of other wine. Congratulate us.

Bernard's tea was last night's uncreamy chicken, which became much creamier after the application of the blender. I told him if he ate 11 spoonfuls, then he could have a jar pudding. He ate more than 11, although he did get a bit fractious, and didn't quite finish the lot. So he got his Cow & Gate Organic Banana & Cookie Crumble, which is a mystifyingly long name for what should rightly be called Sweet Banana Slop.

Uncreamy Chicken

I made this yesterday evening and left it in the slow cooker for Pete to do the donkey work today: he successfully switched it on at lunchtime.

I was expecting it to have a creamy sauce, since it consisted of chicken, leeks and mushrooms, with half a tin of tomatoes, half a tin of Cambells condensed mushroom soup, and half a tub of mascarpone cheese. Yes, I was emptying the fridge. There were a few herbs in there as well, and maybe some cabbage; I can't quite remember.

It smelt delicious when I came in this evening, but on closer inspection the sauce had separated and was very watery. Still, I cooked up some pasta and we consumed vast quantities of the stuff, finishing it up with a spoon. I don't do chicken in the slow cooker very often, but I should, because it makes it absolutely melty and yum.