Random Recipes #35 - Dare to Bare

Random Recipes - how I've missed you. Life has been manic, and although I've chosen my recipe for the last few challenges, I have never quite got round to making them.

But this month, a challenge that suits my current situation: to photograph the contents of my food cupboards and reveal all.

I'm trying to clear out, to reduce the amount of stuff we will shortly need to move from rural north Hampshire to even more rural West Wales. The food cupboards are not exempt. So let's examine them more closely - after all, Dom at Belleau Kitchen just wants to have a good old nosy...

You may remember that I did have a good old clear out of one of my cupboards almost exactly a year ago. Let's see if it's still ordered and tidy. Hmm, Thought not. Bread flour on both shelves, baking powder and bicarb of soda where they shouldn't be, an almost empty bag of pasta shoved in at the back. It's not looking good - but at least there's a couple of boxes of marzipan ready for the Christmas cake that I finally got round to baking tonight...



Where to next? Well, directly above what I notionally think of as 'the baking shelves' is the jam and chutney cupboard. Quite full at the moment, as they should be at this time of year - it'll be a different story come March, when the jars will mostly be empty. And look! I spy some of the Husband's chilli pickled gherkins in there. Oh yes indeed. Remind me to make some bagels some time, you know, when I have a spare 5 minutes, and get in the pastrami...

1 - take a photo of your ingredients cupboard or larder
2 - pop it up on your blog or twitter or facebook and tell us a little bit about what you have in stock
3 - email a link to me at dominic at belleaukitchen dot com
4 - tweet me @belleaukitchen using the #belleaukitchen hashtag and i'll retweet all I see
5 - include a link back to my blog and the random recipes logo in your post
6 - deadline in the 28th December - See more at: http://www.belleaukitchen.com/#sthash.F83pAd3G.dpuf

1 - take a photo of your ingredients cupboard or larder
2 - pop it up on your blog or twitter or facebook and tell us a little bit about what you have in stock
3 - email a link to me at dominic at belleaukitchen dot com
4 - tweet me @belleaukitchen using the #belleaukitchen hashtag and i'll retweet all I see
5 - include a link back to my blog and the random recipes logo in your post
6 - deadline in the 28th December - See more at: http://www.belleaukitchen.com/#sthash.F83pAd3G.dpuf

Moving on, to the spice cupboard (but which you'll notice has the 'current' jars of jam, marmite and peanut butter too), and it's no tidier than the others. The smoked paprika is at the front of course: La Chinata '3 chilli' hot, and a supermarket's own brand bog standard smoked, plus my old friends, ground cumin, coriander, ginger and cinammon. Jostling at the back, all manner of ground this and seeds of that. There's a box of Maldon sea salt in there, the mustard (English, powder), and some cardamom pods. I used them recently in a stove top rice pudding that I made. It was utterly divine.

Finally, dare I enter the corner cupboard of doom? An ingenious pull out contraption which makes the most of what would otherwise be a dead corner in the kitchen (thank you Howdens, for that). 

This, this my friends, is the cupboard that will see me through a nuclear winter. All the guilty secrets are here too - the pack of ready made custard and a tin of steamed sticky toffee pudding that we didn't eat while we were away house hunting at the weekend; some corned beef and some tinned potatoes (mmmm hash); baked beans, tinned tomatoes, chestnut puree, cake icing accoutrements, tinned caramel, some lentils and a bag of porridge oats, along with a number of packets of what the Husband likes to refer to as 'comedy tea'. 



And what on earth did I buy pomegranate molasses (see, in the photo below, the tipped over bottle next to the barrel of Birds custard powder) for? Ottolenghi has got a lot to answer for...

May be I'll do a follow up post, just before we move in a couple of months, to see how much of it all I've managed to use up. What do you think?