Beans, Balls and Baking

 Firstly, thank you for the kind and thoughtful replies to my mental ramblings a couple of weeks ago. I really appreciate it, and it helped enormously.

Life in the kitchen has been been pedestrian rather than post-worthy over the last couple of weeks, but for the sake of ongoing community participation, here are a few bits and pieces that I've been up to recently.

We have the giant triangle of runner bean plants that is looking more and more like Gandalf's hat as it bends over at the top under it's own weight.

So I've been looking for runner bean recipes and gave this Ottolenghi one a try Slow Cooked Runner Beans in Tomato Sauce

It turned out pretty well according to the husband - I don't like runner beans, but am quite happy to cook them. I didn't bother with the gremolata, and I only had smoked paprika, which was an interesting deviation from the original recipe and smelled wonderful when it was cooking. This went great with some BBQ chicken.

As for the balls, of course I mean meatballs. I know it's not been meatball weather - like the UK it's been really hot on the island, but there's something wonderfully tactile about making meatballs that I was just in the mood for the other days. In this case it was Rosemary, Mint and Feta Lamb Meatballs.

I had 500g of lamb mince. Add to that one clove of crushed garlic, 1 tbs honey and 1 tbs dijon mustard, 1 tbs finely chopped mint and 1/2 tbs of chopped rosemary leaves (dried is fine if you haven't got fresh) and 100g of crumbled feta. Get your hands in and squish it all together (remove rings first, because you know - messy...) and then shape into meatballs. My fresh mint is looking a bit worse for wear these days so I added some organic peppermint tea leaves for extra kick, which works really well. I got 18 balls out of my mixture, but obviously it depends on how big your balls are (as it were...)

Fry off your meatballs in a pan in two batches and wipe out your pan afterwards because there's a lot of fat. Then put 375 mil of passata and 125 ml of beef stock in the pan (I used veg stock because that's what I had) and add your meatballs, and cook for around 15 minutes until the lamb is cooked through, or for however long you need to have another G&T or glass of wine. Add some fresh oregano if you have it. I dished it up with penne and some more sprinkled feta, but forgot to take a photo, so here's what it looked like in the pan.

Finally, there was baking. I'm not a baker. One of my biggest Covid achievements has been making banana bread and muffins for the first time.  However we had a socially distanced cup of tea a couple of weeks back with an old neighbour and they served up scones. God they were good. And they reminded me of the scones my mum used to make because she'd just make a scone round and cut it into wedges instead of baking individual scones. So that's what I did and it was such a lovely sense memory.

I'm sure everyone has their own scone recipe, but I'll not bother writing this one out, but here's my very first attempt at scones and I was pretty proud of the way they turned out. And with some butter and homemade strawberry and rhubarb jam, they were pretty good.

That's it for now. I hope everyone is doing well.