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A return to the Ironing Board Blog

A Follow up to my August 2017 post: An Ironing Board could be useful: The Trials and Tribulations of blogging on holiday

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This year we are holidaying in West Wales. In the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic this seemed like the safest and most sensible option. We’d love to travel abroad again, in particular to visit our dear friend Liz in France, and also to catch up on that Florida/New York holiday that never happened in 2020! However, staying in the UK seemed to be a wise decision this year, and it also gives us the opportunity to catch up with Charlie and Aimee (Paul’s son and daughter-in-law) whose marriage we were lucky enough to attend last August. They live in South Wales, so visits on the way to Carmarthen and on the way back have been worked into the holiday plans.

I booked our cottage through https://www.walescottageholidays.co.uk/ and picked a small, remote cottage in Llangain. There is one other letting property which is also being let at present, and our hosts live here too. This is great, as makes arrival, departure and asking questions so much easier. Readers of my blog will know that I always seem to need to ask how things work or to ask for extra supplies of household items. In Sardinia this turned out to be a bitter experience, not to be repeated! Writing my blog in Sardinia, I discovered the usefulness of an ironing board being supplied. No, I don’t do much ironing, but when you need an extra table for your laptop it is ideal! Actually this cottage has a lovely dining table, and Paul is using this as his base for business and e-mails (yes he does work on holiday but we spend much time travelling and having fun too!) Because we like to eat at an uncluttered table, I decided to bring the ironing board into play, simply because it would save constantly having to shift my laptop at mealtimes. Also I was hoping to sit in the glorious entrance area of the cottage with a big picture window for admiring the views of the hills and estuary. See the picture below:

Below you can see the outside of the cottage just by the picture window:

In fact I had to abandon the idea of blogging in the entrance area, as the wifi signal there is just not quite strong enough and keeps dropping. No matter, it all works fine in the main reception room and I can still admire the views from my seat!

To me it is perfectly normal to set up my writing station on an ironing board, but to others it may seem a little eccentric. Sharon (our host) came round to see if all was well and thought it was very amusing how I was making use of the facilities. She offered to find an alternative table for me, but in fact thought that, on reflection, my set-up was ideal! Maybe it could be added to the cottage property details as a useful extra!

So here I am once again writing my ironing board blog. I wonder if I might start a new trend. Some of my friends in my facebook group Archers Chit-Chat, say that they never do any ironing, so here is a use for redundant ironing boards! The additional perk is that you can always revert to using it for its intended purpose. Also the fact that it has adjustable height settings must surely be a huge advantage. I would normally stand to iron my clothes (there are some which just have to be ironed before wearing! But you won’t catch me ironing the bedding!) but for writing a blog, I sit down.

As I generally include some food and cooking news in my posts, I just have to say that Jamie Oliver’s recipe for Tomato soup with grilled mussels is absolutely divine! I cannot find a useful link to the recipe; it is in the Save with Jamie book, which has some great recipes in using ingredients that not everyone would think of as economical. Mussels must be one of the few types of seafood/shellfish that are genuinely cheap to buy. Squid is the only other seafood I can think of in this category. Anyway, I am sure that the recipe is easily findable. After a long afternoon out, visiting Laugharne and Tenby, I cooked this fabulous dish for our dinner. We had bought the mussels in Tesco in the morning and put them straight into the fridge. It was not an early dinner, ready at about 8:45pm, but luckily on holiday we feel a bit more relaxed about late eating. Here are some pictures for you to drool over, if you like mussels!

https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/cookery-books-i-love

I like to support local bookshops, so the link above is to my section of https://uk.bookshop.org/ and you will see there the details of the Save with Jamie book!

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Contents of the Fridge Summer Soup

https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/cookery-books-i-love

We are off on holiday soon, so I have been tidying out the fridge and giving it a deep clean. I have also managed to plan meals using up left-overs from the freezer and taking into account those oddments of salad and vegetables which always seem to be lurking. I am really pleased with myself. Sometimes I just cannot resist buying new stuff even when I have things in the freezer which I should thaw out and use. So this week’s menus including beef tagine twice – once with jacket potatoes and salad and the second time with polenta and a tomato and avocado salsa.

Today I made some really lovely cold soup. Now it might have been gazpacho or it might not have been. I know people can get very hung up on the authenticity of recipes. I was very interested to hear Jay Rayner on Radio 4 yesterday saying that it is fine to put cream in carbonara as long as it tastes good! I always put cream in my carbonara by the way! He is also not keen on pineapple on pizza, but purely for flavour reasons, not anything to do with authenticity. Here is my recipe, using oddments from the salad drawer and supplemented from the store cupboard:

Sarah’s Summer Soup

  • 3 small cucumbers (grown by our cleaner/handyman team)
  • Some chunks of sad-looking cos lettuce
  • A few celery stalks
  • A handful of cherry tomatoes (not from the fridge of course, as who keeps tomatoes in the fridge?!)
  • 3 cucumbers (grown by our cleaner/handyman team)
  • A small pot of left-over canned tomatoes
  • Another can of canned tomatoes
  • A dash of tabasco
  • A dash or 2 of pomegranate molasses
  • A tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
  • A splash of Worcestershire sauce
  • A home-grown chilli (Hurrah! one of my few successes in the garden!)
  • Some radishes
  • A few anchovies
  • Plenty of seasalt and freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Save a few radishes, anchovies and pieces of fennel to chop up by hand. You could save some cucumber and tomatoes too. Blitz everything else in a blender (works a bit better than a food processor) with a can of water, swilling out the tomato juices. Check the seasoning and adjust as necessary. Chop your saved vegetables and anchovies and mix in afterwards, or use as a garnish

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Carrots and Lettuce: Love your left-overs

We do love a party! Ever since socialising has been allowed this year, we have been indulging in our passion and having friends and family round for meals. This has been quite a challenge with constantly changing rules, and the restriction on numbers indoors to start with meant that we had to spread the love and actually have more gatherings with fewer people.

Sometimes I have help with the catering or we have a bring and share event. For our Merry Wives of Windsor after show party on the last night, two very good friends involved in the production assisted me with the catering. Afterwards there was quite a lot of green salad left. Sometimes it does not look that exciting the next day, so I decided to work my magic on it and avoid food waste at the same time. The best dish to make with left-over salad (in my humble opinion) is Peas a la Francaise, which is basically fresh or frozen peas cooked gently with stock, onion, lettuce of any description and a few lardons or any kind of bacon snipped into small pieces. Actually I don’t always put the bacon in, but on this occasion I was roasting a chicken for dinner. So the bacon that had been covering the chicken then went into my pea dish. Sadly I did not take a photo of this, but you get the idea.

Last night some school library committee friends came round for a bring and share social supper. I invited them to the house, as for me it is easier than trying to get to a pub; I don’t drive. This time I found that the main item left-over that was not going to keep for long, was the remains of a pack of carrot batons that was brought along to go with the dips. They were looking a bit limp, but I resisted the temptation to just throw them into the food bin. I decided to roast them with spices – coriander, cardamom and harissa (powder not paste) along with freshly milled pepper, sea salt and olive oil. They took probably more than half an hour to cook to a beautiful tenderness. I then mixed some of them with some red and wild rice that I had just cooked, and some seared chorizo. You could use feta to ring the changes. The rest I blitzed with some ricotta to make a rather interesting dip or pate. I am thinking of having that in some sandwiches as a base for salad and ham or cheese.

We had the salad for lunch, still warm, along with the celeriac slaw that I had made for last night’s supper but forgot to take out of the fridge!

It is a good thing that we both love carrots! Having them both raw and cooked for lunch was a really lovely contrast of textures. I might even include both as part of a buffet selection for a future party – hopefully remembering to take them out of the fridge (although the roasted dish is best served freshly cooked).

https://uk.bookshop.org/a/8665/9781529110272