Tidy kitchen cupboards

Hi everyone. I’ve had a good tidy up of all my kitchen food cupboards today. I’ve thrown quite a bit away and wiped down the inside of all the cupboards. More importantly, I now know exactly what I’ve got in stock, so I’m less likely to buy duplicates by mistake. I can’t say I’ve thrown away everything past its best before date, because there are so many items that are still fine to use after their best before dates. I recently used up some over 10 year old curry powder that tasted fine and we weren’t ill. It probably just wasn’t as potent as it used to be. I hesitated over a tub of cocoa powder dated 2011 today. In the end I threw that out. I kept some slightly out of date flour, dried fruits and herbs and spices. I’m sure they’ll be fine.

This week I treated us to a new baking tray. I’m forever buying new metal ones and begging David not to put them in the dishwasher as they go rusty very quickly. David likes to put EVERYTHING in the dishwasher including the wooden breadboard last year… completely warped, but we did get a very nice new one, which so far has not been submerged into water. I found a glass, Pyrex baking sheet on Amazon for £9.78 which I actually bought with some gift vouchers I had on my Amazon account.

So far I think this looks good and it is definitely dishwasher/David proof, but it is rather heavy so now I’ve warned him to be very careful not to drop it onto his arthritic big toe… 😫or any other part of the body. I’m going to try it out tonight for our salmon en croutes (made by Charlie Bigham not me). I do love a new piece of kitchen equipment (so middle aged), and I like the fact it stores very neatly in our kitchen drawer inside my big roasting dish. 10 year guarantee too. Oven, freezer and microwave proof… microwave?? You’d need to have a weird MASSIVE microwave for that 😂. Anyway, what’s not to like? Apart from the heaviness and risk of dropping onto your foot maybe. It cannot be worse, my friends, than Monday night when I made from scratch a perfect looking fish pie, put the pie in its dish onto the old baking tray, then somehow missed the shelf of the oven and ended up with a vertical pie dish and uncooked fish pie dripping everywhere inside and outside the hot oven, me nearly crying, whilst David scraped up bits of dropped pie from all sorts of possibly not that clean places like the very bottom of the oven and inside of the oven door until I pulled myself (and the pie) together. Actually it tasted fine, the upside down, reconstructed fish pie. Isn’t that a restaurant thing… deconstructed? Reconstructed? Well I was certainly deconstructed, who knows about the pie!

Enough of my waffling, I’ll show you a few foodie pics from the weekend you may like and then leave you in peace.

Loved the prawns from Côte at home.

Scallops and lobster going under the grill.

😋 Yum.

We put the scallop shells in the dishwasher afterwards.

Now they are in use as our new soap dishes and objets d’art.

Do you think we will ever get used to this pandemic/post pandemic life? David and his band mate John are currently strumming guitars in the garden preparing for a wedding gig they have coming up in May. It’s a little chilly but the sun’s shining a bit. I guess it does us all a lot of good spending more time socialising outdoors these days. We’ll have to get used to it. I’ll probably be wearing my thermal vest underneath until about June. Off for tea and toasted tea cake now. This blogging is thirsty work. 🥵Xx