Freecycle score

I spent a couple of hours yesterday traipsing down to the very far end of Dusseldorf to pick up my new freecycle score:



It's a hand-operated bread slicer. I've given it a good cleaning now and am going to make some bread later to do me for lunches for this week. I have a bean casserole on cooking at the moment, which will be dinners for the week as well as some salad in the fridge. I'm really excited about this find. The woman who was giving it away has just gotten a freecyled electric one so she has been using it until very recently. It's not too terribly sturdy but on the other hand, isn't even half the size of the electric ones, which tend to also be for meat slicing. The white tray folds up as well, so it really doesn't take up too much space. I've thought about getting one of the electric ones but I don't really want any more gadgets using up energy and they are heavy and large and really need a permanent spot to live in, which I just don't have in my kitchen. Until now I've mostly just gotten my bread sliced at the bakery when I buy it - I'm often pretty bad at cutting bread with a knife, especially if it's supposed to be thin enough to fit into the toaster. If you need a much wider at one end slice of bread though, I'm your woman. If you ask for your bread to be sliced when you buy it, it is always put into a plastic bag afterwards but if you just buy the loaf without getting it sliced, it's simply wrapped up in paper. So less plastic in my future as well. And it is much better to just slice it as it's needed as the bread doesn't dry out as quickly.

Here's the bean mixture I'm using for my casserole just before I set it to soaking yesterday:



Red kidney beans, black beans, haricot beans, mung beans, brown lentils, green lentils, chickpeas and yellow oriental lentils.

Typically, after cooking it doesn't look half as colourful, in fact, the black beans seem to have leached most of their colour into the cooking water so until I added some tinned tomatoes and a good big spoonful of tomato puree, it was al looking a bit grey and dreary. Have added some carrots and onions as well and that together with some herbs and a few sausages are it. It smells good.

Just remembered that I meant to put in some of the broad beans that I have in the freezer since last summer as well. Oh well, they can go in when I'm heating it up tomorrow.