Cooking marathon

Some things never change. Staying with my mum over the weekend always, absolutely always means I'll lug home at least two large bags of produce, fresh organic eggs procured at the neighbour's, fruit from the local farm....

I cringe at the idea of having to waste food, however eating all of the food my mum has prepared would require a family the size of The Brady Bunch. So I start preparing my cooking plan just as soon as the car engine starts. My method is always the same: plan lots of meals with hearty salads to use the vegetables, fruit and fruit salads for snacks the rest is either refrigerated, frozen, cooked or baked.

Easy start: simple hummus spread with fresh parsley and thyme

 The cooking/baking session lasts about four hours.  It's a tightly run military operation :-)

Project lasagna

Specially if lasagna is on the list. You can't make a proper lasagna without making a huge mess in the process. It requires three separate pots, one for pasta, one for tomato sauce and one for white sauce. And if you have to grind your own beef, things get massively more complicated. But it's worth it in the end.
* And a tiny little trick I use when cooking pasta is to add a few drops of olive oil into the water. This prevents the pasta from sticking together.

Tomato sauce

Next up: using all of the yummy tomatoes and making and easy tomato sauce. I love to use white onions or shallots and slowly fry them in olive oil and then pour a small amount of red balsamic vinegar and let it all slowly simmer until the acid has dissipated entirely and you're left with a thick fragrant onion sauce. And then it's just the matter of adding tomatoes, spices and letting the sauce slowly simmer for an hour.

Peach jam

Making jam is just as easy and gratifying as making tomato sauce. I decided to try a recipe that partially substituted sugar with honey. It's definitely better than standard sugary jam but in retrospect I think I'd be better off using a mildly fragrant honey. I only ever use chestnut honey which proved to be too heavy for the delicate peaches. Ah well, lesson learned for next time.

Pound cake with homemade nutella

And finally I made a pound cake for dessert because I've had two opened jars of homemade nutella that I needed to use up. If anyone is interested click here to see the original recipe for this cake. The only thing I did differently was to use both white and black nutella.
If I had any energy left I would have made some homemade crackers to go with hummus but I settled for store bought ones.