The best laid plans...

I'm not a mouse or a man but my best laid plans most certainly went astray this week. The whole creating yumminess on a budget thing has been going remarkable well even if I do toot my own horn in saying it, so I guess it was time for a cock-up.

For days I'd been gathering in the ingredients for a stuffed cabbage, mentioned before in this blog, the stuffed cabbage is a delight and wonder that belies its grim institutional sounding name. Every trip into town was a recce for another component, all ingredients were located at rock bottom prices starting with the savoy cabbage and ending with some pine nuts (ooh they are pricey little nuggets at the moment - has there been some harvest failure I don't know about?)

Hubby was excited, I was salivating, toddler boy was fascinated and baby girl couldn't care less. All was well in the kitchen as the ingredients took shape into the dish. Now a stuffed cabbage does taste amazing but it is a major faff to make. The French do like their food a tad tricksy on the prep front. So tomatoes had been skinned and cored, pine nuts toasted, bacon diced, onion chopped, breadcrumbs whizzed and cabbage leaves blanched and assembled.Not to mention the crushed garlic, minced pork, blended herbs and beaten eggs. Finally I layered up the leaves with the stuffing and tied it all up into a big muslin wrapped cabbage again. This went to rest in the mixing bowl while I prepped the sauce it cooks in.

Shallots sauteed in butter while I diced potato. I was just peeling the carrots when disaster struck. Toddler boy got over curious and upended the mixing bowl, shattering it all over its contents. Unless we wanted minced insides there was no way we could eat the cabbage. Disappointed is too mild a word. Never have I wanted to eat something so much as that cabbage, nope, not even that hidden choccy bar during PMT. Toddler boy picked up on the enormity of his actions as he inserted a very heavy "sooooo" before his "sorry".

But in the spirit of the blitz (very topical me) I sliced the peeled carrots and whipped out the hummus for a little pre-dinner nibble. After a few more were added to its number the diced spuds turned into a buttery mash. The poor sauteed shallots were rescued by turning them into a white wine gravy (which nearly ended badly when the stock cube refused to co-operate and formed huge lumps throughout the sauce - thank heavens for a whisk Mrs Beeton indeed). A packet of herby sausages pulled from the freezer provided the pork fix and dinner was saved.

It wasn't stuffed cabbage though was it? Grrr...

What we should have been eating...