A day in the kitchen: (almost) domestic goddess-ing

Despite having the best looking veg box delivered last week, somehow lunches didn't happen as I'd hoped. They were hastily grabbed and probably not the healthiest option and I was keen not to repeat that again this week.  So yesterday I spent some time prepping and cooking in the kitchen so that I stood half a chance.

If you didn't see my pretty and tasty veg box, here's my Facebook post:

The box was so good - it's the type of box where you can choose your items - that our second box is arriving before we head to work this morning. We usually buy our fruit and veg from our local greengrocers, but just lately the quality seems to have gone down while the price has gone up and so I've been looking at other options. The price of this box is similar but the quality - and freshness - of the produce is far superior.

As well as these we also had some raspberries from the allotment to use - most are in the freezer - so my day of Domestic Godess-ing started with banana, apple and raspberry spelt pancakes, which of course we topped with greek yogurt, more apple puree and honey. They're good, and I use the recipe in Hugh's River Cottage Everyday as my base. I'm not sure I ever really follow it - for a start it doesn't have banana in it - but you'll discover through this post, I often only use a recipe as a guide.

Back to those lunches...

And yes, if you've scrolled down that is cake. But a homemade cake so I think that's slightly better. And any lunch this ends with cake is even better still.  

So this is my take on Elly Pear's apple and banana cake. It does have quite a bit of sugar in, as I discovered as I started to make it - oops.  Well, I consoled myself that it was helping me reduce the mountain of frozen bananas I have in the freezer.  The recipe says to use overripe bananas, not frozen ones, but I sort of adapted the recipe a bit, I also didn't add the second topping, purely because by the time it was in the oven I had moved onto other things.

Elly Pear's apple and banana cake my style

The cake recipe says it serves ten, even for a big cake person like me, I think it'll do more than that. Maybe next time though I should opt for a healthier cake, I will, if I remember. There is more to our lunches than cake, but rolls get boring (and sandwiches aren't my thing) so I've turned to those kinds of lunches where there's salad, protein and grains with lots of variety.

To help get us back on track with weekday lunches, yesterday I cooked some greenwheat freekeh and knocked up another batch and a half of Elly Pear's green harissa. I was only going to make a single batch, but my kitchen scales went a bit loopy with the coriander and so it became a batch and a half.

I think I agree with her about it being addictive, and who'd have thought that spring onions, kale, coriander, garlic, pickled jalapenos, salt and vegetable oil could produce such a winning combination.

Elly Pear's Green Harissa (it's addictive) and some freekeh for lunch

In her newest book there's also recipes using the paste - I cooked the green eggs and refried beans, and we'll be having that again. Maybe not this batch though, as a spoonful alongside grains, salad and roasted vegetables will give our lunches a bit of zing, and there's more recipes I want to try in her books too.

And a batch of pizza dough 

While the cake was cooking I was making a batch of pizza dough, as with the weather nice again we decided to fire up the pizza oven. There seemed little point making enough for one meal though so in the end I made enough for what turned out to be three occasions.  With a kilo of flour, plenty of yeast, some olive oil, salt and tepid water it's a sticky, but enthusiastic dough.

I've still the perfect my take on the recipe, but when I do I'll share it here. Already we've found that the simplest pizza toppings are the best: tomato sauce, torn mozzarella and torn basil, or with some shavings of spicy nduja sausage.

Here's one serving of the dough during its second prove, it's enough for four pizzas the size of a large side plate and a smaller, test, garlic bread pizza. With another two "meals" in the freezer, the self appointed domestic goddess title was starting to be earnt.

pizza dough on its second prove and ready to shape

But I wasn't done there as while the pizza oven was on, it seemed a missed opportunity not to make use of the heat as the oven cooled down. So the apricots from my veg box were split and doused with thyme, vanilla sugar, water and a vanilla pod. A combination I remembered seeing online recently and was looking forward to trying out. 

Apricots with thyme and vanilla ready for the pizza oven

Each year I forget just how much I like apricots and I was really looking forward to trying these. 

Outside finally the pizza oven was getting there, and pizzas were cooked and eaten. No pictures, as by now I was hungry. I'd also made some crumble to keep in the fridge to meet emergency crumble needs, and following the suggestion of rhubarb crumble in an earlier comment, it seemed the only way to go.  

Getting the pizza oven fired up took longer than we thought

Not content with that I'd also made a good looking, and well-risen sourdough to cook in the pizza oven. We knew it was possible, but as we discovered our oven was still too hot. The crust crusted up well, but before the bread could continue to rise in the heat, and it came out looking like this - oops.

Cooking sourdough in the pizza oven needs a little more practice
 
Our pizza oven sourdough tasted better than it looked

Thankfully though it tasted better than it looked and so we'll be eating this for breakfast this week. And trying again, every time we fire up the pizza oven. 

That wasn't our only mishap though as it turns out I needed my emergency crumble sooner than I thought too. That turned out much better than the bread, especially dolloped with mascarpone and eaten straight out of the tin as soon as it was done. It seemed rude not to.

A change of plan on dessert, rhubarb crumble & mascarpone

But what became of the apricots? 

The short answer is, not much and quite a lot! They cooked well and were just starting to catch so MOH took them out of the oven. And promptly dropped them. 

Apricots and dirt anyone? No, me neither

Strangely, after that neither of us wanted any...   Ah well, another time maybe.  

Firing up our pizza oven

So once we'd filled our gabion baskets, we needed to lift the pizza oven onto the top of it. Something that was easier said than done. It comes to pieces - the base which is very heavy, the interior dome which is less heavy and then the outer dome, which is heavy and an awkward shape. 

It wasn't something I was looking forward to, even though I knew it was essential. The bruises we'd both encountered carrying it through the house (oh how we wished we had side access!) were still there, but healing and I wasn't that keen on adding to them.

As it turns out having the smaller gabion baskets to the side of the larger metre high one was a good plan as lifting kilos worth of a clay oven a metre off the floor is hard work. Less hard work if you can clamber onto a half-metre high block in the process. After a lot of sweat and tears, it was in place. Actually there were no tears, but a lot of the other stuff and some effing and jeffing all round. 

And it looks great, but it needed to do more than just look great.

Our pizza oven on top of the gabion baskets

It seems we've put it in a great spot, it gets the evening sun but is sheltered enough by the laurel tree to avoid the rain. That's brilliant as there'll be no excuse for MOH if we fancy pizza in the rain, well apart from having to get to the end of the garden!

It's heavy - and lifting it a metre into the air was hard work

Before we could use it in earnest, the inner dome needed curing. To do that MOH lit small fires around the inside and waited for the temperature to reach about 200, which was the most angst-ridden and most precise thing ever, according to MOH. And tricky, so tricky that he decided he needed an infra-red thermometer, which had I know how pleased he'd be with this I think we could have started with that and progressed to the pizza oven, it's such a good boys toy!  

Seriously if you're looking for a gadgety gift for your OH then an infra-red thermometer could be just the thing. Just be prepared for him to tell you the temperature of everything close by, including yourself. It's kind of addictive though.

Back to the fire. Look. Fire.

FIRE...

FIRE...

As the oven was starting to cure properly - it needs to be done over four days - I decided to make a start on dough for our 110th party. There was a lot of dough, and boy did it rise. In fact it didn't stop rising and took on a life of its own. 

THE PIZZA DOUGH ROSE MORE THAN I EXPECTED IT TOO

THE PIZZA DOUGH ROSE MORE THAN I EXPECTED IT TOO

I like bread dough though, and while MOH tended his fire, and told me I'd made the pizza dough all wrong. I know, give him fire and a pizza oven and suddenly he's a grand master, even when I'm the one that makes the bread in this house...

Thankfully though it wasn't long before the fire needed a good close look at...

KEEPING A CLOSE EYE ON OUR NEW TOY

And our first pizza wasn't far behind either. We started simply; tomato sauce, torn mozzarella and topped with some torn basil (clearly we hadn't got to that bit for this photo!) and as you can see the lively pizza dough continued to bubble in the oven too.

OUR FIRST PIZZA - IT PASSED THE TASTE TEST

It tasted great. Way better than any shop-bought, oven-cooked pizza and just like the ones from our local pizzeria. We just need to master slightly bigger pizzas now, and to not annoy our temperamental neighbours with the smoke...  I guess we could always offer to cook them a pizza!

I've some more dough to make - perhaps just half of what I made before, and the plan is to freeze it before it's second prove so that we're never that far away from a decent pizza.

What do you have on yours?

 

Gousto: Overall, it's a thumbs up from me

Last Friday I took delivery of my first Gousto box and while I've had vegetable boxes in the past, it was the first time I'd had a food box like this, and I was keen to see how it all worked. I've seen similar boxes, and learnt more about one during our visit to Taste London in the autumn.

I'd chosen two recipes from the website and was keen to try something I wouldn't usually cook for one of the recipes, and something similar to a normal meal for the other. That led me to "Sea Bass on a smoky chorizo chowder" and "Sticky chilli beef burritos & lime mayo" - being a self-confessed fish-phobic, I think you can guess which one was pushing me out of my comfort zone!

Sea Bass on a smoky chorizo chowder

Yes, this was the recipe that I was braving, I knew I liked all of the ingredients individually but I'm not sure I've had them together before, and usually I'll delegate fish cooking to MOH. But not this time. Almost everything for this recipe is provided - butter, oil, flour and milk were the storecupboard ingredients needed, and this made a lot of sense, although I was amused to receive one small shallot and a single clove of garlic in the box for this recipe. 

My first impressions were that it looked a small portion, and then I wondered if my portion size was out of control so decided to reserve judgement until we'd eaten. On reflection, it was a tasty meal and I wasn't hungry afterwards and so my first impressions were unfounded. The recipe card was easy to follow, but like many recipes I think the time taken - 35 minutes in this case - is optimistic. I know my way around the kitchen and it easily took me fifty minutes to cook this dinner.

Sea bass on smoky chorizo chowder - recipe and ingredients from Gousto

But it was great and I was totally sold on Gousto at this point. It was a slightly more adventurous meal for a weeknight than normal, and as somehow we both had white tops on, we also decided to eat at the table too - and that made a really nice change. It was also a good move as it made it easier to juggle the knife, fork and spoon that I think were needed to eat this. 

My finished dish - I followed the Gousto recipe and was very impressed

 

Sticky chilli beef burritos & lime mayo

This was the recipe that was more like a meal I would cook, and buoyed by my success the previous night I tackled this one the next evening and it had a lot to live up to. For this one I struggled more with the packaging of the ingredients. The individual mayonnaise portioned sachet especially, it just felt odd. MOH wasn't so sure about the small pot of Tiptree honey, probably because he knew that the jar wasn't going anywhere once it was empty (and he was right) and he was right.  

sticky chilli beef burritos and lime mayo - recipe and ingredients by Gousto

We ate this meal five days after the box was delivered - I'd frozen the meat once it was clear we wouldn't be eating this immediately - and I was disappointed that the tomato was showing clear signs of deterioration on the day I cooked this. It was easy to replace as we regularly have tomatoes, but that was the only concern I had. Well apart from rescuing the little gem lettuce from an untimely end in MOH's sandwiches...

For the cooking on this one I had trouble with the rice. The recipe uses the "cook in a drop of water" method and I struggle with cooking rice this way, I've no idea why. The recipe card said to turn the heat down low, but my heat was too low and so after twelve minutes or so wasn't cooked at all. Which impacted on my tortillas, which were already in the oven, warming up and becoming a little too crispy. So I took them out of the oven where they promptly went super crispy. Oops. I rescued them a bit with a drop of water and a short spell in the microwave but by the time I'd dished up, there was no chance of rolling these.

my finished meal - not quite looking like the picture this time, but still very tasty

This meal tasted great though, but was messy for us to eat. There were some nice touches, and things I wouldn't have thought to do, such as adding lime juice and olive oil to the mayonnaise, which according to MOH "brought the dish together" - can you tell we've been watching Masterchef?!

Apart from the rice, the rest of this dish was easy to cook and it was much closer to the expected 20 minutes. If my rice had gone to plan I think I'd have come in around 25 minutes, but as it turned out it was closer to 35. 

So overall it's a thumbs up from me for my first Gousto box, I'd definitely be up for trying one again with different recipes, as I think they would be really handy in those weeks where life is busy, but you still want to eat proper food. And quite often, we have weeks like those!

What do you think? Have you tried a food box delivery such as this? And do you manage to cook rice successfully this way - what am I doing wrong?!  Let me know, I'm interested to hear your views.

Try Gousto for yourself

If you'd like to try this for yourself, Gousto are offering my readers £20 discount on your first and second orders, on any sized box. This offer means your first two boxes would cost £7.49 each, to take advantage of this offer please use the code TORNADO on checkout.

* I was sent this recipe box free of charge with no requirement to post a review. As usual all views and opinions are my own.