Today’s Sunday dinner was a fruity affair… It started with a pork joint and what goes better with pork than apple?!

Here is my favourite recipe for making roast pork, it all starts with the Bramleys.

Ingredients: 3 large Bramley apples, 6 large tablespoons of sugar, 2 large leeks, 1 large knob of butter, 1 tablespoon of sunflower oil, 1 teaspoon of wholegrain mustard, 1 tablespoon of honey, seasoning.

Method: Melt the butter with the oil in a large saucepan. Chop the leeks and soften in the butter until translucent. Add the mustard, honey, seasoning and stir. Add the chopped, skinned apples and sugar and leave to simmer for 20 minutes on a low heat.

Put a layer of the apple sauce on the bottom of a casserole dish. Place the pork joint on top of the apple and fill the remaining sauce around the sides of the pork, leaving the top free for crackling!

Put in the oven as per the cooking instructions (usually about 1 hour) until you can skewer the pork and the juice runs clear. Take the pork out of the oven and leave to rest for 5mins then carve and serve:

Continueing on the fruit theme, I was inspired by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall to try my own take on Eve’s Pudding.

Despite my enthusiasm about online grocery shopping, I do get very annoyed when fruit and veg arrives and it’s almost at its use by date! Thankfully this is quite unusual but it does happen, this time to a bag of pears.

While it’s obviously important to complain about this kind of thing, I also like to make sure that it doesn’t mean wasting food. And so, my pear version of a classic dish was born.

I started by roasting the chopped pears with some cranberries, a shake of brown sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice:

I then mixed up the sponge mix (200g butter, 200g sugar, 225g self-raising flour, 3 eggs, handful of cranberries), poured it over the pears and put in the oven (200 degrees) for 20mins:

A very fruity Sunday all round… I’m off for a nap ;O)

Mentioning no names… a certain member of our household has the bad habit of buying very nice fresh bread from the supermarket and leaving big chunks of heel to go hard.

Now, as this is online shopping day (hurrah!), I wanted to make dinner with whatever we had left in the house. Looking at this week’s particular chunk of delicious wholemeal bread that you could now build a wall with, I decided to try and make my own  breadcrumbs.

I waited until after dinner before writing this (just in case) but it turned out to be quite tasty so I thought I would share my method with you:

Ingredients – Chunk of day old bread (or a couple of days providing it hasn’t gone mouldy), salt, pepper, oregano and a pinch of cayenne pepper (optional).

Method – Use a hand blender to grind chunks of your bread into crumbs, be careful to break it down as much as you can by hand first. Dry fry the crumbs in a flat pan to toast them. This is when I added the salt, pepper, cayenne and oregano but you can be as adventurous as you like depending on what you’re going to use it for. Make sure you keep an eye on the crumbs while you’re toasting as they could easily burn. Allow crumbs to cool and put in a bowl for later.

I admit it’s not rocket science but I had never thought of doing this before so figured other people might have overestimated the difficulty too. I used these for coating pork fillets and pan frying so I know they at least work for that. Not sure about oven use but will definitely be giving it a try.

It all started while looking for craft supplies for our Girl Guide unit (I’m in charge of shopping this term). While trawling the internet looking for the most cost effective supplies for the girls, it occurred to me that perhaps craft is not always as environmentally and people friendly as we think. All those really brightly coloured pieces of card, paints, embroidery thread, wool etc. It felt a bit hypocritical to be teaching the girls about sustainability and fair trade while encouraging them to use less than ethical supplies.

Having had so much difficulty finding such supplies, the idea came to start an ethical craft website (this is still in the pipeline but a long way off) to try and make it easier for groups in the UK to carry on crafting guilt free. So, to cut a long story short, while researching this idea we came across sock toys. I had seen sock monkeys before but not the array of possibilities there seemed to be on craft blogs around the globe! I decided to order a book which was recommended by lots of good craft blogs, Stray Sock Sewing by Daniel.

Our copy arrived on Thursday and having had quite a stressful week, it was a pleasure to sit down this afternoon and watch Ice Age 2 while making sock pigs!

Here are a few of the things we’ve made so far:

Does anyone remember an 80s children’s programme where they tipped out loads of household rubbish (helpfully painted in pretty colours) and made it into some brilliant, fantastical engineering feet? I can’t remember what it was called but each time I rinse out a milk bottle and put it in the recycling I find myself wistfully pondering the possibilities… what could I make with all this stuff?!

Now we all know that this year has been about tightening belts so it should be no surprise that recycling has played it’s part in my new found cost saving habits. Washing out every bottle, jar and carton and sorting it into my nifty new recycling bags reminds me every day how much stuff I use. It wasn’t my reason for starting to recycle but it is a handy sideline that it makes me rethink my spending habits. Not just because of how much it costs me but because of how much waste it produces.

My cost saving started about 8 months ago when I started doing my grocery shopping online and I can’t recommend it enough. 

I love dawdling along the isles of the supermarket as much as the next person (probably more than most!), in fact, my nightly visit was getting to be quite the habit. That is until I realised that it was costing me an average of £15 a time… a ridiculous £250 a week!

So now I sit down of a Sunday night and spend an hour going through all the online deals putting everything I think I need into my basket and then going back and cutting the list until it’s under £100. This shop will usually last me about three weeks, excluding the odd trip to the market or shop to get some fresh veg when required.

I rotate the online provider because I find some better for basic stuff and some better for meat etc. Nothing cheers up a Monday night quite like a pile of food arriving (actually, I’m sure there are loads of things that would cheer up a Monday night more than getting your online shopping delivered but sometimes you take what you can get!).

So… mostly the stuff I’ve learned this year is that childish fun can be recreated with recycling and online shopping. Now I’m off to tip out my recycling bags over my livingroom floor and pretend I’m 7 again!

;O)