Disappointing packed lunches

[Bailes1992]

I do my own packed lunches now I've moved out.

When I was living with my parents it was a case of what ever I told my mother I liked I had for 3 months!

Chicken and sweet corn sarnies today

[dirtydirtydiesel]

Steve, make your own pickle it's not hard we've been doing it for years, I got feed up of paying £3.50 a jar for Baxters Old Victorian chutney.
So we found a recipe for spiced chutney & we've slowly altered it untill we like it more than the bought stuff.

Oh & my favorite is Pilgrims choice, with our home made green tomato chutney , I'm off to the kitchen

But a very close second is left over roast beef with lashings of hot horseradish

Then again I am partial to B.L.T & tuna 'n' sweet corn with mayo 'n' chili sauce !!!!

Oh the choices, I feel a Homer moment coming on

[steve_earwig]

Steve, make your own pickle it's not hard we've been doing it for years

You know what? I'm gonna bluddy well give it a go I've thought about it before but the usual stumbling block for anything I try to make here is unavailable ingredients. Most pickle ingredients include malt vinegar which doesn't exist here (which is why I have to import it because I couldn't live without pickled onions - and I just used the last of it ) but it's not so much of the flavour in pickle. I've just been having a look and some just say substitute it with cider vinegar, some want both, but I can get everything else, and I can probably swap it for balsamic or whatever. Anyway, it's all about experimentation, innit? Bugger it, it's gonna happen, nice one

[Welly]

You know what? I'm gonna bluddy well give it a go

*Dreams of:


*Achieves:

[steve_earwig]

That looks like the verdict on the humus I tried to make... There was loads of it too, it sat in the fridge and went furry

Have a recipe http://www.pickyourown.org/branstonpickle.htm

I'm not expecting the result to be anything like Branston or similar, that's impossible, but I'll settle for edible to start off with. The alternative is bugger all because there isn't anything remotely similar available here.

Then again I am partial to B.L.T

Me too, I can get lettuce, I can get tomatoes, however there's not one single rasher of bacon in the whole country, and I'm not about to start a pig farm...

But a very close second is left over roast beef with lashings of hot horseradish

Horseradish grows as a weed here, I pulled out loads of it earlier in the year while I was tilling but I can still see it coming up everywhere. I was always told that home-made horseradish is lethal, that's because I was used to the watered-down stuff commercially available in GB. I soon discovered the commercial stuff here isn't watered down at all, it's just like the home-made stuff so anything more than a smear and your tongue is on fire.

[Welly]

there's not one single rasher of bacon in the whole country

Sod that! us Brits get very tetchy if we don't get a regular Bacon-fix.

[Doggy]

No bacon in the Balkans? Outrageous!

Ask their ambassador round to learn our displeasure.

[steve_earwig]

Umm, their ambassador is in London...

us Brits get very tetchy if we don't get a regular Bacon-fix.

Indeed, and it's not something I can persuade the wife to accept because, as far as she's concerned, the local equivalent is far superior as you don't have to cook it first (as it's smoked ham really). In fact she's very down on English/British cooking, (she's fond of saying other countries have quinine, England just has cooking) and says that the only good stuff is what we've pinched off other countries, like curry. I don't really want to start an argument about it but the curries we get in GB aren't what they're tucking into in Bombay (no rice for a start), it's our interpretation of it and has far more variety. I want to mention that the good stuff here, like sarma, is cooked and eaten in various forms across Central Europe up into Russia, and very probably didn't start off here. As far as I can make out food of local origin is stuff like čevapi, which is more-or-less small rolled lumps of mince, fried in fat until it's almost incinerated, served up with sliced fresh onions and a roll that looks like cardboard yet tastes like glue, closely followed by a couple of indigestion tablets.

[dirtydirtydiesel]

Steve I'll pm you a receipe .DDD

[steve_earwig]

Have a recipe http://www.pickyourown.org/branstonpickle.htm

Seeing as all I can do just now is watch the rain falling through the window... No, make that stand inside and , though a window, watch the rain, which is outside, falling, also outside...

I cooked this up Saturday evening. I did have a few issues though:

1 medium carrot, chopped into 1/8 inch cubes

What constitutes a "medium" carrot then? Not a baby one but not a foot long?

1 cup rutabaga (called a Swede in the UK and Australia), chopped into 1/8 inch cubes. You can use turnips, if you can find rutabagas.

No Swedes here, no turnips either I'm told I might be able to get turnips later in the year but the only way I can get them now is shredded and pickled. I tried to find something similar and came up with... a root parsley root. Not similar in any way really, apart from it grows underground with the leaves sticking up in the air.

3 cauliflower florets, finely chopped

What bit constitutes a "floret" then? I originally decided on just the last bunch on the end of a "branch" but when I was cooking it I considered that this would be an insignificant amount, so I took 3 branches instead.

1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
1 medium apple, finely chopped
1 medium zucchini, finely chopped

Again with the mediums When I shopped for this I could only find 2 courgettes, one was quite small but the other was half-way to a marrow. Both the apple and the onion were a bit on the large size, so I compensated by not using the whole thing.

5 sweet gherkins, finely chopped

What, not medium? How big is "sweet" then? IS that cocktail or wally? Well, bugger you, all I have is these sliced ones anyway.

1/2 pound dark brown sugar

Here I had some luck and found brown sugar with molasses

1 tablespoon corn starch (aka corn flour)

Something else that surprised me by being almost completely unavailable here. After much consideration we decided the Croatian for this would be "kukuruzni škrob" which we managed to find in Zagreb.

I had a lot of issues with the measurements, one US cup is just under a quarter of a litre, so I measure it out as accurately as I could using water, poured it into a smaller measuring cup with lots of scales on it and picked the closest. Tablespoon? Doesn't exist here, sorry. I used a fairly small serving spoon.

1 large pot; teflon lined, glass or ceramic.

Will you settle for "enamelled"? It's all I have...

So into the pot most of it went (as per instructions). Bearing in mind the only liquid at this point is half a cup of (cider) vinegar, a quarter of a cup of lemon juice and a tablespoon of Wostershershiresher sauce it's not actually very liquid. More kind of solid really. Still, I thought, it'll start getting more runny once some of the veggies start to break down. Wrong. I had to keep adding half a cup of water to keep it stir-able. Keeping a pot on the move for 90 minutes is not something I'd describe as "fun", t'wife didn't help because she was watching crappy forign crappy soap operas and the like, all with the volume turned down because she reads the subtitles, and my repeated requests to "put something intelligent on" fell on deaf ears. I eventually stuck my mp3 player in my ears.

As I approached the 90 minute mark I got to:

In a small bowl mix the cornstarch with 1/4 malt vinegar and mix to a paste, then add it to the pot

Paste? It's runny as f*ck! So, aware that it'd get more runny with this added, I let it dry out some more. I'm sure the black will come out of the saucepan eventually... Stir it up, return to the boil and kill.

As this whole process had lasted more than 4 hours and it was almost time for me to head "up the wooden hill" (we live in a bungalow) I left it to cool on the side overnight. The next morning I approached with my 3 jars, took the lid of and... Do I put this in the jars or use it to fill in the holes in my driveway? My god, it's like tar! I packed it into TWO jars (where's the rest then?) and, as an afterthought, tipped some more vinegar it. I've just checked it and all the extra vinegar has been absorbed but it still resembles tar. It smells wonderful though

I've no idea what the result will be just yet, I'm hoping for "edible" more than any culinary success. It's all experience, innit?

[rwb]

Well there's one for the knowledge base.
Maybe we should stick to cars?

[dirtydirtydiesel]

That sounds strange steve , I told you to follow my receipe to the letter

[Welly]

I've just got a picture in my head of steve's wife reading crappy soaps and him in the kitchen listening to Duran Duran whilst mixing this obnoxious cocktail and smearing it into jars

[steve_earwig]

Close enough, apart from Duran Duran Wtf?!! Do I look 12?

That sounds strange steve , I told you to follow my receipe to the letter

Not yours, sadly, I've got that bookmarked for later in the year when I've got so many plumbs, apples etc. I don't know what to do with them...

I have lots of recipes to try, the trouble with almost all of them is I'm not sure how many gallons of malt vinegar the wife will be able to lug through customs...

[steve_earwig]

I forgot to add a verdict on the home.made pickle - it's a bit dry and a bit sweet, and it certainly isn't Branston,the lumps in it are tiny so it goes on like jam but most of the time I'm just after something to stick in a cheese sarnie anyway. Next time more vinegar, less sugar I reckon. I have feelers out for a turnip too...