I bought some duck to make chinese style duck in hoisin sauce in pancakes. It's meant to be marinaded overnight, and I discovered too late that I didn't have any ginger.
This morning I went to a nearby tiny town, which has an Asian supermarket. I had decided I'd buy the pancakes rather than make them. I've made them from scratch before, they were fine - but no better than bought ones. I decided to pop to the nearby big supermarket to get the ginger, and some vegetables etc to do a bit of bulk cooking.
So today I made the duck stuff. It's been marinading for about 4 hours, and then I put it in the vacuum chamber to finish it off. I was going to do that initially, but I thought it would be better once all the marinade ingredients had had time to mellow and mingle. It's now simmering on the hob, and it's a 2 hour job.
While all that was going on, peeled and pressure cooked a 2.5kg bag of King Edwards. I also cooked some blitzed garlic in butter so I could make aligot mash. I should have just put the whole cloves in the pressure cooker with the potatoes, but I didn't think until it was too late. As soon as the potatoes were done, I used Masha to mash them with pepper and I tested a bit. I'd forgotten just how fabulously delicious King Edwards are for mashing. I'd already got everything else ready though, so I added the garlicky butter and the cheese, gave them a quick Masha, and they were done. I measured them out into single portion tubs, and stacked them to cool.
While I'd been waiting for the potatoes to pressure cook, I prepped the ingredients for Catherine Phipps' Chilli. As soon as I'd potted up the mash, I rinsed the pot (I was using the other one for the Duck) , and got started. We like our chilli as strips of meat rather than mince, and it had taken me a while to slice up all the cubes of pork and beef.
While that was doing, I decided to prep the tomatoes that DH had brought in from the greenhouse. I thought I'd try dehydrating them to the "sun dried" stage.... or drying them completely and making tomato powder. I even went to the trouble of skinning them (boiling water then ice cold, skins slip off), cutting them , and then removing the seeds etc. I even went to the effort of straining the seeds and centres to get the "tomato stock" which will add an extra tomato zing to a sauce (probably tomato sauce on plain pasta, later in the week).
After I'd portioned up the chilli, I thought about doing the bolognese (I had defrosted quite a lot of portk and beef mince for this) , but I really couldn't face it. Plus, I had one pressure cooker liner in the dishwasher and one on the hob. I did consider prepping the rest of the ingredients but, frankly, I couldn't be bothered.
I've done nothing towards my stated objective, and I've only got a few days left. But the freezer will have some fab "ready meals" in. And I've had a productive day, so that's a fair swap.
Hygienist tomorrow, and Miss Teen after school (hopefully). Can't see me making much headway tomorrow either. Never mind.
