Scrumptious

My lunch was a little disappointing today. This was because it was shop bought. Time and supplies at home were both against me this morning so I had to buy my lunch. I got a chicken and noodle salad from the Marks & Spencer Food up at the station near work, and it was satisfying enough, especially as it was followed by fruit.

The reason I found today's lunch disappointing is because I have been enjoying salads, home-made by my fiance, all week and home-made is well and truly the best, and always will be. I take a packed lunch into work most of the time. The exceptions to this are when I go out for lunch with friends or when we've run out of food at home, so it is rare that I am without my lunch box on a weekday. Three days this week I have enjoyed an exceptional cheese and houmous salad. My fiance made the houmous himself, using a recipe that my childhood best friend and her husband gave us when we visited them recently. Delicious :D I loved it because the houmous was so full of flavour, the cheese was mature, and the rest of the salad was spinach, lettuce, red peppers and carrot - that's how I like my salads, good and simple. I hate dressings (other than houmous), so this was close to my perfect salad. Yesterday it was a sardine salad - less scrumptious than the cheese and houmous one, but better for my iodine levels. When we don't take salads into work we take sandwiches, often made with our own bread, my favourite of which is tomato and herb bread, filled with cheese, houmous and salad...am I boring you yet?

Moving on...enjoying said scrumptious home-made houmous, bread etc got me thinking about how much better my home-made packed lunches are. Marks & Spencer do fairly decent sandwiches and salads, but they are still lacking because they are pre-packed. There is a Boots opposite the office but their Meal Deals never satisfy. When my fiance and I make our own packed lunches they taste wonderful (I'm allowed to say that because he makes virtually all of them, not me...) and we can have a good portion that will keep us full until we get home.

Thinking of food in this way often makes me a little nostalgic for the university days when we seemed to find it quite acceptable to eat loads of take-away pizza, processed food, or anything that had a value sticker on it even though it looked suspiciously unedible... I was happy enough to live like that in my first year. I was in catered halls and the food was edible most of the time, occasionally quite good, sometimes vile, and once or twice would look and taste worryingly like something you would expect my fiance to be examining under a microscope for signs of disease... Ah, such is the joy of university canteen food... In my second year I lived in a house with four fellow Classics girlies, and the quest for better food began. One housemate took it a tad too far and would buy the most expensive version of everything, something the rest of us couldn't really afford to do. However, I enjoyed learning to cook more for myself. I didn't get terribly adventurous because I was afraid of cooking meat for some time - that was all thanks to a Food Tech teacher at secondary school terrifying me about food poisoning when I was at a particularly impressionable age (she called us her "little munchkins", wouldn't that terrify you!?) Anyway, being an impoverished student there was plenty of unhealthy eating and takeaway pizzas in the mix, but because I didn't drink much and rarely went out clubbing, I was able to spend more on reasonable quality food - unlike some people I knew who were living off Tesco Value beans on toasted Tesco Value bread most of the time (on good days they could even sprinkle on some grated Tesco Value cheese as a treat!)

Then I moved back into catered halls for my third year. I didn't think it was possible, but the canteen food tasted far worse than it had before, and was about twice the price *shakes fist at inflation*. It was worth eating flavourless cardboard food just to live in these particular halls though - I had a top-floor room between two turrets in the university's Victorian chateau-style building. But still...some of the food... all I can say is I don't miss it at all. That being the case, I was immensely grateful that I was part of a brilliant church in the local town during this time. So many of the people there took pity on us unhealthy students and invited us round for dinners and parties where there would be such delicious home-made food that we would weep to return to halls afterwards. I also appreciated the wonderful cooking my dad does more than I ever had before when I went home for the holidays.

Now I am lucky enough to be engaged to a fantastic cook. My fiance makes brilliant meals, included the best mashed potato I have ever tried as well as some of his own invented recipes. Now it is time for me to work on my skills. A few weeks ago I tried my hand at a Brazilian fish stew, which came out very well. My other specialities are vegetarian stuffed peppers and fish risotto. My baking skills extend to chocolate rice krispie cakes, which isn't really baking at all. So I've acquired a few recipe books, old and new, so I can practise and become a half-decent chef (other than my specialities I currently cook fairly mediocre meals). So here's to some cooking and baking adventures!

Added to this we've been a little adventurous in our house - in our patio garden we have lots of plant pots that promise to develop into yummy broccoli, squash, oregano and thyme. Last year we grew tomatoes, courgettes, and both sweet and chilli peppers, but alas those plants succumbed to the snow and frosts this winter. But we are hoping to grow more. With both the cooking and the growing, it'll be a real learning experience, hopefully with "fruitful" results ;)

PS. Thanks again J & J for the houmous recipe!