I decided that to further our attempts at frugality, we really must start eating from the store cupboards and freezers. We have run out of vegetables from the last season now, apart from onions - but we still have mountains of plums and gooseberries and rhubarb, not to mention hillocks of red currants and assorted other bits of fruit.  And it won't be long before the new season rhubarb is ready to pull. We need to eat the fruit!  We also have quite a few home-made "ready meals" waiting in the freezer for rainy days. Well, we don't ever seem to have rainy days. I've decided they need eating up too - winter weight stews and soups won't be all that appetising when the weather is warm and sunny and we want to be eating summer food!

So I made a start this weekend. We had a minced beef and Japanese curry style stew that I made a few weeks ago with rice and vegetables on Saturday. Then yesterday I slow roasted a large piece of pork, on a trivet of chopped onions and the last of the frozen Bramley apples, roughly chopped, with some sage leaves and a glass of white wine. When the pork was cooked I set it to rest and put the apples and onions and all the juices in the blender with a very little of the vegetable water, then passed it all through a fine sieve to make an apple, onion and sage sauce. We had the pork and sauce with roasted potatoes and lots of vegetables.

And then for dessert I made what was in effect a plum clafoutis. I took a bag of plums from the freezer and when they had defrosted cut them in half and destoned them. I put the plum halves cut sized down in a baking dish and then covered that with a chilled, sweet Yorkshire pudding batter (I sweetened it with a vanilla infused caster sugar) and then baked it all in a hot oven for around 20 minutes. The batter didn't rise as a proper Yorkshire pudding would - I think the sugar and the plum juice would prevent that. But it did become quite fluffy and sticky and delicious.

And the store cupboard and freezer frugality continues today. I have some left over pork, all the left over veg and potatoes and the left over apple and onion sauce from yesterday in the slow cooker for tonight. We can choose whether to have it with potatoes, or rice or pearled barley or pearled spelt :-)

Can't freeze the left over pork stew though - I need to run the freezers down so they can be defrosted and cleaned ready for what I am hopeful will be a bounteous harvest this coming season!!  Leftovers will have to be eaten tomorrow as well