Dinner for Seven

We're nearing the end of our first supermarket-free week, and the cupboards are slowly getting emptier.  It hasn't been too hard feeding the two of us for the week - let's be honest, if things get really desperate there's always eggs on toast...  However on Saturday we faced our first major challenge - feeding seven people for dinner.  

My Mum and Dad have been visiting for the weekend,

and we invited them for dinner along with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew.  The family have been following our February challenge, so there was a bit of pressure on to cook something decent and authentically supermarket-free.  I decided to make pizzas with mostly homegrown veges (yet another creative use for the zucchinis) as well as some from the Farmer's Market, with roasted potatoes and carrots from our garden on the side.

  

             Rainbow Carrots            

One of the things I have found fascinating about growing our own food is discovering the extraordinary diversity of vegetables. In the produce section of the supermarket, the carrots are orange and uniform, the tomatoes are red and perfectly round, and zucchini are green and all the same size.  Supermarkets sure know how to make vegetables boring!   This year we decided to grow three different colours of carrots - orange, purple and yellow (fascinatingly, carrots were not originally orange, but were a hybrid created in the Netherlands in the 17th century.  But when did you last see a purple carrot on sale at New World?!)  So we had rainbow carrots on our plates for dinner.

 

With the mains sorted, now I needed something for dessert.  As I was leaving the house on Saturday afternoon, I saw an unfamiliar plastic bag sitting in the mailbox.  Hoping that it would be something exciting, I had a look - the neighbour had dropped off some apples from their tree - stoked!  They weren't quite ripe, but I figured with enough sugar added they would make an excellent apple crumble.  Of course, apple crumble isn't quite the same without ice cream.  This was a problem....  Fortunately, I found a really easy recipe that took hardly any time to make.

Easy Ice Cream Recipe

(from a random website I found on Google)

Use 3 bowls

lst bowl 4 egg whites - Beat till stiff, add ¼ cup any sugar, beat again
2nd bowl 4 egg Yolks - Beat till frothy with another ¼ cup any sugar
3rd bowl Beat 300 ml Cream until fairly stiff

             Super easy ice cream            

Put contents of bowl 1 and bowl 3 into bowl 2.

Fold in gently with spoon.
Pour into 2 litre ice cream box and freeze approx 6 hours.
 

You can add any other ingredients you like to make it tasty - chocolate bits, berries, flavourings etc.  I crumbled up a chocolate Flake and added it to mine when I mixed the three bowls together.  Easy as!

It all turned out pretty well - I got a bit worried when I realised we had run out of brown sugar for the apple crumble (not sure where I'm going to restock that...) but white sugar seemed to work fine.