Freezer Potluck

I had even more good news today. I found out that I got a scholarship from my college for next year, which, while it's not a huge amount, will make a good start at making sure I stay afloat next year. So I'm very happy.

Last night we went to our last college dinner of term. Monday night is an extra nice meal for grads in college, if you book in advance, and we dress up and wear our gowns.

This is me, in our college dining hall. You can see the black down over my brown top. Our dining hall is very old and traditional, it's lovely. We had a pretty good dinner last night. We had Cava, in our common room, then our starter was pea soup, with a piece of cod in the middle of it. It was very good. Main was lamb chops, with a stack of crushed potatoes, roasted tomatoes and ratatouille. Dessert was summer pudding and clotted cream, which I'm not so keen on. But we had port and chocolates afterwards back in the common room. I was sitting with a big group of my friends, and it was a lovely end of term dinner.


Unfortunately, I had to spend a large part of today packing. I hate packing! At least packing up to go home is easier, because everything has to go. I need to completely vacate my room. But it's going to take lots of trips between my Oxford house and my London house, so I still need to figure out what I will need and where. I'm not making my first trip home until Thursday morning.

In order to move out, I'm also eating up the food from my freezer, hence freezer potluck tonight:



I had a whole rainbow trout in the freezer that I'd bought reduced to clear a few weeks ago, so I baked that with herbs and flaked almonds. Trout and almonds are a great combination!

I had some roasted sweet and normal potatoes in the freezer, so I made them into a potato salad. As they were cooked already, I crushed them, and added lots of crushed garlic, paprika and some mayonaise. Potato salad always needs a bit of a kick.

I also had creamed leeks - leeks saute'd and then mixed with mayo, and a couple of roasted parsnips. I added some roasted broccoli too. It was a pretty good dinner to interupt my packing - although that had already been interupted by my going out for a long gossip with a friend...

Presto Pesto

Ok, back to real cooking, finally!

Monday night's dinner was roasted veg with pesto and pasta.


I started by roasting vegetables: brocolli, courgettes and red onion. I chose those because I love brocolli with pesto, and the courgettes and red onion because I had them.





Then I made the pesto, using my mum's recipe. I'm not sure entirely where she got it from, but it has been refined over the years. I also had to reduce the quantities, as I was just making it for me.

The ingredients are:
Garlic
Basil
Parmesan
Peccorino
Pine Nuts
Salt & Pepper
Splash olive oil
Splash hot water

Everything gets thrown into the food processor, and quantities adjusted to taste. I used two cloves of garlic, and a pakcet of basil. I prefer to buy little plants, but they die almost immediately in my kitchen here, as it's like a sauana! I probably used about 50g of each cheese, but I have no scales, so I do it all by eye.

Ingredients in the food processor

Blended ingredients


Mix with pasta and vegetables.

This meal goes really well with a glass of red wine. Unless, of course, you are in the midst of an essay crisis, which I was. It was a very good dinner and I'm going to send it to Presto Pasta Nights, which this week is being hosted by Ben at What's Cooking.