lavendersparkle

I am quite curvy*. This leads a problem with finding shirts for work. I generally have a choice between shirts which are only a little bit too big at the waist but gape at the buttons over the chest and shirts which are roughly the size of a tent (and still somehow manage to gape at the chest).

I have found the solution: poppers! The problem I have is that there is enough fabric in the shirt to fit around my chest, but the contours make the fabric pull at the buttons, leading to gaping. To solve the problem I sew a popper half way between the buttons where it gapes the most. Not only does it stop the shirt gaping between those two buttons, but by changing the tension on the fabric, one popper will often cure all of the gaping problems. It's rather magic and if you're neat enough to sew through just the inner layer of the double fabric around the buttons, the popper is invisible when the shirt is being worn.

*In a E cup size rather than a euphemism for fat way.

This isn't a particularly impressive bento, but it was yummy. I made stir fry for dinner and after dinner, wanting to go to bed rather than overthink the bento, I realised that I could just eat the remaining noodles and put the veggie and tofu part of the stir-fry in my bento box along with a pre-frozen portion of rice.

Stir-fry is one of my favourite quick yummy dinners. Grab random veggies from the fridge, soya sauce, onions, maybe miso and 30 minutes later there's yummy healthy food. In this case I particularly wanted to cook this because the steamed tofu dumplings only use less than half of a pack of tofu so when I make them I have to make something else with tofu in within the next few days. I'm trying to plan ahead to ensure that I use up ingredients and minimise waste.

I decided to post about the bentos I make for work. Maybe it will provide inspiration to others.

This is pretty much a replication of the Vegan dry curry bento on Just Bento.

I made the dry curry with chickpeas rather than tempeh because I had a tin of chickpeas whereas tempeh is a slightly more exotic ingredient which requires a trip to Muswell Hill. As Maki says, the dry curry freezes really well. I made a batch weeks ago, bunged it in the freezer in some tuperware and just pulled it out to spread on top of rice in my bento box. I didn't need to defrost it when I packed it in my box. I've also taken to cooking big batches of short grain rice and freezing it in one cup portions, then I just defrost it in the morning in the microwave as I make breakfast.

If you're interested, the box is a 800ml Lock & Lock box which comes with the dividers. Annoyingly the dividers don't reach up to the lid so there is a little bit of movement between the sections as I carry my lunch to work, but not as much as you'd expect. Future posts may contain pcitures of my cute bento accessories.

In the original Bento Challenge you're supposed to take photos of your bentos at lunch time and post them on your report. I did take a picture of one of them but I can't work out how to upload photos off my phone yet, so you'll have to make do with my descriptions.

I made two bentos. The first was rice, curried kidney beans and carrot kinpira. I took two little sauce bottles of soya sauce to put on the rice. I made most of it the night before and went as far as putting it in the boxes apart from the soya sauce. One snag that I hit was that I planned to put some pickled ginger in the rice but in the morning I couldn't get the jar of pickled ginger open so had to go without. It was nice though.

The second bento was originally going to be potato salad, sausages and dipping sauce and carrot sticks and homous. However, we ate all but one of the sausages the night before so I had one sausage and had curried kidney beans left over from the previous bento. For this one I did more of the work in the morning. I had cooked potatoes but I chopped them up and made potato salad in the morning. I had some left over salad from the night before but cut up my carrot sticks and used slices of carrot to separate the sausage from the curry. It took a while to do, particularly as I had to work out how to fit it all in. I didn't use the dipping sauce in the end when I ate it but I did discover that my panda sauce holder is just the right size to hold enough homous to dip one box of carrots.*

So I think the main lessons I learnt from that week was that I should do as much prep as possible the night before and just do things like peeling and chopping carrots in the morning. I should also take photos with my camera in the morning as then I will actually be able to upload them.

The challange for week 2 is to make one more bento than the week before and look at how nutritious your previous weeks bentos were. I have to say that my bentos were pretty nutritious as my box has three compartments which are 250, 200 and 200 ml and I've been filling them with one each with carb, protein and veg components.

Next week I'm planning to make three bentos. I've got a rough plan of what I'm going to do, but I may change that depending on what happens. The first one I'm planning to use up the potato salad and make some kind of bean salad to go with it and have it with carrot sticks, homous and a bit more salad. The second one I was thinking of making kinpira out of the slightly less than fresh carrots and broccoli stalks in the fridge and have it with rice and fried tofu, maybe with some pickled ginger. The third I'm not sure of yet. I'm planning to make tempeh chilli on Thursday evening so I might keep some of the tempeh and beans to go in my bento and have it with rice and some kinpira if I have any left.

*All of these references to pandas etc. will make more sense when I add pictures.

We have a wardrobe which is too narrow to fit full sized hangers in. Consequently it is pretty empty, with only trousers hung in it on trouser hangers, and our other wardrobe is overstuffed. I'd like to hang more stuff in the narrow wardrobe and, as it's not full length, the obvious things to hang in there would be skirts. Most of my skirts have ribbon loops on the waist to hang them by and I hang them on wooden shirt hangers with notches. I prefer doing that than using hangers with clips, as it makes it quicker and easier to get the skirts on the hangers. I came up with a cunning plan recently, when it occurred to me that children's hangers would be small enough to fit in the narrow wardrobe and I could buy wooden ones with notches and hang my skirts from those in the narrow wardrobe, leaving the other one free for shirts, jackets and dresses.

So, can you see a glaring flaw in my cunning plan or suggest an alternative way of hanging skirts in wardrobe too narrow to fit standard hangers?

Do any of you know of a good pattern for a knee length 1950s style petticoat?

It may shock people to hear that despite being vegan for about a decade (my I'm old) I've not been much of a fan of green vegetables. I've eaten broccoli, but that was about it. However, over the last few months my omnivore husband has been winning me over to them. It started with bubble and squeak. Surely no one can object to a bit of cabbage or spinach if it's mixed with fried potato and onion. Gradually I got over my aversion to leafy veg to the point where I was willing to add a small serving of plain cabbage or kale to my plate. This is a Good Thing because we are entering the time when the main veg in season are 101 brassica variations on the theme of leaves.

This week on my trip to the local organic veg stall I was adventurous enough to buy a sprout top (the leaves at the top of the sprout stem). Inspiration for what to do with it struck when I decided that I'd also like to try the recipe for Ethiopian Spicy Tomato Lentil Stew on Post Punk Kitchen. I wanted some kind of vegetable side dish and a bit of googling turned up recipes for gomen wat, which is Ethiopian style greens. I amalgamated a bunch of recipes to make my own.

Serves 2-4 as a side dish

Ingredients
One spout top
One small red onion
One clove of garlic
One green pepper
Vegetable oil
Spices (I used a pinch each of turmeric, ginger and ground cardamon)

I boiled the sprout top leaves for about ten minutes until they were done and then chopped them into small pieces. I chopped the onion and fried in some oil in a small saucepan. I minced the garlic and added it and then chopped the pepper into 1-2cm chunks and added them. Once the onions are translucent add the greens and spices and stir until heated through.

I served both on this deeply inauthentic imitation of injera, which takes 15 minutes to make as opposed to three days for the real thing.

Today I went to the organic farm stall, which is in Cambridge market every Sunday and I highly recommend. Lots of the things he sells still have their leaves attached. Rather than just add these leaves to the compost, I decided to investigate whether they could instead be added to my tummy and it turned out that they could. I bought two fennel bulbs. I'm aware that the leaves are edible and go well with fish. They have an aniseed taste and one of my friends like adding them to her drinking water. Next was beetroot, which also, it turns out, has edible leaves. They can be cooked and eaten like spinach, which is what I did this evening. Radish leaves are a bit trickier. They are edible, but I've seen mixed views of them on the internet. Apparently they're quite bitter and are somewhere between watercress and nettles. I might have a go at cooking some later this week. On the topic of eating all of the bits of the vegetable, broccoli stalks are edible, I like to put them in veggie chillis because they can sometimes be a little tough but they add a lovely flavour to the dish.

A more obvious way to avoid waste is to eat whatever bits of the food you've decided are edible before they go off. There seem to be two competing approaches to this. Under one approach, you make a careful meal plan and buy your week's food with an exact plan for how each item will be consumed. Another method is to buy your food each day and only buy what you'll eat that day. I don't follow either of those plans. Usually I go to the market/shops/supermarket website with no idea what meals the food I'm buying is going to turn into, just a vague knowledge of what sorts of things we typically get through. I waste surprisingly little food despite this shopping strategy because I keep an eye on what's in the fridge and am happy to base meals around what has to be eaten today, because if we leave it another few days it'll start growing new lifeforms. Here are some of my favourite 'it's still edible but it won't be tomorrow' meal ideas:
1) Mushroom risotto. This is what I cook when I find a bag of mushrooms in the fridge, which are past the stage when I'd eat them raw. The recipe I use calls for a pepper, so it can also use peppers which are starting to go a little wrinkly.
2) Bubble and squeak. I must confess, I like bubble and squeak so much that I cook potatoes and cabbage specifically to make it, but if you've got some left over cooked potatoes and green veg it can't be beaten.
3) Pasta sauces. These can be home to all manner of tomatoes and peppers which are on the turn. By the time they're cooked they'll be squishy anywhere, so it doesn't matter if they started off that way.
4) Veggie chilli. Almost any veg which is safe to eat but not appetising to eat can be turned into a delicious meal if chopped up and mixed with tinned tomatoes, beans and chilli.

What are your favourite recipes for using up stuff that's about to go off?

This year I tried not to get too stressed about Pesach prep but failed and still ended up having a couple of sleepless nights. Despite that, by the time it got to the time for the seder I was feeling happy and relaxed and energised by the arrival of my guests (particularly Alice who arrived early to help and made the ratatouille). This year we expanded from last year and had four guests. As well as Alice, who came last year, there was: Xose, a Spanish Roman Catholic and Alice's boyfriend; Beccy, an Israeli leftist, who, due to her upbringing on a Socialist kibbutz had minimal experience of religion prior to meeting some members of the Cambridge Egal Min crowd; and Anthony, an Australian PhD student who is trying very hard not to overrun and was a great help with the singing.

The menu was vegetarian and almost vegan. We had a roasted beetroot instead of a lamb bone and lentils instead of an egg. I also tried to make as much as possible from raw ingredients so that I didn't have to spend too much on kosher l'Pesach certified food.* The menu was:
boiled eggs in salt water (and a boiled potato for me)
carrot and coriander soup
Nut loaf** with rosemary roast potatoes, broccoli, curly kale and ratatouille
Tea pouched pears with chocolate sauce

The seder went well, particularly with the addition of Anthony for the singing. Alec was against fiendish in his hiding of the afikomen. Xose did appear at one point that he might die due to not realising what horseradish was until he had a big chunk of it in his mouth. We had Kedem rather Palwin this year and I prefer it's super sugery goodness although the rest of the guests (apart from Beccy) found it a bit much. I made the mistake again of forgetting that, despite all of the jokes and moaning, the seder actually isn't that long and that I need to put the roasties in earlier. Next year I shall try putting the over on when we begin and putting the potatoes in about 20 minutes after that. At the end of the seder we sang The Land which Alice was unamused by as she is still in denial about the Lib Dems being better than the Labour party.

*I still somehow managed to spend over £70 at Kosher Kingdom for one basket of groceries.
** I used this recipe but I used kosher l'Pesach falafel mix rather than stuffing mix because I couldn't find any. I also used smashed nuts rather than sliced nuts because shoving them in a bag and whacking them with a sturdy bottle is easier than slicing.

As I said in my last post, I want some more formal dresses. To achieve this aim I've bought Simplicity pattern 3673 and am planning to make view C. In an attempt to look a bit more like a well-dressed sophisticated adult rather than a Grayson Perry wannabe, I'm going to make it in plain black rather than some of the much more exciting fabrics available at John Lewis. I'm thinking that I'll make it out of black cotton sateen and use black cotton lawn to line the bodice.

Does that sound like a good plan for making a sophisticated little black dress?