The Bluestocking Women’s Pub: definitely full of ludicrous halfwits who refuse to get a grip (with unionised gerbils)

[MyrtleLion]

Welcome to The Bluestocking: convivial by design, opinionated in the best way, generously stocked with excellent food and drink that complies with whatever it’s meant to comply with, and any calories, gluten or alcohol are entirely virtual.

Staffed by impeccably trained, unfailingly polite gerbils who run a tight bar with plenty of enthusiasm and good intentions. Quick with the drinks, but terrible spillers spellers and liable to turn an idle thought on existential existence into a full blown musical with Busby Berkeley routines. You have been warned.

All women welcome, just in case that isn't obvious. Men can go to The Staunch Ally round the corner.

Previous thread here: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5477133-the-bluestocking-your-local-womens-pub-warm-friendly-and-not-at-all-unusual-in-any-way

I do similar. The Green Roasting Tin’s my favourite recipe book at the moment & I usually throw a few extra things in, then freeze some portions up for weekday lunches.

Hello Swash, good luck getting through the next 5 hours - 5 hours😱

I prefer to cook from scratch rather than use ready meals and my go-to quick meal is risotto, which can be made in little more time than the rice takes to cook. I like butternut squash and sage, or mushroom versions, but my favourite one is made with smoked haddock and leeks and topped with parmesan.

I also make a lot of slow cooker meals and freeze the excess. I like sausage and bean casserole, made with smoked bacon, Italian style sausages and cannellini beans in a tomato and herb sauce. An alternative version can be made with chicken. All my recipes have "hidden" vegetables such as peppers, courgettes and broccoli.

I also occasionally cook a small gammon in the slow cooker, which I use with a cheesy vegetable bake and then use the cooking stock to make soup. I freeze the unused portions of gammon for other meals. I can easily get 8-10 meals from a cheap gammon joint and a few vegetables this way.

Tonight is the last of the frozen chilli I made in a batch before Christmas, which I will have with a baked potato.

Like @Magpiecomplex and @Britinme I don't often use recipes these days and if I need one, I'll look on the internet, but I bought a student relative "The Green Roasting Tin" for Christmas and she absolutely loves it. She has put several photos of her efforts on the family WhatsApp page.

Small gammon joints can go a remarkably long way.

Our supermarket sells roast chickens, and one of those usually does us for at least three meals - one sliced in gravy with potatoes and veg, one stir-fry with lots of different veg, and a large batch of soup with the trimmings, using the bones to make stock. I keep bags of veg peels and trimmings - especially leeks and carrots - in the freezer and I dump those in with the chicken bones. It makes a very tasty stock.

I know some of you dislike fruit in meat dishes, but I enjoyed a very easy stew I made from 1X 375g pack of diced beef, some chopped onions and sliced carrots, a few garlic cloves (chopped not crushed for a milder flavour), a handful of prunes, a class of white wine and a cup of stock, dumped in together, brought to the boil and then turned right down and cooked slowly for 21/2 - 3 hours. I don't have a slow cooker, but it should work well in one.

It made 4 servings, two now eaten, two in the freezer.

leeks and ham in cheese sauce; courgette gratin with parsley, eggs and creme fraiche; toad in the hole; lentil pie (like shepherd's pie but with lentils instead of shepherds); meatballs cooked in the air fryer served with home-made tomato sauce; mashed root vegetable with chunk of cheese baked with more cheese on top; fillet pork sliced into small steaks and cooked on the pan with vegetables and white wine; chicken paprika; kedgeree; chicken and mushrooms in sherry and cream; cheaty chicken Caesar salad with Worcestershire sauce and mayonnaise and extra parmesan and anchovies (which can be healthified with nuts and cucumber cubes instead of croutons). And, of course, breakfast for dinner.

Greedy, moi?

Pork marinaded in olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, crushed garlic, lemon zest and chopped fresh herbs. Lovely for chops if you can get ones with some fat, serve with baked potato cooked beside them, and either green salad or green beans, maybe a baked tomato. Nowadays I tend to do cubes of pork and cook them in the air fryer often with button mushrooms and cherry tomatoes. The scent of that marinade cooking is one of the scents of my childhood.

I've just discovered there's a Romanian place near me, and am feeling a craving for tochitura moldoveneasca. I suppose I could try making an Irish version and swap out the polenta for champ or colcannon.

You could claim that yallamale is also an Irish version.

I have realised |I can't fit any more food in the big chest freezer in the shed, so I guess it's no cooking for me for a few weeks until we've eaten some of the stuff.

I always used to plan meals for the week but DP's become such a capricious sod in his 50s and 'doesn't fancy that after all' 4 times out of 5. So now we decide around lunch time and I go from there. At least twice a week we eat different meals entirely because he's in the mood for a meat and potatoes meal again.

It's so boring! I think potatoes about twice a week is great, but for god's sake, there are so many other options available! Pasta, rice in its many forms, breads, grains like bulgar wheat or quinoa, lentils, chickpeas... endless spuds is such a dull way to eat.

(ok, honest admission, I would eat pasta 5 days a week if he'd go for it. Bloody love pasta. So I'm hypocritical to be bored by spuds)

We really only eat potatoes when DD is home and weve killed the fatted calf (ok, bought a nice piece of beef from the local farm shop). DH is mindful of a family history of type 2 diabetes and has done some sobering experiments with CGMs so we avoid ‘white carbs’. We will have a modest amount of wholemeal spaghetti with the ‘bolognese’ this evening but we’re increasingly using pulses - hence the sausage and lentil casserole upthread and harissa salmon with butter beans I’ve mentioned in the past. Recently I’ve started doing quick beans in tomato sauce - sauted onion, tin of chopped toms, blob of Tom purée, tin of mixed beans and whatever herbs I fancy.

That sounds delicious - thank you, @DeanElderberry.

Well it was not great.

All the yarn and knitting was upstairs and the lift has been broken since the beginning of December. I had to take the stairs down one at a time.

It looked really shabby and lots of things were not under their display headings.

I bought three balls of 4ply 100g white Women's Institute acrylic. Everything else in 4ply was 50g and £3.50ish. The yarn I bought was £5 a ball, but they had a 3 for 2 offer. The buttons are not shown with sizes but fortunately rulers were being sold on the other side of the display stand. But I wasn't paying £4 for 4 buttons when I need 5.

And they wonder why we shop online...

Puy lentils with wilted spinach stirred through, a dollop of greek yogurt and a salmon fillet is one of our regulars when DP remembers he likes something other than spuds.

Pulses are great, aren't they!

Oh, he told me he became the Only Gay In The Villiage at work recently!

I prefer the term partner to wife - we only got married after 18 years for the paperwork - so he refers to me that way. I have a fairly gender neutral name. DP was talking to a new colleague at work, had mentioned me, that something about the kids came up. Colleague asked if he'd adopted or fostered.

DP replied, no, we had them the usual way. Colleague nearly fell of his chair as he's assumed for 4 weeks that I was a bloke.

Obviously if I was one of the SPECIAL people that would have been LITERAL violence. As it was, we thought it was funny.

Mr Magpie had something similar recently. Travelling with a male colleague who happens to have the same surname (common name, big organisation) and the flight attendant assumed they were married to each other. Second attempt was brothers.

Sorry Hobbycraft was a bit pants.

Buttons are hard to buy in real life and can be expensive online. John Lewis used to keep loose ones in stock but my local branch doesn’t have them any more. It doesn’t have much haberdashery at all, but it probably has a big enough yarn section for your needs and definitely better than Hobbycraft. Yarn shops usually carry some, although either plastic or not washable, in my experience.

Years ago I bought a big bag of shell buttons in two sizes from Bits and Bats which will last me for ever. They are still less than 1p each, too fragile for baby wear, though. They have some small cardigan buttons at 100 for 20p or 25p and elephant or duck buttons at 100 for £4.10. They are very friendly over the phone - and speak with lovely Bradford accents. Prices are before VAT, minimum spend £40 (£48 with VAT).

Do you think we should buy some buttons for one of The Bluestocking Craft Rooms?

I once went to Duttons for Buttons in York, but was disappointed.

Buttons!

Ah, the pearly queens of the Serengeti.

Before prices went up markedly at Goodwill over here, I used to spend a couple of dollars on a garment I didn't need if it had lovely buttons on it - cheaper than buying them at the store! I have a large jar in which I store all the odd old buttons, and extra ones from where I've bought six but only needed five. I really ought to find some craft project to do with them, but I barely have time for craft projects as it is.

MasterRandom is very keen on dressing up and likes cloaks. Interesting buttons are good fasteners for cloaks for kids and they're fairly quick and low-skill things to make -which suits my very basic sewing skills. I may also, possibly, have my own cloak now to aid in role playing games.

That sounds fun, can we all join in? We'll bring our own cloaks😄

Apologies for my silence recently. My dicky knee has been playing up recently and last night, as I lay down in bed, it decided to really flare up. 😬I had to sit up with my legs straight out in front of me until 2.30sm when it had finally calmed down for me to sleep. Definitely feeling my age today... If the Sleep Gerbils could do their stuff tonight I'd be very grateful.

oh that’s rough. The softest sleep gerbils are on their way.

Sleep gerbils and dream gerbils are on their way to give you a lovely sleep.