Sweet and Sour C…arrots
04 Oct 2011 4 Comments
in Life en France, Vegetarian Tags: cheap, chinese, dinner, meal, quick, recipe, recipes, student, student meal, student meals, vegan, vegetables, vegetarian
So, at the market, you can buy carrots at 0.99€ a kilo; at Lidl, you can get 3kg of carrots for 0.99€. Needless to say, I bought the latter. That is, however, quite a lot of carrots, and other than being the crazy Scottish girl giving out carrots to everyone on my corridor, I wasn’t sure what to do with them. A google later, and I came up with a few ideas other than my initial ideas of carrot sticks, salad, and soup. The first google suggestion was carrot soup, with a bit of a twist in that it called for the addition of orange juice. Now, maybe it was the fact that I substituted it for a slosh of sirop a l’orange, but this soup tasted absolutely bogging. There is no other word for it. I may also be put off eau a l’orange for life, which isn’t ideal when a hot, non-milk based drink is called for for hiking expeditions. Anyway, I digress… the next potentially intriguing thing that presented itself was sweet and sour carrots. So I went with them.
FYI, this is what I’m dealing with kitchen-wise. (Rare moment when nobody else is trying to use the 2 working hobs)
So, yeah…
You can’t see, around the corner is a table with 5 chairs, but nobody eats there so there’s not really much point to it.
The pots a-sizzlin’:
And the end result:
Recipe after the jump…
In which I put my cupcake-baker to good use
25 Sep 2011 5 Comments
in Cookies, Life en France, Recipes Tags: baking, chocolate, cookies, easy, milk chocolate, quick, recipe, recipes, white chocolate
Now, I don’t like baking cupcakes particularly. They’re ok, but the effort required into making something really spectacular is not in any way reflected in the resultant taste: the cupcakes that look the nicest normally taste distinctly mediocre. By way of contrast, the squidgiest brownies are the best sweet things you could ever taste
This year, having only a cupcake maker (manufactured by Breville, it looks like a toastie-maker and I have no idea how it manages to function as an oven), a microwave, and a hob (currently there’s 2 working hobs for our corridor of 50 people) at my disposal, I’ve had to improvise. Turns out, baking cookies in a cupcake maker makes them turn out disappointingly uniform, but essentially cookie-like. Take them back out of the paper case (such a waste of paper cases, but my baking has taken priority over environmental concerns for the moment!), and they are pretty standard, tasty cookies.
So, for my first try-out of a new cookie recipe this year, I went for:
Whoppingly Wicked Chocolate Chip Cookies
No idea what makes them wicked – the recipe was found on Waitrose and is pretty much a bog standard (though a yummy bog standard) recipe for biscuits that wind up tasting a tiny bit of shortbread due to their high butter/sugar content. Thinking about it, perhaps Waitrose don’t have the same “if it’s home baked, it contains no calories or fat or bad things” mentality as I do, possibly explaining the wickedness. Anyway, I’ll rename them because really they’re just
Really Easy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Knitting Banter #4
30 Aug 2011 1 Comment
in Knitting Tags: aran jumper, knitting, quick, ravelry, shrug, slow
So the super secret project which I hinted of in my last post is ripe for being revealed – ’twas an Aran (ie cabled) sweater, destined for a birthday present.
Took 5 weeks, which, barring my initial knitting project is the longest ever time I’ve spent on knitting a single thing… it would have taken longer if it hadn’t been the summer holidays… then again, it would have taken a shorter time if the shock of there being some sun in Glasgow hadn’t caused me to be outside and not knitting for a good few days amidst that.
Voici le pull:
I figured Ruth wouldn’t mind me trying it on in case it was horrendous (tbh, she’d have got it anyway after that amount of knitting 
) and for blog-posting purposes.
The pattern was http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/knitted-aran-sweater-1101 and I think it was quite a good introduction to cabled sweaters… not that I’m planning on doing many more of them, unless under a far diminished time restriction! Made a couple of mistakes as I’m not used to cabling, but sorted them out and ended up being quite quick by the end as I got used to the pattern, which I think’s to be expected.
Didn’t want to blog about too many projects one after another,
so didn’t post about this shrug on Saturday: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/ribbed-lace-bolero
This was quick (did it in 2 days, maybe took 15 hours of actual knitting and sewing up) and I think it looks quite good! The photo’s not the best as my camera was about to run out of battery, and the sleeves aren’t really that uneven. It was also a good way of using up all the aran wool that’s lying about our house due to various cardigans and jumpers.
In other news,
tomorrow is D-day. All packed (ish) and ready to go! Wishes of luck and prayers much appreciated (particularly the latter) – going anywhere new alone is always a bit daunting and is especially so when there’ll be the language barrier, and the staying-in-uni halls (a new experience for me!)
To anyone that knows me: my skype is my email address minus the “@gmail.com”. Add me and schedule a chat! 
Pizza
08 Jul 2011 1 Comment
in Meals, Recipes, Vegetarian Tags: easy, meal, pizza, quick, student meal, thinking ahead
If you make a batch of pizza dough, split it into bags and freeze it, this’ll sort your meals for ages. Take out some dough in the morning, roll it out in the evening, cover with some tomato sauce or passata, some cheese, and whatever veg or other toppings you want – chorizo is especially nice.
Tortilla Pizza
19 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in Meals, Recipes, Vegetarian Tags: easy, food ideas, grill, meal, quick, recipe, student meal
If you’ve no time for proper pizza, or just have some tortillas to use up, this is really tasty.
