When Freyja and Simon were up at the weekend they mentioned that Simon had made hummus and had also made his own tahini paste to go with it. My ears pricked up at this. Once of the reasons I don't make my own hummus is because you can only buy tahini in large-ish quantities and I never use enough to finish it before it goes off.
How, I enquired, do you make tahini? Very simply, it turns out. You toast some sesame seeds and put them, some flavourless oil and some salt in a blender and let it do its thing.
Simple enough, I thought, and gave it a go. I had everything I needed in the pantry. I used canola oil and some sesame oil to boost the sesame flavour. I also used the very small blender attachment which came with the food processor. I think it's supposed to be a spice grinder but I couldn't see why it shouldn't also be a tahini processor and it worked very well. I bought a tin of chickpeas to make hummus. I already had lemons, garlic and paprika. My hummus was very delicious. I've been eating it for lunch with some supermarket falafel, yoghurt and flat bread.
This reminds me that in my younger days, I frequently made my own falafel. I might give it another go. I don't recall them being difficult to make.
The soft plastics recycler REDcycle has just this week stopped collecting soft plastic. We are advised to try to buy less soft plastic packaging and to put what we do get in the general rubbish to go to landfill. A very earnest Young Thing on the radio this morning pointed out that our foreparents didn't buy things wrapped in plastic and therefore we also don't need to. I thought about this. It is indisputably true that my grandparents in their younger days didn't buy things wrapped in plastic. But then they also didn't buy from the supermarkets, using instead their local butcher, greengrocer, grocer, market etc.
I remember when we were all encourage to move from paper packaging and carrier bags to plastic for the sake of the environment. Save the trees, use plastic. But then I also remember that we didn't thrown the plastic away but washed it and reused it. It's not so easy now. I do save plastic bags, both carrier bags and the plastic bags that produce comes in, when I get them. But there's not much you can do with a lot of soft plastic packaging
I was unhappy today when I started throwing soft plastic into the kitchen bin and not into the dedicated Soft Plastics bin I have in the laundry. I might have to reconsider what I buy ready made and what I can reasonably make myself. And what alternatives there are that come in reusable or more readily recyclable packaging.
(I have fond memories of the shops and market stalls where you could buy frozen peas, corn, beans and other things by the scoop, to put into your own containers. I wonder if The Source could be persuaded to add frozen things to their extensive range of pantry items.)
You may remember that the other day I said that Brandy and Whiskey were not particularly good escape artists. I was therefore a bit surprised yesterday to find Whiskey asleep in the sunshine on the driveway side of the barricades I had put up to keep them in the front garden. It wasn't obvious to me how he had got out, but I picked him up and put him back. I then went into the driveway to do some vigorous "pruning" of a bush that has become very overgrown and is getting in the way of where I want to plant my sweetcorn seeds.
I noticed Whiskey, thinking about how he could come and join me. Now remember that Whiskey is a Big, Fat Kat. He tucked his tummy in as teeny, tiny as it would go. He squidged between the fold out child gate that I had blocking the exit from the porch, and the garden edging that I had put along the top of the garden bed running at right angles to it. And then he tippy tip toed along the wooden edge of the garden bed, as though walking along a tightrope, until he got to enough space to jump down into the driveway and trot over to me. The garden bed is only half a meter or so high so not a great height, but I was very impressed with his agility. He is normally quite a clumpy cat.
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| A minute's silence at 11:00 |
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