NEW STASH, A BIT ABOUT FOOD, AND MY PANTRY REVISITED

New stash from Ebay

After thinking that plastic lace table mats were well-nigh impossible to get in the UK, I have suddenly found them in abundance on Ebay! Perhaps I had been putting in the wrong search parameters…

After my extremely successful coffee-staining experiments with one of the three first table runners I bought recently:

I felt confident enough to order some more. Most of these have now arrived.

These four adorable little ones were sold as dolls’ house tablecloths! They are identical, and I thought they would make lovely designs for cards, or arranged as a grid like this.

I wanted a circular one, and this one has a nice overall pattern and attractive bits of border.

The final one to arrive today is my favourite, a place mat with my favourite sunflowers on it.

I think all of these are going to make very successful prints with the coffee. They have plenty of texture and lots of holes.

I also bought a bamboo mat.

This will be useful for when I do felt-making again, and I thought it might also create some interesting textures either with coffee-staining or on the gel plate.

Kitties

I have been busy in the kitchen for the past couple of days, so no time for the studio, and certainly no time for lazing around like this lot!

Again, Ruby in her favourite position on top of Lily, who never seems to mind. Half the time I wonder how she manages to breathe!

Wholefoods

I have had quite a bit of cooking to do, because several things were running out in the freezer and I needed to replace them. I like to keep a good stock of ready meals that I cook in bulk, and we rotate them. I have designed quite an extensive menu so we don’t get repeats too often. However, I felt the need to try a few new recipes this week and have been busy with those.

I have some more cooking to do tomorrow morning, and I also have to unpack a huge box of wholefoods from my supplier that arrived today, which I didn’t have time to deal with. It takes a long time sorting through everything and packing it all away – some goes in the freezer (nuts keep best in the freezer as they go rancid if stored for any length of time at room temperature) and the kitchen cupboards in the flat are full of packs of stuff! There’s always plenty in reserve as I like to buy, store and cook in bulk. I usually put in an order every month to six weeks.

Buying wholefoods in bulk is very economical. The bill for a big box may seem quite high, but there’s a lot of food there, and a lot of variety. Even if you can get the equivalent in the supermarket, the prices are ridiculous, and you only get small packs. Eating whole-food plant-based, I get through large quantities of cashew nuts, ckickpeas, rice, all kinds of beans, grains, seeds, dried fruit, herbs, spices, and flours for the bread maker. A tiny jar of cumin from the supermarket, for instance, is ridiculously expensive (not to mention having to buy a new glass jar each time) compared with a bulk supplier – I tend to buy 500 grams at a time of such things, and store them in the freezer.

I cook a pound of brown Basmati rice at a time and freeze it in four portions for two, and with my beans and chickpeas, I cook the equivalent of 1 1/2 cups of cooked (i.e. the size of a standard tin which is often called for in recipes). I can then just whip a pack out of the freezer for whatever recipe or meal I need.

Soya and phyto-oestrogens

This morning I cooked another batch of chickpeas and also of soya beans. I eat the latter every day as a counterbalance to my oestrogen-blocking therapy after my breast cancer last year. Soya is rich in phyto-oestrogens and these stave off the menopausal symptoms I began to get immediately after starting this medication. The oncologist said he would not advise taking phyto-oestrogen supplements as I had done during the menopause, but had no objction to my having increased amounts in my diet – after all, Japanese women have a very low incidence of breast cancer, and also of menopausal symptoms, because of the high soya intake in their diet. I also eat small quantities of tofu with every meal, and have soya milk and yogurt. I rarely have a hot flush now!

The beans and chickpeas require no soaking when I cook them in my electric pressure cooker. That, and my high-speed blender, are essential pieces of kit for the whole-food plant-based diet if you are going to cook good wholesome foods from scratch.

My pantry

My pantry montage picture, taken some time ago. Things have now been rearranged somewhat.

I have collected coffee jars for many years, and I made the labels on the computer. I have templates for three sizes of these and can print them out when I need. They are stuck on with matte gel medium which also protects them from getting wet. I like the uniformity of design on the pantry shelves.

Several years ago now, we discovered dry rot under the floor in this corner of the kitchen, under the old fitted cupboards that were part of the original kitchen of the house. I had asked the builder to leave those cupboards as it seemed a shame to get rid of all the original features, but they were always an absolute pain to use, being too deep to reach the back easily, and I could never find anything!

Also, they only filled the alcove beside the original chimney breast:

This meant that the space in front of them was effectively dead space. When the cupboards had to be taken out completely in order to sort the dry rot problem, the new pantry which replaced them extended to be flush with the built-in oven.

This has doubled the depth of the storage space, and everything is immediately accessible as it is a walk-in pantry (albeing small!). Nothing on most of the shelves is more than two items deep so everything is visible and easily reached.

My pantry is brilliant and has revolutionised life in the kitchen! I have now got it organised how I want it and everything works very well. Finding the dry rot back in 2017 was a nightmare, but it was a blessing in disguise in the long run.