It's a cooking Sunday

I'm trying to take it easy in order to shake off this lingering cough. I did drag myself off the couch a short while ago to start the marinade for the chicken I want to cook. And that turned into doing all the dishes, peeling the carrots and chopping the pumpkins. So I'm all set and just sitting down now for some more rest and a nice yoghurt (going to break the horrible habit of never finishing the yoghurt that's in the fridge!)

I was going to do spicy dal and carrot soup, the chicken (with roasted sweet potatoes and parsnips that was posted on That Curious Love of Green the other day) as well as make some stew. Even remembered to take the beef pieces out of the freezer. But since I was only half planning and hadn't written anything down, didn't get to the market yesterday and, even when I did go to the supermarket, didn't have a proper list, I've had to make some changes.

I had just exactly enough carrots for the spicy dal soup. Not thinking that beef stew with just beef and some onion would be a bit boring and, more importantly, not at all helping me towards the more veg-filled healthy eating I'm trying to get back to. So, the carrots will go into the stew and I'll have to wait until next week to make that soup.

Okay, so how about the chicken? Well, since I did pass by the meat counters in the supermarket yesterday I remembered to buy some. It's French, so not local (and forgot to look it up before throwing out the packaging and am not going rooting in the bin now - the border is about 300 km away, so at least that much anyway) but at least it's definitely free-range, 80% grain-fed, organic chicken. Totally forgot about the sweet potatoes though - got too distracted with the lettuce situation I think. Looking for veg in a supermarket has just become such a strange and unusual situation for me. I'm not terribly fond of parsnips anyway so I was thinking of doing the sweet potato with some carrots but as we've already seen, I've had more ideas of what to use my carrots for than actual carrots so that would have been a bust. I did have two hokkaido pumpkins that I got before christmas though. And now I'm very glad I'm using them because although they looked perfect one had just started rotting in one small spot. By next week I probably would have had to throw out half of it, instead of a roughly one inch square.

So I have one pumpkin to use with the chicken and have just put the other on as soup. Just the pumpkin chopped, enough water to cover it well, salt, pepper, cumin, some tumeric and a sprinkle of ginger as well.

The beef hasn't defrosted yet so I'll wait till this evening to make the stew but the carrots are ready and waiting in a bowl of cold water.

And the chicken in marinating is the fridge. Not at all bad for a quick burst of movement brought on by just getting up to do that one thing!