Tasty Tuesday

Goodness.  It's been too long.  I'm still adjusting to being home alone and the pain from my disability has left me avoiding communication with the world!  I'm currently trialling different pills for pain relief and it always has a bit of a knock on on the things that I can get up to - hopefully it'll be worth it in the long run. 

Having said that though, I have been busy on the 'Pretty Filter' front.  I will endeavour to show you my crochet ta dah's and updates on my 'Pretty Filter' during May.  Promise.

Today, I wanted to share with you an idea that's been brewing for a while.  As a stay at home mum, one of the regular parts of my daily routine is cooking the evening meal.  I've become bored with the routine meals I've been cooking.  R has quite a sensitive palette and likes more traditional plainer food, which does restrict us a little.  I cook from scratch most nights but the regular favourites (spaghetti bolognese, risotto, jacket potatoes, roast chicken, fish pie etc) have become both boring to eat AND boring to cook!

I'd began to dread cooking.  And that's just not me.  I LoVE to cook -I like to bake even more. I  love the fact I can put healthy, nutritious meals together for our family to eat - and all on a tight budget.  But that feeling has been getting jaded.  Tired even.

So, I've set myself a challenge.  On Tuesdays each week I will commit to cook a 'new' meal and bring it to our family tea time.  This will include a main and a pudding (oooh naughty) and hopefully over time I shall increase the range of things R will eat and the range of meals I can add to our rotating repertoire!

So I've decided to launch this idea with Cornish Pasties (as a Cornish girl, I'm sure I can call them Cornish pasties even though I've made them in Somerset!!). 

I made a cheese, potato and onion one for R and the traditional pork, potato, swede (which Cornish people call turnips - yet the rest of the country calls each vegetable the opposite) onion, a small knob of butter to help make nice juicy gravy and a few twists of ground pepper.

 

Once you've added the ingredients you crimp the edges together.  This originated in Cornwall down the mines and was a regular part of the miners' meals.  Often stewed apple would fill up the bottom half of the pasty and the miner would throw away the generous pastry crimpings as they often had dirty or arsenic laden residue on their hands. 

 

 

You do have to add some fork holes for the steam to escape and then they don't usually laugh (split open) although you can use egg wash if needed to patch holes or bind the pastry edges together.

 

 

I haven't made pasties in a good few years so I was very pleased with how these turned out.  It was definately a positive start to adding homemade variety to our mealtime. 

 

For afters I've made a pineapple upside down cake.  I didn't look at a recipe - just made up a basic sponge mixture and put cut up fresh pineapple in the bottom of a pyrex dish.

Once I'd added a decent layer of the fresh pineapple I poured over the sponge mixture and baked.  We had it with custard and was lovely while warm.  I can tell you it definately tasted better than it looked!!

Tea time is a really lovely time in our family and I hope to add a bit more excitement to our Tuesday nights!  We've discussed it as a family and we're all 'on board' with the plan.  Hopefully Tasty Tuesdays will bring a bit of variety to our tea time and at the very least will get me reading through some recipe books that sit forever on the shelves in our kitchen.

Here's to planning our new meal for next week's Tasty Tuesday!!

Pop back later this week and I'll share little lady's bedroom Ta Dah!  Thanks for reading,
J9 x

Today I'm partying with these fabulous blogs:

Inspire Me Tuesday

Coastal Charm