Ravioli Lasagne

I haven't been on here in months – truth be told, life's been crap for the last year or so. Health matters, both Mr S-V's and mine, have had to come first. 

Food, along with complaining about the state of the country and the NHS have all had to take a distant second place. There's been plenty to moan about, btw – the entire bloody country is going to the dogs.

Just take my advice and don't get old; believe me – it stinks. Unfortunately for me though, I'm now too old to die young! 

I just wanted to put this Ravioli Lasagne recipe on before I forget what I did and it's never seen again! 

I love lasagne but it's too much of a faff now; my knackered arthritic joints don't like holding me up for too long so any recipe that requires me to stand for lengthy periods has been consigned to the kitchen bin of history. 

Sad, but there it is... nothing I can do about it.

Recipes with minimal prep where I can shove the dish in the oven while I have a sit down are very high on my agenda right now. This is a strange one... a kind of lasagne, kind of ravioli and bloody brilliant. It popped up on a Good Food notification, it's so simple I can't think why I never thought of it before.

Anyway, I vegetarianised (is that a made-up word?) the recipe and I also fiddled around with it a bit to include more veg and more cheese.

• 1tbsp olive oil
• 250gm chestnut mushrooms, chopped
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 med carrot, chopped
• 1 stick celery, chopped
• 1 tin chopped tomatoes
• half a jar of passata
• 1 tsp of dried oregano
• 500gm pack of spinach and ricotta ravioli
• 160 gm pack of baby spinach
• 75gm grated mozzarella
• 75gm grated mature cheddar

Fry the chopped veg in the oil until any water from the mushrooms has evaporated and the veg are starting to turn golden.

Add the tinned tomatoes, passata and oregano. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Put the spinach in a colander and pour over a kettle full of boiling water. When it's cool enough to handle squeeze out as much water as possible.

Put half of the tomato sauce in the base of a 20cm baking dish. Top with half the ravioli followed by half the spinach and a third of the grated cheeses. Repeat the layers, finishing with the remaining grated cheese on top.

Cook for about 35 minutes at 200C or 180C fan. 

We had this with green beans, but a green salad would be nice too.

Incidentally, I made a double batch of the tomato sauce and froze half; it saved having to think of something to do with half a jar of leftover passata and I have enough sauce for next time. Good move, huh?

The NHS, Then and Now

June 1974

Aged 19, I turned up on a Saturday morning, no appointment, to see the GP who'd known me since before I was born. Just sit in the waiting room and you'd be called in order of arrival. Lovely man, Dr. N, with a handlebar moustache, a bow tie and a pristine white coat. He was usually smoking a pipe during consultations. One of his five sons had been at the same school as me. 

After a quick examination the doc handed me a prescription and said, "Try this for a week and pop in next Saturday if things are no better". On hearing that I wasn't available next Saturday because I was getting married, he leapt to his feet, threw his arms around me and said "My dear girl, I'm so pleased for you!" 

The medication worked, as he knew it would; I never saw Dr. N again because I moved away after the wedding.

April 11 2024

I don't know if my GP still works at the surgery or even if he's still alive. However, I rang this morning to ask for an appointment. After explaining my symptoms to a completely uninterested receptionist, she asked me to send a photo of the offending body-part and informed me in her best I-couldn't-care-less voice, "Someone will ring you back". 

Someone...? Which particular someone? Doctor, nurse, part-time cleaner? I said "Thank you very much", although why I was thanking her I don't know.

90 minutes later the in-house pharmacist rang, asked me to go through the symptoms again and told me to send a picture. 

"I already have", I said. "Really?" came the reply. 

The very valuable medical advice she gave me was "Take ibuprofen and come back to us if there's still a problem."

I've just booked an appointment with a private GP...

To calm my fury I went into the kitchen and made a big batch of this Spiced Butternut and Lentil soup for lunch. Highly recommended and it makes loads!

Jam Sponge Pudding

Yesterday was allegedly the first day of meteorological spring; it poured with rain almost all day. Winter's over, they said... so perhaps someone could tell the weather! Good grief, will it ever stop raining?! Much more of it and we'll all grow webbed feet!

Sometimes comfort food is needed and there's few things more comforting than a sponge pudding with an obscene amount of custard.

As I've mentioned in the past Mr S-V loves a sponge pudding (I'm quite partial to one myself, actually!) so when I saw this recipe from Nigel Slater it looked just the thing. Scroll past all the meaty stuff and go to the last one on the page.

It's as easy as anything and, serendipitously, I had all the ingredients in the pantry, including some home-made plum jam from our own plums. I hope our two trees will come up trumps for me again this year - there's nothing quite like Victoria plums for jam.

I halved the recipe, as you can see below, and steamed it for about an hour to make a pudding more suited to the two of us, and I've paraphrased Nigel's method - he's very wordy!

75g butter

75g caster sugar 

1 large egg 

75g self-raising flour 

1 level tsp ground cinnamon

1 level tsp ground ginger

finely grated zest of half a lemon

1 tbsp milk

2 heaped tbsp blackcurrant, plum or apricot jam

Cut a disc of baking parchment to fit the base of a 1 pint pudding basin. Rub a little butter around the inside of the basin.

Cream the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer till pale and fluffy. Beat the egg lightly and add a little at a time to the butter and sugar, mixing well between each addition. 

Sieve together the flour and spices, then mix into the butter and sugar with the lemon zest. Stir in the milk. Spoon the jam into the base of the pudding basin, then scoop the pudding mixture on top. Level the top a bit with the back of a spoon.

Cover the basin tightly with a square of baking parchment, then a square of double foil. You can tie it on if you like but I don't bother. Stand the basin on an upturned saucer in a pan of boiling water and pop the lid on. Only use enough water to come halfway up the basin. Simmer gently for about an hour.

Leave the basin in the water for 15 minutes to allow the pudding to settle, then turn it out carefully on to a plate. 

Serve with custard... lots of custard, and ignore the vile weather outside!

Focaccia

I love bread, any bread, just the sound of the word is instantly cheering! I made some last week that I've been threatening to do for ages... focaccia. Arthritic hands (god, I hate getting old!) mean that actual kneading is out of the question, so I enlisted the help of my trusty bread machine for the hard work; I just joined in at the end for shaping and slapping it in the tin. 

I used this recipe by Paul Hollywood. I imagine Paul would get sniffy about me using a bread machine, but there again he gets sniffy about most things.

I reduced the flour to 400g and adjusted the other ingredients accordingly, mainly because I only had a 23cm square tin. We really enjoyed it - lovely fresh from the oven with soup and a chunk of cheese; I could easily have eaten the other half but, showing admirable restraint, I froze it. At the weekend I warmed it briefly in the microwave and served it with this BBC Good Food recipe for Bean and Halloumi Stew.  A really nice easy meal.

As a side issue, I discovered that my "new" oven, which is in fact six years old, has a proving setting! Just goes to show I should have read the instructions in 2017... duh!

I won't comment on the various pantomimes going on in the news. Suffice to say, I think everyone has lost their minds. Collective insanity seems to have taken over - I may well be the only sane one left.

Three years

March 23rd. 

Three years since the entire country was locked down. 

Three years since we were told "Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives".

Three years since most workplaces, cinemas, clubs, pubs, restaurants and 'non-essential' shops were forced to close.

Three years since schools closed and children weren't allowed to see their wider family and friends or have a hug from their grandparents.

Three years since elderly people in care homes were locked away with no visitors.

Three years since some poor souls died alone in hospital; their families having to watch on an iPad, denied the chance to be with their loved ones in their final moments.

Three years since our politicians lost their minds, but found a really good way to control an entire population while simultaneously trashing the economy, children's education and the health service.

I thought, as time went on, I would lose some of the anger I felt about what politicians and 'scientists' did to us. I was wrong! Now I'm able to look back at it all and see everything they put us through, recall how much they lied and how badly their disproportionate reaction to a flu virus has affected every aspect of life, I'm actually more angry! 

It won't do any good - politicians are fireproof; nothing touches them and nothing stops them. 

I'm not a great believer in natural justice - I just hope that in some way or another they're forced one day to pay for what they did.

The start of Christmas

Since I was here last we've lost Boris as PM (thank god!), lost Truss as the subsequent PM (she might have turned out to be ok but her MPs gave her the boot) and laughably, we now have the useless Rishi (why are his clothes too small?) as the third PM since the end of the summer. Don't ask...

Sadly, HM the Queen died at the beginning of September. At the age of 96 it wasn't a surprise but it was still a shock. Most people had never known this country without her as Monarch. It still seems strange.

Meanwhile, Covid has all but been forgotten despite the best efforts of the media and the NHS to keep it relevant; unsurprisingly, the NHS is continuing to use Covid as the best excuse it can find for being relentlessly useless. Nothing new there, then.

The scorching days of summer seem long ago. It's now winter, it's cold, the sun sets at around 4pm and Christmas is approaching at speed. There was even Christmas music on the radio today!

Our Advent calendars made an appearance this morning! I bought one for Mr S-V from Bonne Maman which has a dinky little jar of jam behind every door... how cute is that?! - and we've unearthed the decorations ready for their annual outing in a week or so.

Best of all, given that it's December the 1st, we've made a start on the "treats" drawer in the kitchen which is full of nice little bits and pieces to have with an afternoon cuppa; well, there's no way I'm waiting until Dec 24th before I dive into the goodies!

Today's little treat was a slice of stollen - I've never made one and I'm never likely to; why bother when Waitrose does them so well?

This year Waitrose and M&S will be doing most of the heavy lifting in the kitchen as mobility issues have become a bit of a problem for me. Kitchen chores have to be broken down into small chunks so I shall only be making the things I really want to. 

Obviously, that includes a Nut Roast Wellington for when The Troops come for lunch on Christmas Eve, and a tray of Not Sausage Rolls. No Christmas at this house would be complete without them! 

I've already made the usual batch of Freeze-ahead Roast Potatoes which really are the best thing since sliced bread; they're snuggled up in the freezer along with red cabbage and desserts from Waitrose.

I saw a nice recipe the other day for sprouts stir-fried with chilli and crème fraiche - I'd post a link if I could remember where I saw the damn thing!

As usual it will all creep up on me and I'll say, as I always do, that next year I'd like to do something different or maybe we could just ignore Christmas altogether. Then next year comes around... and off we go again!

Once a liar, always a liar

I said he was lying and now the police have confirmed it. Boris Johnson, our esteemed (esteemed?!) Prime Minister has been fined over his lockdown parties. Our tax-dodging Chancellor and assorted others will also have to shell out for breaking the rules that they implemented. Of course, the rules were for others, not for them.

The week before Boris's first party (there were eleven others!) it was our son's birthday. Under the rules we weren't allowed to meet indoors so we sat in their garden for socially distanced tea and cake. We didn't break the law but the people who made the laws did.

They told us repeatedly it was a highly dangerous virus, so dangerous in fact that we couldn't see or hug our closest family... but that was just another lie, wasn't it? Covid was never the deadly virus we were led to believe. Would they really have put themselves and their families at risk if it was as lethal as they said? I can only suppose power and status somehow confer immunity... HM the Queen mustn't have got the memo about that; without any fuss she managed to follow the rules even though the PM didn't.

Boris has paid the fine and given a full apology but, even while apologising, he tried to weasel out of any responsibility by saying he didn't realise it was a breach of the rules. The rules he made!

He must think we're as stupid as he is. 

He can shove his apology... sideways. It's worthless, as is he. 

He should do the decent thing and resign but, sadly for us, there isn't a shred of decency in his miserable body. He's a lying scumbag who, when he's caught out lying, just tells more lies. They trip so easily off his tongue; he clearly thinks his position puts him above the law.

I'm amazed at how many people online and in the news media are saying it wasn't important, move on. Clearly, I have higher standards than them and certainly higher than the people who supposedly lead this country.