 Today's vignette starts by showing you the vagaries and the pre-curtiousness of March here in the north of England. One day we'll have a very frosty day in which everything seems to be beautifully coated with a dusting of icing sugar. Despite the evidence of winter and how cold it is, there are shoots of green such as the rhubarb which get me quite excited and more importantly we've recently realized that the frog spawn has arrived and for us here in our home frog spawn appearing in the pond is the definitive sign that nature is realizing that winter has come to an end and that spring is abound. So I was very excited and I wanted to share with you this vignette of the garden despite the winteriness, despite the fact that some of the water containers were frozen over. Spring is on its way and I heartily welcome March. Hello, it's another rainy day in the north of England. Gloriously rainy outside. Clouds are all grey, atmospheric like. It's not even three o'clock yet and I have to have the lights on. See? See? It's turning on the lights. Yes, so I'm here today. I'm just about to get started on cooking dinner and we have a new thing in rotation because we're now in March. Yes! March! Glorious March! March! I love March so much. Okay compose myself. Yeah, I'm very happy to be in March because it means that we are marching ever forward to spring. There have definitely been loads of signs of spring but most importantly the frog spawn has appeared in the pond and yes and my husband was the first one to spot it this year which is awesome. He hasn't been the first one to spot it in several years. Normally it's been the kids but he got in there first and yeah so that's normally for us a good sign that spring is definitely on its way. We have the Daffodils. Most of my Daffodils are already out now as are the Crocuses and yeah so I'm gonna be making something that's entered the menu rotation because it is a new month so we now have sweet and sour chicken in the rotation rather than the chicken coma. So I tend to rotate things in and out because absence makes the heart grow fonder when it comes to feeding kids except for when it comes to pizza. Pizza is eternal just like Rome is the eternal city so pizza is eternal and the kids love pizza. I could feed them pizza every single day and they would eat it so pizza is around the whole year on the menu rotation on the menu so it doesn't actually rotate out or anything like that. But yeah so I'm gonna be making some sweet and sour chicken. Normally I like to make the sweet and sour from scratch however my plans today got kiboshed by unexpected things happening so I'm using my backup plan wherein I use a cooking sauce. Now I think it's always good to have a backup sort of like a short axis a quick axis pathway to achieve a decent meal if you don't have the time to gather everything together so I'm making it using a sauce and then getting on. So I briefly wanted to also talk about I've been having a lot of tech issues and I do apologize about the reduced frequency of my uploads. My plan had been to upload more regularly but I'm just currently going through a lot of tech problems and I'm nearly there with sorting it out and it's basically because I record most of this stuff on my phone and my phone is quite an old phone which I've dropped many times so it has cracks on it and it constantly shuts itself down and there was a point at which the battery very nearly exploded it just started expanding and expanding and so it had to be replaced. So I've had quite a few tech problems. I've switched over to another phone because luckily for me my son upgraded his phone and so he had his old phone line around which was better than the phone that I have and this is the phone that I'm now using. So if you've noticed a bit of a difference in the video quality and the sound quality it's because I've been slowly moving over to doing things on this new phone which is also my son's old phone and I am so terrible with technology. I really don't like dealing with these things and so it's taken me quite a while because I also have to transfer it over all my contacts and everything and it's one of the reasons why I have been holding on to this old phone despite the fact that it's dodgy, it's cracked, it just randomly switches itself on and off as because I dread the prospect of switching phones and I'm like that my last phone before the new one I had that one for about five years and I had to change it because nothing could be updated on it anymore because you know they do this thing with the software where they try to force you to update stuff. But anyway a little rant over those are some of the problems that I've been having but hopefully those have been sorted out. It's a different setup and I'm learning how to navigate this new phone that used to belong to my oldest son and so and so that's that's what has been going on but hopefully things have settled down and I'll be back to doing regular uploads which is a little fun because I really do enjoy doing those. Okay so we're going to get started with the making of the sweet and sour chicken but first I'm going to share with you a bug in that I'm so excited to have found. As you know I'm a big fan of the reduced to clear sections I do check them out I know when they do the reduced to clear and most of the shops that I normally go to but these free range eggs were 50% off 50% off for free range eggs. So anyway so I swapped out the last there were only five packets left five boxes left so I got those five boxes and I'm going to freeze them because I read that you can freeze eggs and I'm going to do that and I thought for 50% off that was a really good deal so I got I got like that little yay. So to make the sweet and sour chicken I've got some chicken breast here so I'm making a 2kg batch this is going to make two meals one will be frozen and one will be served today. I'm using the Aldi sweet and sour cooking sauce and to add to that I'm going to be chunking it up with some pineapple chunks. I'm also going to be chopping up a red pepper. Oh look at that good looking red pepper. I also have some spring onions which were boneless 50% off and I'm also going to be adding in some carrots. So I'm going to dice this first chop these cut this up and chop those. For this particular dish I'm using chicken breast and that's because my children will pretty much easily eat chicken breast they find it to be a lovely cut of meat though I'm actually personally not a big fan of chicken breast myself but sometimes when I'm cooking I obviously have to cook to the greater majority. The other cut off chicken that works well for us with sweet and sour is chicken thigh fillets but you don't tend to come across those as often as the chicken breast particularly at Aldi which is where I do most of the shopping and I find that when I am cutting them up medium-sized chunks are much better than smaller chunks because chicken breast does dry out very easily so I find that if I do smaller chunks they become quite hard and chewy by the time I finish the process that I use because it effectively does a double cook first by frying it and then secondly by putting it in the oven which are fine to be a lot easier so I always go for the medium medium-sized chunks and that seems to maintain that balance of having the chunkiness of the chicken within the sweet and sour sauce as well as keeping it reasonably moist without it getting quite dry and also I don't know if I mentioned this but I'm actually making a double batch that's why there is so much of it and I'm basically going to fill the tray that I'm making and going forward with spring what I do is almost every meal that I cook is going to be doubled up and that buys me more time because it means that the next time that that meal is showing up in the menu I'm just getting it out of the freezer at the beginning of April and towards May I begin to do a lot more batch cooking wherein I'll put aside a half a day to prepare you know loads and loads of food loads and loads of meals that I then put into the freezer and that buys me even more time because in summer I tend to need to do a lot more stuff in the garden I've got a lot more sowing plants we have a lot more activities a lot more events to go to it just seems to work out that people do a lot more stuff in the summer and so I try to buy more time create more time in the summer that way but I won't compromise on the quality of food that I make for my family and I also do enjoy the cooking process and providing good quality healthy meals for my family so whilst the chicken is frying in batches I'm going to go ahead and prepare the vegetables which is my favorite part of this particular meal because as you know it's sweet and sour sauce it has that quintessential colorful bell peppers that give it that lovely pop of color when it comes to cooking I definitely prefer using the mise en place type of cooking whereby I put everything into place it's certainly when it comes to preparing vegetables I do find something very therapeutic about having my vegetables prepped and particularly when they're very colorful having them in separate little caddies I find that's so very satisfying so I think it's one of the reasons why I do really enjoy making sweet and sour chicken and so the next thing that I will do is in the same pan that I was using to just sear the chicken breast I'm going to go with the onions first and then I'm sauteing the carrots I like to sweat the carrots a little bit before I chuck them into a sauce I think that that gives their crunch the texture a little bit more of a satisfying mouth feel than when you just chuck uncooked carrots into something like a sweet and sour sauce I'll use uncooked carrots straight into a soup because I'm going to puree the soup eventually but I don't think it works so much in the sweet and sour sauce I don't know there's just something a little edge that it adds to it and so I'll add all of the vegetables in there that I will then just saute very quickly I had run I didn't do the green or the yellow peppers on this one I just went with the red peppers I add the carrots because again to me sweet and sour needs to have that crunch there's nothing more disappointing to me than a sweet and sour sauce that doesn't have any crunchy texture to it and then I'm just going to add the sauce over there and I'll cook it very very briefly only for a few minutes or so just to get it to warm up before I will add it to the chicken another thing that I like to add just to give it a little bit more thing is some lemon juice I find that with store-bought sauces on the most part if you find them to be a little bit on the bland side it's probably because they don't have enough acidity to them and so I'll add something like lemon juice or some apple cider vinegar because apple cider vinegar has that acetic acid and lemon juice has got that citric acid and I'll also add a tablespoon of honey as well and it just adds a little more pep a little bit more zinc to the store-bought sauces and you can kind of get away with making them seem very home-cooked by this time all my days this is smelling so good I'll add the pineapples last because obviously these are canned pineapples the preferable choice would be to use an actual pineapple but I didn't have one at hand it was easy to use the canned pineapples and what I'll do is into my roasting tin where I have the sautéed chicken breast I will just pop that sauce over the top of it because I'm going to use my usual trick of putting this in the oven rather than letting it simmer on the countertop it just for me it creates a much better flavor it's a lot easier for me to cook things in bulk this way when I put it into the oven and the cleanup is a lot easier because when you simmer in a saucepan for such huge quantities you inevitably have a bit of burn at the bottom but not so when you put it into the oven it doesn't that look lovely with the reds and everything so before I put it into the oven I will put some foil over it and again this is to reduce the drying out of the chicken breast chicken breast is it dries out very easily and it's one of the reasons why it's not my favorite but my kids like it so I have to cook with it um yeah and I'll double foil it as well and that just makes sure that all of the steam all of the moist just stays in because I don't want to dry this out I'm basically using a cheat code to simmering by popping it in the oven and I can get on with cleaning and tidying up everything else and so after 25 to 30 minutes in the oven this looks so good and it smells so good the carrots will be nicely soft and textured not at all thoroughly cooked so they'll have an excellent mouthfeel the red peppers will be just nicely cooked al dente so you have that lovely texture to it and all of the flavors have melded together and it is one of the kids favorites I decided to add some spring rolls to this meal that I'm trying out they're a new product at Costco and I like spring rolls so I thought that they would go well with the sweet and sour chicken and they did we serve it with some white rice some basmati rice and as you can see it's a really lovely looking dish which also tastes really fabulous thank you so much for visiting with us today I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I have and until I see you next time lovelies I wish you blue skies health and happiness and I'll leave you with a wonderful poem from Emily Dickinson about March bye