The Week Before the Challenge

So there's less than a week to go before the Challenge kicks off again for this year and I decided the other day to have one final little 'play with my food'.  I had a little bit of flour in a jar in the Van so I weighed out 50g of it added a pinch of salt and just enough water to bind it all together to make me some pasta.

A quick knead and then a half hour rest for the dough while I got on with a few little jobs and I was ready to roll out my pasta.

Just using a rolling pin and a well floured surface meant I got it reasonably thin, well I could see my fingers through it so I reckoned that was thin enough for me.  This was actually only the second time in my life I have ever made pasta from scratch, last time I was at the Vegetarian Society showing that pasta could be made without eggs, but then I had a pasta rolling machine.   If anything I found the rolling pin method easier and obviously there was a lot less to wash up afterwards ... always a bonus in my book!!

I sliced it into sort of tagliatelle width strips, I thought that was so much safer than trying to get to the spaghetti thinness.

And then I hung it to dry, far out of the reach of a certain little permanently hungry Pug  🐕

After a few hours hanging in the sunshine it was almost completely dried out, so I made a quick 'sauce' with half a dozen halved cherry tomatoes and a finely sliced spring onion that had seen better days.  Simply sautéed in some olive oil with a sprinkle of garlic granules and then a dash of the pasta cooking water right at the end to make it a bit more saucy.  It took around four minutes to cook and really was as simple as that to do.

A tasty little evening meal and surprisingly filling for what seemed like a small portion.  A good finale to my practising for Ration Challenge Week. 

I'm home in Wales at the minute but tomorrow morning I will be heading back to the Van and once there I will take some photos of my rations and get myself prepared for starting the Challenge.  I think a bit of this preparing may involve eating all the chocolate that is left in the Van in a bid to take away all future temptation ... it's a hard but very necessary job  😁

The Fundraising Page

Thank you to everyone who has sponsored me by donating money to my fundraising page, between us we are doing an amazing job and we are now less than £11 from being able to feed nine refugees for an entire year.  Wow ... what a result.

Thank you so much.

Sue xx