Autumnal Delights

Life has gone crazy again at the moment, with barely time to brush my teeth - let along write a blog ! So, with that in mind we decided to give athletics a night off and come home straight after school, and chill. Of course for me that means cooking. I honestly hadn't meant to cook anything that required much effort at all really what with my eyes feeling like they are out on stalks, but there you go.

First up, was what to eat ? I ventured out to the freezer in the garage at the bottom of the garden and found a packet of turkey sausages. Cupcake is notoriously difficult to feed. It's not that she's fussy, although she *is* fussy. She won't eat any form of pasta, she won't eat most meat, ham, she won't eat most fruit. She will eat rice, veg and cheese so most of the time she is practically vegi, which is fine by me. So, I thought maybe she'll eat the turkey sausages maybe she won't, as it was she managed half a sausage with homemade potato wedges and carrots.. her kind of food...

Now on to what I wanted to do with the sausages, well I was half way through baking them in the oven when I suddenly thought about throwing some veg to roast in with them. I took the sausages out of the oven, put them in a larger roasting tin and did this:

I took some tomatoes off the vine outside, I picked a couple of the last of the small yellow courgettes, a manky yellow pepper that has been in the fridge for I don't know how long !, ditto a carrot, a red onion, a white onion, chopped them all chunkily and nestled them in amongst the sausages. I topped this off with a handful of fresh thyme, a blitz of lemon juice, oilve oil, a blitz of balasmic vinegar, a spoon of sugar over the top and some salt and pepper. Then I let all of this meld together in the roasting dish. By the time I had finished it looked like a mix of Autumn, Halloween and Bonfire Night all mixed into one giant dish, hence the name of this post.

Then I preheated the oven to 200deg. and baked the lot for thirty minutes. I served it with garlic bread. See photo below, when I get chance to upload it !

For dessert, I was again using up store cupboard/fridge ingredients for a totally modified Bread and Butter pudding. I got out a nice big pyrex dish and teared up some old, stale croissants, some previously frozen chocolate brioche from France and a chocolate brioche hanging around from the weekend. I put this in the pyrex in layers and between each layer I chucked in a half-handful of chocolate chips, and a half-handful of raisins.

In a jug I had also whisked 2 eggs, about half a container of single cream (About 200ml), some drops of proper vanilla essence, some sugar and added enough milk to make quite a runny textured custard (I knew I had a lot of bread to cover).

Then I tipped all of the creamy custard over the bread. .
 

Then I melded it down a bit with a spoon until it 'squidged'.

I baked this in the oven at 200 deg. (seems to be my failsafe temperature!) for 30 mins. You don't need to serve this with anything it's gooey and decadent enough as is..

Perfect Autumnal Delights !

Here's a final picture of this lovely pud on the plate:

WARNING: A word of warning, I think I left this in the oven either too long or on too high a temperature (maybe both) suffice to say, the top was VERY brown. I would rather it had been a 'lightly toasted' colour. ?So do check this after 20mins, and every 5 mins after, so it doesn't 'catch' (as my mother would say).
PS> I was just thinking to myself how fattening all this food looks. I ate this after walking 2 miles to work and running four miles, so I feel I can eat this. Believe me, if I did not do that exercise, I would NOT eat the food.

Anyway, that leaves me with nice cleared out cupboard ready for when the shopping arrives in a couple of days. Result.