Home cooking

I've not been Blipping much recently, mostly because I haven't been out much. The weather has turned cold so I tried hibernating but unfortunately I kept getting hungry (apparently to hibernate properly you need to lower your metabolic rate) so I had to keep scuttling out to the local shop and forage for food.

I had bought some cheap meatballs at the supermarket the other day and today decided to make some "tomato" sauce for them. Not entirely sure what I was doing, but I picked a few ingredients at the supermarket, while the sauce was simmering away I thought I'd photograph some of the left-overs (that's the problem with being single you can rarely buy a small amount of food for a single meal (the number of times I have thrown out carrots that have gone mouldy is ridiculous! and I've given up buying eggs because there's no way I ever get through an entire box of 6).

And yes the beer DID mostly go into the sauce (I drank the small amount that was left), having thrown most of the ingredients into the pot and let it bubble away for a while, I had a taste and it wasn't all that great, it was very sharp and "vinegary" (may have been the beer or the cheap canned tomatoes I used) anyway, I added a little brown sugar and let the sauce simmer for a while until it had reduced to a thick sludgy consistency, I then used another beer (this time a sweeter Whisky Oak aged beer, also from Eden Brewery) to "thin down" the sauce back to a reasonable saucy consistency. Eventually it turned out quite good with the meatballs and mashed potatoes which I added a couple cloves of crushed raw garlic to before mashing, that made a total of six large cloves of garlic (4 in the sauce & 2 in the potatoes). Next time I might not add so much Tabasco sauce AND cayenne pepper powder to the sauce as it was a bit spicy!.

So I now have a heap of celery, carrots and sweet chilli pepper left over... not sure what I'll do with it, probably soup.