Free Electricity ... and Food Review

We're with Octopus Energy for our electricity and gas, and for the last few weekends there has been an hour of free electricity.  Alan has made it his mission to use as much energy in that hour as possible and I've been joining in, maybe with not quite so much gusto, but joining in nevertheless.

Over the weekend just gone we had one free hour on Saturday, so I did all the usual, charging my laptop, camera, phone, vacuum cleaner etc,  putting one load of washing in the machine, alongside making twice as many cups of coffee as usual and boiling a kettle of water to wash the pots instead of firing up the boiler for hot water ... looking at that little lot perhaps I have been as obsessive as Alan.

Anyway late on Saturday night Alan got another email telling him that there was to be a further two free hours on Sunday.  What else could we possibly do to take advantage of it?

Well I decided that for my lunch I would cook the Rainbow Vegetable Parcel which requires one hour and twenty minutes of cooking time in the oven, and I had been putting off using just for that reason.

We also decided to quickly prepare all the apples off our little tree in the garden.  Now they are lightly stewed and in six 'takeaway' containers, three of them in each of our freezers.

I also decided to descale my kettle.

Usually I use vinegar or lemon to do this but I had neither, so I 'borrowed' a sachet of descaler off Alan.  He has the most well stocked, chemical fuelled array of household products under his kitchen sink.  I literally have a couple of well used favourite products.

With free electric for the full two hours it meant that I could boil and re-boil the kettle numerous times to get it nice and sparkly clean and not have to worry about the cost.  Then I boiled it a few more times afterwards to make sure to get all the nasty chemicals away, pouring the boiling water down each of my plugholes one by one, my preferred way of keeping the drains clear.

So ... what did the Rainbow Vegetable Parcel taste like?

It was dire!!

I think you can see quite clearly from this photo how compressed the layers of 'vegetables' are in it.  I put the word vegetables in quotation marks here because they were pretty unidentifiable as vegetables flavour-wise in my opinion.  They were supposed to be spinach, butternut squash and red cabbage ... well what can I say, they were the right colour at least.  😕

I had cooked them alongside the last of my leftover boiled potatoes from last week ... thank goodness I did, at least I got something for my lunch.

It looked promising on the plate.  

The one saving grace was the pastry it was lovely.  In future, for a much quicker version I will wrap my own leftovers in pastry, perhaps in layers or maybe just simply mixed together and have a homemade version, as the idea is one that I do like.

Oh well, at least I now have a nice big space in the freezer, one that I will be filling this week with some cooked homegrown rhubarb.

Sue xx