Potato Surprise Pie

Just as surely as things that go up have to come down, it is also the case that, unless they are incredibly organised and have a bigger freezer capacity than I, people who go out and enjoy themselves 2 weekends on the trot end up with nothing in the fridge and a bit of a crisis - especially given that it's now officially 'Christmas' (having got the Husband's birthday out of the way) and my organisational skills have had to be turned to that rather than the day to day food regime.

I do have a meal plan for December. It's filled in with the many Christmas related events the children are involved with, the Husband's not inconsiderable absences through work-related travel, some parties (more! hooray!) and  a couple of food-related scrawls. I see "salmon?"  against tomorrow. And (rather obviously) "turkey" against 25th. But for the rest of the time? We are doing a lot, and not, apparently eating much.

Actually that's not quite true - closer inspection reveals "leftovers" written in for Monday with an arrow wiggling across the rest of the week (until tomorrow when we are supposed to be having salmon...).

Leftovers on Monday and Tuesday consisted of a rather luscious cauliflower and bacon cheese using up the remnants of various cheese from the weekend, and a sausage and sweet potato casserole, again using up sausages we didn't cook on the beach. The same was on offer on Tuesday, and by Wednesday we had Sausage Casserole left. Left overs from the leftovers, you could say. (I'd over achieved when I bought the sausages). 

Throw into the mix the fact that I've had to scrape together packed lunches and the fridge painted a rather grim picture this afternoon.

But a pot of cream, although a day out of date, was unopened and passed my 'does it taste off' test, and - hallelujiah! 4 slices of bacon. Potatoes an onion and some tired looking tomatoes, and dinner was born. A kind of take on a dauphinoise, I suppose, or a bacon hotpot.

I hesitate to offer a recipe - my dish is, shallow approx 20cm by 20cm, and I thinkly sliced 3-4 maris piper potatoes and an onion, then layered with the bacon and tomatoes plus a grated clove of garlic, salt and pepper and a mixture of 300ml of veg stock and about 100ml of cream, cooked for 40 mins in a hottish oven.

Coupled with some peas (from the freezer) and bingo.

Dinner. 

As I haven't done so for ages, I'm linking this up with Dom's Random Recipes challenge #46 for December. He challenged us to take a photo of our Christmas fridge and post it. Granted this is more the pre=Christmas fridge than the Christmas fridge, but still...Thanks, Dom.