What else is there.. but to cook!?

I'm a bit over this rain now. Yes, I know, last week I was over the heat, but now I'm over the rain. I really hate using the clothes dryer... to the point I haven't used ours for a good 5 months I estimate... I make good use of the sunshine and also we have an undercover clothes line set-up for rainy or overcast days... these days I actually exclusively use that for the kids clothes - they last longer if they are dried out of direct sunlight.

Anyhooo. the past week since we got home from Sunny Queensland it's been raining, raining raining! Now I have a backlog of washing.. add to that I"m back to work 4 days a week from tomorrow (yay!) so I need to be more organised than usual... so we've got another retractable clothes line and hooks and not only the decking but the BBQ area are Chinese-laundries now! I can get 3 loads of washing on both.. so that should get us through the winter and hopefully we can get rid of the clothes dryer for good and get a chest-freezer for the same space in the laundry.

Talking of chest freezers - we went out farmgating today - first time in three weeks...just fruit and vege today and since we got home I've been whipping up in the kitchen. Knowing we'd be going farmgating today, and that the abbatoir would be closed.. went to the 'wholesale' butcher yesterday and was truly mortified...! (no pun intended there!) we are saving so much money going to the abbatoir, I bought the BARE minimum.

Today though, at the farmgate, got the usual but got a few little extras - one being rhubarb $1.50 a bunch (they actually went out in the rain and cut it out of the ground for me! And a couple of kilos of cooking tomatoes for $3. I also got some mini-white nectarines, supersweet. Yummy for lunchboxes.

So I've roasted the rhubarb already: Just chop the stalks (not the leaves they are poisonous!) and put into ovenproof dish with 1/4 cup of Orange juice or juice of 1/2 orange and 2 teaspoons of sugar. Cover with aluminium foil and put into moderate oven for about 30-40 mins until soft and stew-ed looking. You can serve it on it's own over ice-cream or I like it with some steamed apples or pears and a dash of cinnamon with runny cream. I also make apple and rhubarb crumble. I'll do that and give you the recipe another time! It's really easy.

The tomatoes I made passata (italian cooking sauce) with one for tonight's dinner, and one for an easy dinner one night (i.e. over pasta with some fried smoked (sliced) chorizo.. or over browned diced onion and beef mince to make bolognaise)

Liss' Passata

Ingredients:

1/2 cup water

2 kilos soft or 'cooking' tomatoes, sliced

2 stalks of each: basil, oregano and italian parsley...chopped finely

4 cloves garlic, finely diced

2 tb sugar

2 tb tomato paste

Just bung it all in the stock pot, bring to boil for 20 mins, simmer for futher hour, stirring regularly.

Now, how I used this tonight, I made Chicken Parmigiana. (Serves 6)

Ingredients

4 large chicken schnitzels/crumbed chicken (got mine from the butcher)

Passata - about 2 litres

Tasty cheese.

Method

Pre-heat oven to moderate setting, fry the chicken until crispy on outside/cooked on inside, place on bottom of oven dish.

Ladle over passata until it totally covers the chicken, and levels out over the top (does that make sense?!).

Sprinkle tasty cheese generously.

Cover with aluminim foil and bake for 30 minutes, take off aluminium and let cheese brown.

I also made some cheesey scallop potatoes tonight, but I'll leave that recipe for another time, you've probably got recipe overload now!.. kids tonight were begging for seconds (and thirds!)

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