For the love of Produce...

Here's something to do with a bunch boring carrots languishing in the fridge. Thai inspired carrot soup. Sautee some store bought red curry paste with an onion and a few cloves of garlic until translucent. Add chopped carrots and water. Simmer until carrots are soft enough to blitz with an immersion blender. Once liquidized adjust seasonings to taste: fish sauce, lime juice or vinegar, coconut, a pinch of sugar, chilli sauce. Garnish with chopped coriander.

I'm blessed to live in a rural area with lots of farms that collaborate closely with the county food bank.

This week I was able to pick up a huge bag of carrots, two bags of salad greens, four plums, four delicata squash, yellow potatoes, cherry tomatoes (in October!) zucchini, a few onions, and a banana.

A big problem with poverty is that it often forces one to prioritize cheap processed calorie-dense crap. This creates a lot of breathing room in my budget so I can spend my few dollars on higher-quality carbs and protein.

Dinner tonight was a massive green salad with a slice of thin-crust pizza. Profoundly grateful to my community.

I haven't had pumpkin pie since I was a kid growing up in North America. We don't have tinned pumpkin puree or tinned dulce de leche here in the UK so I had to satisfy nostalgia cravings from scratch. My "pumpkin" tartlet filling was half an air fryer roasted butternut squash and half a tin of condensed milk which had simmered inside the tin for 3 hours in a big pasta pan. Fillng was blitzed in the food processor with and some spices (a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of ginger, a pinch each of nutmeg and clove) and an egg.