The sun pours down like honey

[lizblackdog]

So I've rediscovered some joy in cooking, as long as I can make the effort:number of meals ratio make sense. For me on my own, this means I can't be arsed cooking things from scratch unless I can account for at least five major meals from one cooking session - hence the preponderance of Enormous Casseroles. The random factor is just incidental.

I have bought a bigger pan, but it is nowhere near big enough. I had to make this one in two batches; they turned out slightly different because I keep having afterthoughts and adding different stuff, so I mixed them all together messily before freezing.

My original plan had been to go with a lamb/spinach/dill/kidney bean theme, but that never happened, though the spinach and kidney beans both showed up in this one. Instead it's turkey, bacon and Chinese themed. That really only happened because I found fennel and baby corn reduced for quick sale. It turned out damn well, except too salty - when I do it again I'll need to use not-bacon. I did hope the beans and chickpeas would offset the salty, and perhaps they did, but not enough to cover for bacon, soy sauce, char sui sauce and Thai fish sauce all at once.

1 head fennel, chopped.
1 head garlic (a head, not a clove) crushed/chopped.
Six medium onions, chopped.
Half of a smallish white drumhead cabbage, shredded and fried in with the onions and garlic. (As long as you fry it slow and soft, white cabbage makes a great stealth vegetable. You can barely tell it apart from the onions.)
1 packet baby corns, chopped into bits. (About 3/4lbs?)
1lb mushrooms, chopped.
1 ready-chopped pack carrot batons (3/4 - 1lb? Never looked at the weight.)
About a cup each of previously soaked and cooked kidney beans and chickpeas.
Two handfuls of this stuff called "organic soup mix" which consists of pearl barley, flaked barley, bits of dried vegetable and three kinds of lentil.
One bundle of spring onions, chopped (Asda had run out of celery and I wanted to up the Green Things Quotient)
Half a bag of frozen chopped spinach that had been in my freezer for possibly years.
1lb diced turkey thigh, browned.
1 pack random bacon bits, chopped. (I'd leave this out if I were you)

Flavoured with:

Ground cinnamon
Ground coriander
A shitton of chopped ginger (I buy it in jars from the Chinese grocery. Dried ginger tastes all wrong but life's too damn short to shred fresh ginger.)
Two tablespoons of Char Sui sauce from a jar (also Chinese grocery)
Generous splash of dark soy sauce
Generous splash Thai fish sauce
About half a pint of nasty cheap-ass sherry left over from Mum's drinking days. (No, I never, ever throw anything away, why do you ask? Anyway, it was perfect for this recipe.)
Two vegetable stock cubes.

Made enough to fill about seven large-sized Chinese takeaway cartons, six of which are in my freezer (one was yesterday's dinner). It was really bloody good despite the salty.

Comments

[huntingdon.livejournal.com]

Very colourful

[yesididit.livejournal.com]

woman you can cook for me any time! that looks delicious. i love the tons of stuff in it. i need to get a big pan so i can do that. i really want to cook more things with beans and barley and stuff like that in it, and i like meals that have all the food groups included in one dish. it makes things so much easier.

nice.

[wolfdancer.livejournal.com]

give me some idea of what to do with my veg.
if i cut out some things I can even feed the birds.

[kyra-neko-rei.livejournal.com]

Yum!

[bananadancer.livejournal.com]

That looks absolutely delicious!!!

[santaman.livejournal.com]

Looks great Liz, I bet it tastes even better. :D