Riverford Organic Vegetables

Today we received our first organic vegetable box from Riverford Organic Vegetables.  Don't let the name deceive you, they do lots of other organic stuff like fruits, breads, eggs, meat, dairy, and even wine.  We heard about this on a TV show about local farming, and then I read about it again in a magazine.  Basically its a website where you can order organic stuff and have it delivered to your door.  The cool thing about the company is it's trying to get people to eat healthy fruits and veggies at affordable prices.  Lot's of people argue that they can't afford to eat organic and its just kind of a silly rich person trend.  So I put them to the test... have a look at what we got.

We ordered the "Seasons Vegbox"  The contents of which change weekly, but this week it contained : 2 leeks, 1 head of broccoli, 1 cauliflower, 6 onions, 3 ears of corn, 3 different varieties of lettuce, and one sugar pumpkin.

Our fruit box contained 6 bananas, 1 mango, 8 apples, 6 pears, and 14 clementines.

You'd think that'd be enough produce for us... but I just couldn't help myself from ordering the "Squash Box" - and I'm SO glad I did.  They sent us a crown prince squash (the pretty blue one), butternut squash, and I think the other two are carnival squash and kabacha squash.  That little piece of paper helped me to identify them and it also has recipes for how to use them.  I'm pretty sure I've died and gone to pumpkin heaven.

Am I the only person who thinks pumpkins are cute?

I also got two packs of veggie burgers as I'm on a hunt for a decent veggie burger in England.  I tried these already and they're OK but still don't compare to my all time favorite Five Star Foodies Artichoke Burger, or even Morning Star Farms.... the search continues.

Now most importantly is this stuff affordable?  Well, we paid 33.25 pounds for ALL of this.  So I did an online shop at our grocery store, Sainsbury's, for the exact same things.  Sainsbury's total was 34.41 pounds!  So we spent less money, and got organic and fair trade produce.  So take that and eat it all you "organic is too expensive" nay sayers!

French Bread and Cheese - It's a Classic

As promised I made my own French bread to go with the cheeses we bought at the festival on Sunday.  I found this recipe on La Fuji Mama's blog and it was pretty darn easy and super tasty.  It definitely wasn't exactly the same as real French French bread.  The texture was a bit denser - this seems to be the problem with all my breads - I want fluffy bread!  Does anyone know how to fix this?  But still you can't beat fresh from the oven bread, even if its not entirely fluffy.

I cut the ingredients down from the original recipe so I only made one loaf - which disappeared quickly between three people.  Here's the recipe for one delightful loaf of bread...

Ingredients

• 1 packet (7 grams or 3/4 tbsp) dry active yeast
• 1/4 cup warm water
• 1/4 teaspoon granulated sugar
• 1 cup hot water
• 1.5 tbsp granulated sugar
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 1/4 cup oil
• 3 cups all purpose flour

In a small bowl dissolve yeast with 1/4 cup warm water and 1/4 teaspoon granulated sugar.  In a large bowl, mix 1 cup of hot water with 1.5 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tbsp salt, and 1/4 cup oil.  Add 1.5 cups of flour to this and mix well. Then add your yeast mixture to this.  Add another 1.5 cups of flour and mix again.  Let the dough sit like this for one hour.

It'll seem like a gooey sticky mess - but thats OK.  After an hour take the dough out and on a heavily floured surface roll it into a rectangular shape.

Then roll your dough into a log, folding it under at the ends to form the iconic French bread shape.  Spray some PAM on a baking sheet and put your dough on it and let it rise again for a half hour or so.  Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F or 200 degrees C.  After your bread has risen slice the top of it diagonally 3 or 4 times and then pop it in the oven for 25-30 minutes (this is the time according to the recipe - ours needed about 35 minutes).

And you will get something that looks like this...

Which you can serve with something that looks like this....

And there you have it.  French bread and cheese - an unbeatable combination!

Cupcakes : Dessert or Disaster?

So I bought this rosewater stuff in the baking aisle just because I've never heard of it and it seemed intriguing.  I tried to find recipes to use it in but this ingredient was pretty obscure.  I finally found the prettiest little rosewater cupcakes with whitechocolate meringue butttercream and thought this could be promising.  However, I am not the type of person who just whips up cupcakes.  I need an excuse for baking these type of things.  So when Nick asked me to make his assistant something for her birthday I was excited to have a reason to put my baking hat on and give these a go.

Now, another fun fact is that Nick's mum is currently staying with us.  We get along, but at times I feel as if we are passive aggressively fighting to win the title of "ultimate woman" in Nick's life.  So when Nick asked me to bake him cupcakes this triggered an impromptu bake-off between yours truly and the mum.

I was rummaging through cabinets trying to find food coloring, when I came across packets for something called blamanche.  The mum was hovering around me waiting for the opportunity to be of assistance to her son so when I asked her what blamanche was she got very excited and said she would make it for Nick for dessert tonight.

So there we were dancing around each other in our less than huge kitchen, each baking our respective desserts.  Her singing and humming, and me trying to focus on the cupcakes at hand.  I whipped up batter and got the cupcakes in the oven meanwhile she was heating milk and sugar on the stove.  She then added some little packet of stuff to it which turned the milk pepto-bismal pink.  This went in a jello-mold and was placed in a fridge.

I had started my frosting which required egg whites and a cup of sugar to be whisked together over medium heat until the sugar dissolved.  Then I beat them until they were at room temperature.  I then added 18 tablespoons of butter in chunks to form the frosting.  I beat these for ages and it looked like a soggy buttery mess.  The recipe said this might happen but not to worry and just keep beating.  So I took a seat on the kitchen floor and kept on beating to no avail.  It was still soggy and not coming together at all.  I was about to admit defeat award the title of ultimate woman to the mum but as I was sitting there I realized there was still a box of icing sugar in the pantry.  I grabbed it and sat down on the floor with renewed vigor and sifted in powdered sugar in batches until finally half a box of sugar later my frosting looked like frosting.  One point for the wife!  The recipe then calls for about 1/4 of a cup of white chocolate - but considering the amount of sugar I added I threw in the whole bar. After all the doctering up the icing was delish if I do say so myself.  And I had so much icing I made another batch of cupcakes.

So I iced the cupcakes and put some sprinkles on them and put them in the fridge.

After dinner the mum and I served up our desserts.  Her blamanche was quite possibly the most cringe inducing dessert I have ever had.  It was artificial strawberry flavor, not my favorite at the best of times, but it was the texture that really threw me.  Think of milk in jello formation - but with chunks every now and then from where the milk had burned when she was heating it up.  I could barely keep from dry heaving.  I tried to politely excuse myself because I'd consumed so much sugar taste-testing my frosting and I gave mine to Nick who ate 3/4 of the entire pie sized dessert.

My cupcakes on the other hand were rich and sweet.  The frosting was great, though the cake was a little eggy.

When we were alone later that night I had to ask the only non-biased taster who was winner of this unofficial bake-off.  I asked him which dessert he preferred and he gave a non-commital "its apples compared to oranges" type answer.  Can you say BS???  Then I asked him if we were making dessert tomorrow which would he want.  He said none because his stomach was killing him from the amount of blamanche he'd consumed.  Again BS response.  Then I asked him if I was making him dessert next week should I make cupcakes or blamanche.  His response...... "blamanche".

I lost to a pepto-bismal milk jello mold dessert.  The mum wins.  FML.

Cheese and Wine Festival

Yesterday Nick and I went to the Cheese and Wine Festival at the Southbank Centre.  There were a bunch of wine festivals on the city but this was a CHEESE and WINE festival so I was sold.  The tube was suspended and it took us ages to get there but once we saw this we were pretty happy we went through all the fuss.

We started off with a delicious pear cider.  I don't know why but I always think cider is similar to beer which I don't really like - but its not and it tastes 1,000 times better.  Nick went back for seconds.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this raclette making man serving up steaming hot dishes of gooey melted cheese over potatoes.  

Nick hadn't heard of raclette (obviously he is not cultured and hasn't made it to one of my mom's famous raclette parties) but he was smart enough to know that gobs of melted cheese on potatoes = good.  So we bought some.  Ah just look at him scraping off the melted stuff from that big hunk of cheese.... 

Yesssssssss

Do I even need to tell you it was good?  It was good.


Clearly this isn't enough cheese and potatoes for one night though so we bought some Cheddar Cheesy Mash.

Not exactly a looker but quite possibly the best mashed potatoes of my life.  No I'm not exaggerating.

Nick hogged them.  Typical.


Then I realized I was at a cheese and WINE festival and hadn't had any wine yet.  That situation was promptly fixed and we went cheese shopping.  We picked up some Tuma Rusa - a cow and sheep's milk cheese (the big white cheese below) which was really soft and mild.

Then we got another cheese from Normandy which I don't know its name mostly because the girl who sold it to me was French and it was difficult to pronounce let alone remember... but its the one in the middle right of the picture wrapped in grass.     

Overall the Cheese and Wine festival was a great Sunday out.  The only problem was they had so many cheeses it got to be a bit overwhelming at times when trying to decide which cheese you wanted.  Clearly we couldn't purchase ALL the cheese there but we went home with some winners.  They also had cheesy desserts like cheesecakes and cheesecake brownies, but we'd had enough cheese after our two rounds of potatoes.  One booth was selling make your own cheese kits.  I was REALLY tempted to buy one but they were pretty expensive and I'm not entirely sure I'd want our house to smell like a boys locker room.  


On the other hand I DO want our house to smell like fresh bread.  So hopefully I'll be baking some baguettes to serve with the cheeses we bought.  I'll keep you posted.

Ironing Shirts

I now iron Nick's shirts.  I am becoming such a domestic diva!  I should join a group of dive (plural of diva according to Beyonce) and do diva-ish things with them.  

I started ironing Nick's shirts because I honestly didn't want to carry them to the dry cleaners.  It's like a 15 minute walk and those shirts are heavy.  What am I his woman slave?!  I think not.  So I did what any sensible walking hating American lazy housewife would do.  I ironed them myself.

This is a revelation to me.  I have ironed 16 shirts this week.  Each shirt costs 1.20 to press at the dry cleaners.  That means I have saved 19.2 pounds in total so far.  This is equal to $31.52.  Nick wears a shirt everyday to work so that comes to about 312 pounds a year or $512.33 a year at the current conversion rate.  Why didn't I think of this before?  With all this money I am saving I could go and buy myself a whole new diva wardrobe.  Beyonce will probably invite me to join her own personal dive because I am such a classy female version of a hustler.    

If you are missing my obscure pop-culture references this video might help : Diva by Beyonce.

Also if anyone has any other money saving revelations they would like to share with me by all means I'd love to hear them.