Cooking

Whew, it's 9pm and I've just finished a mega stint of cooking. I've made vegetable tarts, butternut squash and chilli soup and another batch of my apricot and apple stuff (recipe to come, on request). Because I was out for most of the weekend I didn't do my normal cooking spree, and with my mother coming over for a couple of weeks at the weekend I want to make sure that the freezer is full of stuff to eat for lunches etc so that I don't need to cook too much while she's here.

I'm amazed at how much more I'm cooking for myself now. I can go for days without eating anything prepared by anyone else (other than stuff like yoghurt, and other not quite in their natural state ingredients like bread and cheese). The strange thing is that the thing that made the most difference to my current cooking spree isn't familiarity with vegetables, the increased number of recipe books in the house or anything like that. It's the fact that I went out and bought some containers to put the leftovers in so that I can carry them into work and reheat them without worrying about them leaking everywhere.

It's funny how it's the simple things that make all the difference!

Anyway, back to the recipes. For the apricot and apple thing you need 125g of dried apricots, 4 apples 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 tablespoon honey. Soak the apricots for as long as possible so they're nice and plump then cut them into smaller pieces and put them in a pan with the water they were soaking in. Peel, core and cube the apples and put them in the pan too. Add a bit more water if necessary (depending how much you used for the apricots) so that the water just comes below the top of the apples (this is trial and error I think), and boil for 10 minutes. Then you split the fruit mixture into individual pots (I use ones with a nice secure lid so I can take it to work), I find that it does about 5. I usually chill it like this, and then the morning I want to eat it add a couple of spoonfuls of low fat plain yoghurt (soy yoghurt works surprisingly well), and some pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and linseeds, plus a sprinkling of extra cinnamon. Then I pop the lid on, take it to work, put it back in the fridge at work and tuck in at lunchtime.