Today was quite a productive one in the Budget Bounty kitchen.

I started the day by poaching the Pork Belly for dinner tonight and then making myself some sugar body scrub to get me through the mid-winter itchy skin that’s driving me up the wall.

A friend has given me masses of winter fruit, so I am now all citrused up and thought I should take advantage of it.

 

Some Lemon Butter was therefore made.

This was followed quickly by popping the empty lemon shells into a large jar and covering them in plain old household vinegar.

In a few weeks the lemon oils will have suffused the vinegar with their wonderful scent. The vinegar will then be diluted 50:50 with water and used to clean just about everything.

Then I finally made my pork dumplings and they turned out really well! The only down side was that I ran out of wrappers before I ran out of filling.

However, even that has a plus to it. I’m thinking the filling could use some spicing up and may add some ground cumin or coriander and possibly even some sauces to the remainder.

In the meantime, we had a tasty lunch and now have some morsels in our freezer for future feasts.

I managed to have a bit of a sit-down (lunch, donchaknow) and then got dinner underway.

We had a lovely piece of pork belly with a sticky Asian sauce, served with steamed millet, bok choy and baked butternut pumpkin (squash). Doesn’t it look good?

While that was cooking, I mixed up my Grandmother’s Chocolate Fudge Pudding – including some zest from an orange in that fruit bowl I showed you earlier.

It worked wonderfully. The orange really made a difference, cutting the richness beautifully. I’ll post the recipe soon, I think. My only regret is that we didn’t have any vanilla ice-cream to serve with it (the freezer is full of things that aren’t ‘sometimes foods’ right now.)

So now I am in need of a good night’s sleep. No idea why.

I’ve noticed that the biscuit barrel is nearly empty, so some cookies or biscuits will be made in the next day or so. I quite enjoy the time beforehand, when I get to trawl through my recipe books and pins looking for something special to make. One batch usually lasts The Boy a fortnight (two weeks), so I don’t bake all that often and it’s my chance to make him something special. Because I’m a softy.

Goodnight All.