Thursday, June 01, 2006
Waiting with Leftover
We spent the last two days getting everything around here ready for my mum's visit. Doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, tidying up these
messy corners that we have been trying to ignore for the past weeks... And clearing out the fridge. I made a rhubarb compote, which I froze along with the sausages and several blocks of cheese and some buttermilk. This was really a bit of an experiment. I'm not sure that you can actually freeze buttermilk, but several websites claim that you can and I often freeze milk with no adverse effects, so I'm quite willing to give it a try. I need the buttermilk and the rhubarb for a little project I've had planned for a while. I want to make my own version of Paul Rankin's desert from Great British Menu - Buttermilk cream with rhubarb and rose petals - Buttermilk cream with orangey rhubarb and orange blossoms. I hope I can get my hands on them somewhere in Dublin otherwise it'll have to be toasted almond slivers instead.But first I have to get through the stuff I can't preserve without substantial loss of quality. On Wednesday,
Lofty finished the venison, this time accompanied by crispy enoki mushrooms from the Oriental Emporium and a medley of butter-glazed spring vegetables. Tonight, however, we were really down to the bare basics. This generally means risotto or pasta, but what we had just didn't seem right for either. Too little of too many different things: A tomato, a handful of spinach, a few bean sprouts, a carrot some broccoli, 3 or 4 mushrooms, a leek... Looks like the prefect combination for a vegetable quiche, doesn't it? I always keep frozen puff pastry sheets in the freezer for such emergencies, so all I had to do was to fry up the veg to evaporate some of their juices, season them with lots of onion, garlic and fresh herbs and bake them in the pastry base, smothered in egg and cream mixture and covered in cheese. And just in case you find these instructions just a tad too casual, you can find my recipe for a quick and easy quiche here. And with this I leave you. I have wrongly remembered my mum's time of arrival and desperately need to get down to the airport to pick her up.Christine at 8:25 pm
