cooking | organised castle

Tonight I have been organised by preparing meals to sustain us. I used 1kg of mince and made bolognaise sauce which yielded 17 individual serves. It is now all packed up ready to go in the freezer. On the weekend I soaked some haricot (navy) beans with a view to making my own baked beans. Last night I cooked the beans in the slow-cooker and this evening I made up the sauce and added the beans. They taste great and are so useful to take for lunches. I made 10 single serves from 2 cups of dried beans.

I will add the recipes one day soon. In the meantime the freezer is replenished and I know that when we arrive home and don’t feel like cooking too much that I have a choice of easy, nutritious meals at my fingertips.

I made another batch of spreadable butter mixture, too. As an aside, I cooked risotto for dinner tonight with enough left over for 1 lunch tomorrow.

Did you see the photo of the bowl of rosellas in yesterday’s post? This is the larger of 2 mixing bowls which I have inherited from my maternal grandmother. Although I have an assortment of other bowls – glass, ceramic, plastic and metal – none are quite as good as these. What makes them special? Is it the weight, the sense of history, the intrinsic link to my grandmother and her kitchen? I don’t know.

While you are unlikely to ever find me creaming butter and sugar by hand there is a certain pleasure in tucking this bowl on my hip and thoroughly combining the ingredients for a batch of muffins with a wooden spoon.

I have a wonderful Kitchen Aid stand mixer and a Kenwood food processor and they are fantastically useful but I can never imagine myself loving them like I love my mixing bowls. It is also gratifying to know that I can still create a wonderful array of wholesome food with nothing more sophisticated than a bowl and a wooden spoon.

Apart from the muffins, I also make zucchini quiche, banana cake, muesli slice, tuna patties and tuna roll using nothing more than my bowl and a wooden spoon. I am sure there are others that I cannot think of at the moment. What are yours?