Food glorious food

Greetings. I’ve had the day off work so today has been all about food and sunshine and I feel truly satisfied with that.

I started off this morning with porridge in the garden. I like this sort and it’s really easy to do in the microwave. I have no idea what Acai is, but I’m sure it must be good for me.

Then I moved on to prepare tonight’s dinner for the slow cooker. This is a really good book for slow cooking.

Today I made the beef rendang from this book, an Indonesian beef curry. I’ve never made this before. It smells gorgeous. This is the first part, mixing up the spice paste in my mini chopper.

Then fried it up and added coconut milk…

Mixed it up well and brought to the boil..

Then poured it into the slow cooker and added the braising steak..(no idea why the sauce suddenly looks very bright yellow here).

It’s been bubbling away all day on low in the slow cooker and now it smells gorgeous. I think it will be quite spicy as there are lots of red chillies as well as garlic and ginger in it… 😋 yum! There’s loads of it, we’ll probably freeze half of it.

I then relaxed in the garden for a while with a cup of coffee. After that I heated up some gourmet sausage rolls from “Cook” to prepare our picnic. We had sausage rolls, cherry tomatoes (me only), little cubes of gruyere cheese, mini cheddar biscuits and twiglets. We drank lemonade (me) and red grape juice (David). For pudding I had a satsuma and a David had an Actimel yoghurt drink. We took our picnic chairs and found a quiet spot to sit by the river in Windsor for an hour, it was lovely. We were immediately joined by some Canada geese.

We had our picnic lunch and did some river watching, lots of canoeists. One was solar powered so he just sat there doing nothing, gliding up the river Thames. I’m not sure you could call that going out for exercise! Then we went for a walk up to the castle, quite strange without the tourists. All the shops were shut except for a couple of ice cream shops and Tesco Express.

Such blue sky, amazing weather today. I am wearing clothes I usually wear on holiday in the Caribbean, and factor 50 sunscreen on my face as for those who don’t know me I am very fair skinned.

When we got home I started thinking about different rhubarb recipes I should try, as there is still loads of rhubarb in the garden. I researched how to make rhubarb jam in this old recipe book from the 1970s. I love old cookbooks and how the food pictures look in the old days, with things laid out with patterns of fruit/veg chopped up on the top, very trendy at the time. I bought this book at a car boot sale in Chichester when visiting my parents many years ago.

I’m going to use the recipe in this book to make rhubarb jam in the next couple of weeks. I haven’t had much success with jam in the past, but I’ll give it a go. I now have a jam thermometer so that should help. I ordered some jam pot covers from eBay and some glass jars with red gingham patterned tops from Amazon with some leftover gift vouchers.

Then I decided to make a rhubarb cake for tea. The result is the headline photo, turned out really nicely and I ate it in the garden with a scoop of ice cream and a cup of tea. David joined me for tea and some shop bought chocolate cake as he doesn’t like rhubarb. Oh well, all the more for me! It was very tasty.

So, looking forward to the slow cooked curry in a bit. A day full of food and sunshine.. bliss! Before I love you and leave you as big sister is phoning me for a catch up, I’ll just show you last night’s dinner. This is Nigel Slater’s mushroom and potato pie below…think garlic mushrooms with mashed potato, gruyere and Parmesan cheese… so good 😊. Going back to work tomorrow before I get too fat at home. I’ll be back on Sunday with cocktail news et al xx.