Vegetable casserole.

Firstly I must apologise to you all for the slow rate at which I am posting!
Time just seems to fly by and  keeping up with everything is not easy, especially at this time of year, when the garden needs a lot of attention!  

I have still not managed to edit my photos of the Lot region of France and we go on holiday next month, so there will be loads more photos to edit on our return after 3 weeks of travelling.  I have, however, managed to keep up the photo diary, for those who are interested. Catching up with 'My life in the Charente' in summer may be difficult but I will do my best when we return from holiday.  Tomorrow we have a blogger friend arriving and we are looking forward to showing her around; sadly the weather has taken a turn for the worse and lots of rain is forecast!

Meanwhile, I have discovered an amazing way to make a vegetable casserole and decided to pass on my 'invention,' as we thought it was so good.  No amounts or weight are involved; just decide how much you need for each person.

You could use pretty much any vegetable of your choice but I used:

2 carrots

1 parsnip

A large stick of celery

2 leeks

A few mushrooms

Two sticks of asparagus that I had in the fridge.

Freshly ground pepper to taste

Chop all and put into a dish with a lid.  I then added liquid 3/4 of the way up the dish.  This was a 50:50mix of box orange juice and dry white wine with a vegetable stock jelly added.  Put on the lid and cook in the oven at about 190C (375F, gas mark 5) until the carrot is just tender; mine was done in a little more than an hour. Pouring in heated liquid  first would speed up the cooking time if you were in a hurry.

When the vegetables were cooked, I drained off the liquid to make a sauce and kept the vegetables warm meanwhile. 

Butter - about 60 grams or 2 ounces, melt in a small saucepan then add some flour (about 2 tablespoons), Add a couple of heaped tablespoons of lemon and lime marmalade, stir well then slowly add the vegetable liquid, stirring all the time until you have a thick pouring consistency.  Serve up the vegetables and pour some of the sauce over.

I served it with a potato cooked in the slow cooker, and a grilled pork chop, it was delicious.

Pasta sauce.

We had some of the above vegetables left over, as I had cooked more than we needed. I made up a little more sauce using butter, flour, wine, orange juice and marmalade and adding the left over vegetable.  We then poured it over our favourite pasta and hey presto, what a great sauce it made.

I hope that you get to try this out as I thought it was really exceptional and the lemon and lime marmalade just finished it off with a novel taste.  It may work with any marmalade, but that is for you to try and experiment with!

See also My Life Before Charente (updated 9 March)

and my daily blog

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