We are (especially me) really quite into the idea of self-sufficiency. Eventually I want to grow my own fruit, veg, and herbs, and have chickens for eggs and probably also meat. Currently we live in a flat with a garden which is communal and maintained by an outside gardening company, so at the moment I'm dreaming. To compensate we are trying to buy as much local produce as we possibly can and grow herbs and some veg on our windowsills and also shop on a budget with a meal plan each week and reduce our food wastage as much as possible. This week we discovered the wealth of farm shops there are in our surrounding area and at the risk of sounding like a total geek, it is so much fun to shop there!
Anyway, I digress. The new initiative is that hubby and I have recently decided it would be a good idea to make Saturday nights 'veggie night' in an attempt to eat less meat. Tonight we had an epic success and I wanted to share because we're ridiculously proud of ourselves!
This was the main course - a weird mixture of Spanish and Japanese food that ended up working really well! Using a load of the veg we brought from our various trips to various farm shops, we made our first attempt at tempura and it worked surprisingly well. We also made my all - time favourite tapas dish, patatas bravas, to accompany the veg. We still have leftovers and we're both stuffed!
We had an egg white left over from making the tempura batter which only uses the yolk, so Rhys mad a couple of meringues, and earlier in the day we'd made a lemon and raspberry tart using locally made lemon curd and raspberry curd. This was pudding:
Ridiculously successful and hugely fun dinner. I'm currently in the middle of reading The River Cottage Cookbook (and yes, it does need to be read not flipped through. The thing is like a huge foodie reference book. It's amazing) and he keeps talking about how every meal should be fun. I know there are days when I just so don't want to cook and can't be bothered, but on days like today I really feel like forcing myself to be enthusiastic is worth it. My mum always used to tell me to pretend to be happy when I was sad because after a while I wouldn't be pretending anymore, and it turns out the same is true of my cooking enthusiasm :-)
