Worm's World

I am currently between ovens - as we're mid way in the 2 week kitchen renovation - which I know is a terribly short time in the scheme of things, but it doesn't help. It boils down to this - you don't notice how much you use the hob, or the grill till you don't have one. We've set up a makeshift kitchen, set up in the dining room - all the essentials - microwave, toaster, kettle, toastie maker, coffee grinder - and the dishwasher is still working - which is good since what little room around the sink is full of ramekins full of nails. The worst of it is the not being able to find things - the dining room is currently full of boxes, which also means there's no room to put anything, or do anything - it took me 10 mins of going through bags of things to find chocolate spread to put on some french bread for pudding (I gave up trying to find a bread knife, so I tore it in satisfying hunks of baguette) I know it will end soon - I'm not entirely sure when the plumb...

There's some interesting times ahead - for a whole month I'm being left on my own while my lovely, vegetarian husband goes off on a blues tour of Scotland . He'll be living off pizza and pasta 'n' sauce I've no doubt he'll be fine. This does leave me free to explore food he doesn't much like (asian) or doesn't eat (meat) - but because he's off to pursue his dream of being a full time musician, it also means we'll have a severely reduced household budget to play with, and as an added bonus I'll be in work full time and our little baby boy in full time nursery (He's catered for at least). What I don't want to happen is what used to happen when I was a student and I just ate peanut butter on toast for days on end, so I'm enlisting the help of the slow cooker, the substantial section of the cookbook collection I don't usually play in and Pinterest.... I've got a month before this happens, so I have some time to plan, and ...

So, we've found a place for the slow cooker to live, nestled in a big deep drawer with the pasta maker and a selection of ice cube trays and I think we're getting the hang of it. We also seemed to have started a bit of a localised Stafford based slow cooker revolution but it seem people get a bit obsessed and cultish about them. My mum described it in a lovely way, like "having a mam in the kitchen leaving your dinner on the stove". We've found it excellent for tomato based things, chillis and pasta sauces,  Pete did a slow cooked Spanish omelet after a tip off from a friend at work, I've used it to cook a stewed fruit crumble filling, loving the fact that it frees up the rings on the cooker for more immediate things. I think I'll keep an eye out in charity shops for a more general slow cooker cookbook - The veggie one is good, if a little limited - but we're getting there on adapting recipes where we need to. I'm keen to try ...

So, I brought a slow cooker - having turned to the internet for support last week. Admittedly, we had a busy weekend anyway, and the Pete was on holiday for a week - not necessarily the best planned time - but on the flip side we did have veg to use up. We have ordered 2 cookbooks -   (Numbers #277 & #278 on  NomBooks) I've also been tagging any tweets about it with #genericstew  - after something I read on a mumsnet page about slow cookers. So far we've done: Monday -  a Veggie Chilli - Using the only vegetarian recipe that came with the slow cooker. Getting home at 7:30pm to the smell of it cooking was really lovely. It also meant Pete got to go out to an Open Mic night. The leftovers went towards my lunch the next day. Tuesday - We had a rather large Butternut squash to use up so I found the recipe  - although I cheated and didn't saute anything, just chucked it in - I also suspect I over filled it, but we'll see. There is something st...

I've been thinking about buying a slow cooker, well, no, that's not true, I've just this moment had the idea while looking at all those enticing pins that mention crock pots and I've only just got around to confirming that a crock pot is indeed a slow cooker and maybe buying one of those would help with an issue we've found selves in a few times recently. Mainly that we're too busy to cook, and so we seem to eat a lot of pasta, and quick things. Which is fine and lovely, if a little bit boring after a while. Either one of us is out, or the other, and sometimes we have plenty of veg to sue up, that would make a lovely soup, or stew, just not the time to make it. Now, the reason I've not yet run off to Argos and brought one is three fold, one, I've not run it past Mr Wearn yet - not that I have to you understand, but it would be nice that he doesn't wake up from his afternoon nap with a note saying 'gone to argos to buy a slow cooker, back soon...