This week in my kitchen :: Fast Food and Home made Rosemary Hair Rinse

On busy days I often rely on store cupboard ingredients to make speedy suppers. I find these staples useful to have in mine:

Bottled olives, capers and sun dried tomatoes.
Dried beans, noodles or pasta (Spaghetti and orzo are favourites) and shitaki mushrooms.
Vegetable basket shallots or spring onions (quicker to prepare than regular large onions and take less time to cook), sweet potatoes, capsicums especially red or yellow ones and broccoli. 
Canned chopped tomatoes, anchovies, tuna or sardines. 
Frozen broad beans/garden peas.

If I know in advance that it's going to be an extra busy week I'll stock up the fridge with things like fresh pasta such as tortellini that cooks in half the time of dried pasta and tastes a million times better. Fresh shitaki mushrooms for deep earthy flavour, cray fish tails or prawns that are peeled and de-veigned ready to cook, bags of mixed salad leaves and herbs if there aren't any in the garden and avocados. I can quickly put together something simple with these ingredients in ten minutes. Other foods like abgoosht and baked rose cocoa beans that I cook this way are also quick to prepare but take a long slow cook. They are great for if you are working in the house so that you can check them every so often. 

Here's a little of the action in my kitchen this week:

• Tortellini with shittaki mushrooms, crayfish tails and peppery salad leaves. I like a combination of watercress, rocket (arugula) and spinach.
• Abgoosht (or Obgoosht), Persian lamb and chick pea stew. You can find our recipe here. Traditional accompaniment's are cool cucumber chunks and raw onion. It's sometimes served spooned over small pieces of bread placed in the serving dish in much the same way that bread is added to Italian Panzanella salad to make it more hearty and substantial.
• Breakfast, oat porridge with banana and berries.
• Tortellini with shittaki mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes.
• Fresh duck eggs and my favourite crunchy green conference pears.
• Dill, garlic and broad bean rice that we served with oven baked sardines and sweet caramel garlic pickles.
• Poached duck eggs with sour dough rye bread toast.
• Tasty tortellini with peeled baby broad beans, broccoli and garlic...mmm...
• Good local bread, like Alex Gooch sour dough rye bread, cotswold's black, or beer bread with almond or peanut butter and fruit.
• Painting the garden table.
• Making rosemary hair rinse from this lovely recipe here...So easy. You just have to bring a pan of filtered water to the  boil, add stalks of fresh rosemary. Reduce the heat and allow it to simmer for about half an hour. Strain off the water and allow to cool before using. After washing your hair whilst it's still wet rinse with the rosemary infused water and allow to dry.The result should be shiny healthy deliciously smelling hair...Mine is much greener than hers. I wonder if that's good or bad...I'll go and try it now and let you know...

...has anything interesting been happening in your kitchen this week?

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