Food part two

So what have we been eating in these early weeks? Pasta, obviously. Thalia has overcome her misgivings about eggs so we have fried eggs on toast once a week. Maybe the status of eggs was elevated once she worked out what some of the other offerings could be. I'm overcoming my misgivings about deep fat frying (the health ones AND the burning down the house ones) and presenting the family with a selection of chicken nuggets, vegetable fingers and fries. There's a wide selection of frozen chicken and veg products available, some of them even quite spice free, much to the kids' delight. Not many Indian kitchens have ovens so they're all designed to be deep fried. You can't oven bake them. I tried. And there's Papa John's pizza for our traditional Saturday Night Pizza Night. Unfortunately the television doesn't live up to our usual Saturday Night Pizza Night, unless you count Indian Idol, but that's in Hindi, so we don't.

After a couple of weeks of this I was pining for a meal that contained vegetables. When I mentioned this at the dinner table Thalia she said she wasn't. I was very excited to find a jar of Kikkoman sauce in Spencers because I knew that wasn’t going to be hot. So we had sweet and sour chicken and veg stir fry with the veg from the roadside stall. I've also modified the recipe on the side of a jar of pasta sauce (when have I ever followed a recipe exactly!). After bitching to Julie about the lack of houmous to serve with the nice looking pita bread you get here, because the tomatoes don't deserve this pita bread and lettuce is non-existant, she sent me a link to Delia's recipe. Well I found all the ingredients and made it. As I had absolutely no way to measure any of the ingredients other than a teacup that tapers at the bottom, a soup spoon and a teaspoon it didn't turn out too bad. It looks like houmous. It tastes like not particularly good houmous. Once my scales and measuring cup arrives I feel I will be able to do a much better job! And then I'll buy some more pita bread :-)