It started with the potato harvest. This week has been designated a food and garden week, which means that my first priority is to get to grips with the wilderness that even a tiny garden becomes this time of year. The potato plants were starting to die back, so we got the spade out and dug them up.
I ended up with about 5-6 lb of spuds. Not exactly enough to see us through the winter, but considering how badly I'd neglected my soil, not to mention my failure to earth the spuds up as they were growing, it really was a great deal better than I deserved.
Dinner, therefore, was going to be spuds in one form or another. A quick look around the kitchen, a quick peek in the fridge - bad move, this, as it brought the feline next door running, and I am trying hard not to feed him anymore as he is refusing to go home - and I came up with one of my large round courgettes that have marrowed before I got to picking them, a handful of smallish onions, half a head of garlic, a scrag end of chorizo and the same of feta cheese.
Thinking about it now, how come that chorizo seems to come as scrag ends only ? I mean, I recall quite clearly buying the whole sausage, bringing it home.... And the next time I see it, it's a scrag end, and a scrag end that never seems to quite run out.
Anyway.
The spuds got peeled, quartered and parboiled for five minutes. Water drained, a teaspoonful of semolina sprinkled over them, lid back on, shaken up to get them all rough around the edges, just as they should be.
Onions peeled and quartered, the courgette cubed fairly small - oil heated up in the oven for five minutes, then in it all went. And this is the beauty of this dish - I had potatoes, onions and a courgette, so that's what I used - but whatever veg I happened to have lying around, as long as it lends itself to roasting, in it would go.
Twenty-five to thirty minutes later, the roasting dish came out, and peeled and halved cloves of garlic, cubed feta and thinly sliced chorizo went in - and ten minutes later it was dinner time.
Other half and I had ours with home made kimchi. The daughter objects to kimchi on grounds of smell, so she had hers without.
And then the plates were empty, and approval was indicated all round - and the gnawing edge of anxiety that has been manifesting itself as a hollow feeling inside my belly that my brain chose to interpret as hunger was - thump ! - gone, just like that.
And I felt full.
See, the family have been a right ruddy pain about food the last few days - and yesterday was one of those days when you end up wondering why the heck do you bother..... And I cooked and I ate all the food that everyone was moaning about or turning their noses up at, and felt hungrier and hungrier and.....
.... and now I rather regret eating so much because my waistband is rather tight and that really was rather a lot of potatoes.
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