Wednesday essay writing

It's the final countdown. 46 hours and 17 minutes until my two assessed essays are due. Fortunately, this being the final week of term and lecturers being fully aware that students will have left it until the last minute, the English department cancel all lectures and seminars for second years in week 10, so we have time to write the essays we've had about a month to do. This also meant that I was able to get a Sainsbury's order delivered - a bonus to the week I hadn't been expecting! My cupboards, fridge, and freezer are all looking a lot more cheerful now, and I'm already planning some slightly more adventurous dinners for next week.

As I've got something on this evening, I thought I'd go for a main meal at lunchtime again today, and for preference one I could leave bubbling on the hob while I get back to writing about realism in the nineteenth-century novel. Using those cannellini beans from yesterday was another important part, as was finding something that wouldn't be too strong, as the sudden end of term panic has made my tummy quite grumpy!

With a fresh stock of chopped tomatoes and some diced chicken back in my arsenal, I decided to be a bit creative for lunch today. The end result was pretty delicious, if I say so myself...

Firstly, I heated some vegetable oil with a chopped up clove of garlic (having first removed the green shoot that causes the feared Garlic Breath) and some dried rosemary. Once the garlic was lightly toasted and the oil good and hot, I added the diced chicken breast and a bit of salt, and gave it all a quick stir. I didn't want the chicken to go too golden, but I did want it to have a headstart on being cooked before I added anything more.

After that, I tipped in about half of a tin of chopped tomatoes (around 200g at a rough estimate), a pinch of sugar and a splash of water, got it up to a simmer, then popped my makeshift lid of the dinner plate over the top, turned the heat down and left it to cook for about 20 minutes.

(I'd like to pretend that the 20 minutes where my dinner was cooking were productive, but I shouldn't lie...)

Then, about 15 minutes into this, I got my bowl of cannellini beans from yesterday out of the fridge, drained, rinsed, and left them for the remaining five minutes before I removed the plate/lid (now nicely warm for putting my meal on), tipped them all in, stirred until the beans were all cooked, and served it up.

Very, very pleased with the results. It was warm and comforting, just what I need when I'm brewing a cold. The garlic, I'm told, will be good for sorting out my cold, so that's always a plus, and cooking the chicken in the tomato sauce meant that it was beautifully tender and not as tough as it can be when you just fry it. As with the casserole from yesterday, another plus was that there's only one dirty pot to clean - and with having bought already-diced chicken, there's not even a knife or a chopping board to clean, either. A variation on this would be to omit the cannellini beans and instead serve this with a generous helping of my dad's indulgently creamy mashed potatoes, which would be a good way of mopping up the delicious sauce!

Now, I'm stuck with the eternal dilemma of a student: put off getting back to this essay by doing my washing up, or put off doing the washing up by getting back to the essay? Difficult. Very difficult...

Tuesday rush

It strikes me that there will be one day every week where you struggle to find time to fit in dinner. For me, this is Tuesday. It's not that I'm particularly busy, it's that working at an awkward time makes it difficult to know what and when to cook. Today, I plumped for cooking the main meal at lunch so all I need is to pick up (or make, if I had anything in my fridge) a sandwich to eat during my break at work, and then indulge in some marmite on toast when I come home - alternatively, I might be very naughty and call into Tesco's on the way back and pick up a little something as a reward!

I'd had in my head the idea of making a different version of the sausage casserole I always do. I tend to make a very improvised casserole and have it with mashed potato or rice - a couple of sausages, a tin of chopped tomatoes and some tomato purée, garlic, onion and chopped peppers, all into the oven for about 45 minutes. But I've had a tin of cannellini beans lurking about in the back of my cupboard since I moved into the house in September, and I really fancied using them in something so I wouldn't need to wait for the rice or potatoes to boil. So this morning, when I really should've been doing something more about my essays, I trawled the internet looking for a good casserole recipe that wouldn't require putting anything into the oven. Unable to find anything that didn't require an oven or lentils (seeing as I'd used the last tin of green lentils on Sunday) online, I turned to one of the M&S recipe books my parents bought me last year for Christmas.

Amazingly, there was something in there that was exactly what I was after: a sausage and bean casserole that only needed one pot and could be done just on the hob in about 20-30 minutes. Even better, I had all of the ingredients apart from the tin of chopped tomatoes, but I did have a ramekin full of tomato purée that needed using up, so I thought I could improvise. In the future, I'll definitely leave this one for when I've got some chopped tomatoes (which will be after tomorrow when my shopping arrives) because the purée was just a bit too rich, and even with adding a fair amount of water, the sauce was still quite thick. I think having the chopped tomatoes would sweeten the meal a little bit and also then, you've got the lovely chunks of tomato in addition to the green pepper, onion, garlic, sausages and beans.

The cannellini beans make this really filling and means that you don't have to get another saucepan messy by having to cook rice or any potato - I didn't even need any bread to bulk up the dinner, although I think that if you did have the chopped tomatoes in there, even with using some tomato purée to thicken everything, you might want something to mop up the sauce afterwards!

Another success, although definitely one to save for when you've got all the necessary ingredients. Now, to try and find something I can make tomorrow with the cannellini beans that are left - and the new additions to the kitchen with my Sainsbury's order...