Foodie Friday - What I Ate In September

Ah September and food, where do we start? Well for at least a quarter of the month food was the farthest thing from my memory but we've been through that enough already, but I didn't cook as much as I hoped and I certainly didn't try any new dishes, well apart from the epic cake I made for Mummy Lou's birthday.

It was an epic birthday meal all round, the main course was my immense Gluten Free Mushroom And Basil Lasagne, made with some of my homemade easy pesto sauce.

This is probably the most drawn out, excuse the use of the word again, but epic recipe ever. It's time consuming but so worth the effort for a special occasion.

The lasagne was hard work, but in typical LouLou style, I don't do things be halves and made an even more time consuming dessert.

Yes, it was a cake, a 6 tiered gluten free sponge cake to be precise (I used this recipe 3 times replacing the lemon with a splash of vanilla extract and some food colouring). It was supposed to be blue, yellow, and pink but as you can see the pink food colouring (Asda's) was erm, useless! I sandwiched the layers together with butter cream, and Carnation Caramel, and cut a hole in the middle of the middle 4 cakes to make...

a Pinata Cake! I then filled the hole in the centre with Peanut M&M's and Galaxy Caramel Bits, Before covering it in literally a mountain of vanilla butter cream, and white chocolate jazzies.

OMG it was the most stressful thing I've ever done, first of all there was the problem with cakes, would they turn out? and would they crumble when I tried to cut them? Then there was the food colouring issue - it kind of ruined the look with an insipid beige colour rather than the pretty pink I anticipated. Then of course it was slightly too high so I had to hold it steady with skewers because I thought it might tip over arghhhh. Yeah so by the time it came to cutting the cake I was a nervous wreck, thankfully though the look on my mums face made it worth while and it tasted amazing, but never again - this was a one off - lol

So the birthday meal was by far my September highlight but what else did I eat? Well the rest of the month was mainly spent trying to get my head around food again. I ate a lot of plain stuff for a week or so, a lot of plain pasta, lots of potatoes, and lots of eggs and toast. I'm lucky to have relatives with chickens so over the last month I've probably ate more than I have done in a long time. I'm a huge scrambled egg fan, and this was a version using some leftovers, mainly spring onion, a spare slice of cheddar and some cream cheese, all on top of an Udi's Gluten Free Bagel.

As well as the chickens, I think I've told you before, but both my uncles have a lot of land and last month we received some more bagfuls of homegrown produce.

Onions, parsnips, apples, green beans, beetroot, you name it we got it, things are now either blanched, or stewed and frozen or in a cool dark place for use later in the year. One of my uncles had also been blackberry picking and provided us with this mountain of berries that my mum swiftly converted into several zillion jars of jam.

When I want comfort food nothing hits the spot more than a bowl of soup. Despite the still relatively fine weather in September I've started on the soup early this year. First up probably my favourite, my mum's Leek and Potato.

This was the soup of my childhood, and the warmth and creaminess really takes me back. A newer favourite of mine is of course Broccoli and Stilton, well it would be a newer favourite, up until about 5 years ago I detested blue cheese, it's funny how your tastes change.

Stilton obviously isn't very popular is my little part of Co Durham as my local Tesco nearly always has some in the reduced section. We love it though and in September I also made a variant of my Broccoli, Stilton And Walnut Pasta, only this time I threw in a little bit of vegan chorizo, for a bit more of a kick.

Treats weren't high on the agenda in September but I must include the vanilla cheesecake shots, and the Glo Worm from the recent Candy Rocks Jewellery Event (read my post here to find out more).

Oh and I guess I could count this as treat too - I finally broke my Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte duck. I'm not a huge cinnamon fan but I give in, it is as nice as everyone says and I may have even had another one today :). If you do have one though I would  definitely recommend you get them to use the Guatemala Antigua origin espresso, it's about 25p extra but it has a sweet, warm, spicy taste that really takes a PSL to the next level.

So that was my September food highlights. I was worried that I wouldn't have a lot to show you but I think I managed to make a post out of it. In October I'm going to try and get back on the healthy eating bandwagon, and I'm going to try and experiment a bit more. I've got a few, new recipe ideas that I want to try and I want to play about with some old favourites, so hopefully I'll have some new things to show you soon. Thanks for reading and don't forget to let my know your September food highlights x