Category: Rice, Risottos, Pilafs, Etc

Fruit ‘Em Up

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Christmas shopping: 3 Laura: -100,000,000,003.
I’ve attempted to Christmas shop every weekend for the last month and have ended up with very little to show for myself. I know it’s not all about the gifts, but after a lifetime of getting presents for my family, I can’t just stop now because I can’t find much of anything. I have one weekend left to scour Wellington for trinkets. Wish me luck. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in this sorry boat.

Melodrama aside, we have been eating remarkably well lately because, to my endless happiness, summer fruit and vegetables are finally getting cheap, properly cheap, at the local market. I’ve eaten more fresh fruit in the last two weeks than I have all year and I am loving it. Strawberries for $2 a punnet, and three mangoes for a dollar more than makes up for six months eating uncrisp apples and canned peaches. Not that canned peaches don’t have a special place reserved in my heart, but there is something so exciting about summer fruit.

Vegetables too – I finally got my hands on some of those sugar snap peas that everyone talks about, $1.50 for a big bag (but they cost $4.95 for about 6 beans in the supermarket), a whole bag of red, swollen tomatoes for a dollar, bunches of asparagus for a song, and the top story in my world this week, beetroot has gotten really really cheap again.

Inspired vaguely by an orzotto in Nigella Christmas, I wrapped two large beetroot in tinfoil and roasted them at 200 C for about 45 minutes. While that was happening, I did the usual risotto thing – sauteed onion and garlic in butter, added vermouth, let the arborio rice sizzle (I know, arborio is the least culinarily desirable of the risotto rices but it’s also the cheapest), and ladled in vegetable stock, stirring all the while. I diced up the now soft and roasty beetroot and folded it into the risotto, which promptly turned the whole thing a garish (but pleasing!) pink and made the frozen peas which I’d added seem particularly green in contrast. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: pink goes good with green. A spoonful of sour cream and a sprinkling of basil from the garden finished off this almost ridiculously colourful dinner. Bright? It’s phosphorescent! And delicious too, but any reader of this blog will already know that I am a fan of the beetroot from way back.

We always seem to have a swag of overripe bananas kicking round. And, I’d found myself a very cheap ring cake tin at the Newtown Salvation Army store and was amped to make something in it. I’m not going to even try and present this cake to you as if it’s anything new and revolutionary, but who could possibly turn up their nose at a slice? I based the recipe on the Banana Breakfast Ring in Feast by Nigella Lawson. It’s a little more spongy and springy than your trad banana cake, but still moist and delicious and very simple to make. And is it just me being irrational, or are ring cakes way easier to slice up than normal ones?

Banana Cake

60g butter, melted
3-4 ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
150g brown sugar
50g white sugar
250g flour (I actually used 200g flour and 50g cornflour, but whatevs)
1 t each baking soda and baking powder
2 heaped tablespoons sour cream



Mix everything together gently, bake in a buttered and floured ring tin for about 45 minutes at 180 C. I iced it with a mix of butter, icing sugar and cocoa and it was perfect. Some kind of lemony icing would be equally marvelous, I’m sure. The cake may or may not keep well, it didn’t really sit round long enough for me to find out.

Well, well, well. Wellity wellity wellity. I hope to get another post in before Christmas, it has been quite slow here lately but my excuse about the slow computer still stands. Conversely, time is going so fast. I finish work for the year on the 23rd and then shall commence the annual war with my luggage in that (a) I have to cram everything in and (b) I have to pay exorbitant excess baggage fees on my flight home because they weigh too much, apparently saying bitterly, “Hey lady, it’s Christmas!” doesn’t really help the situation. Even though I’m only just getting home this side of the big day I hope to fit in a ridiculous amount of goodie-baking. New Years will be very quiet for me, and Tim will be in Wellington working through at Starbucks, but we will be hitting the ground running come 2009. In a matter of weeks -admittedly, several weeks- we will be seeing Neil Young and goodness knows who else at the Big Day Out, Arctic Monkeys (that’s right, we bought tickets to their Wellington gig even though they’ll be at Big Day Out), Kings of Leon AND The Who. Oh yes.

I haven’t been on Twitter for a while, once again the slowness of the computer prevents such frivolousities, but here are some random thoughts:

– I heard my neighbour singing the other day. Does this mean they heard me singing Defying Gravity while no-one else was home?

– What did we use for the saying “recharge your batteries” before the advent of electricity? Did people take mini-breaks or book facials because they needed to “stoke their coalrange” or somesuch?

– I wonder if Leonard Cohen ever got called Leotard as a child. Admit it. Now you’re wondering too.

Lentils, Rhubarb, Burghal Wheat and Humidity (Wait! Don’t Run Off!)

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Okay so the title isn’t really selling it much but I’m too brain-weary to come up with a kicky pun.

Sorry to be a complete bore and talk about the weather and the rising price of dairy again, but good grief! Tim had to get up at 5am this morning to go to work at Coffee Bucks, and the sky was be-flashed with lightening and rain was bucketing down. By the time I went to work at noon, it was intensely humid. I mean, I was sweating like a mule carrying a barrel of tequila. So I figured it was safe to wear a dress. After work (where I embarrassingly stuffed up every single invoice I was supposed to enter – there’s a Neil Young song that described my mood perfectly but as I like to keep things clean I won’t tell you which one it is) there were gale force winds abound and everyone was looking at me disapprovingly for wearing so little clothing. I know, “four seasons in one day,” etc, but really! What’s a girl to wear? Get it together, Wellington!

We watched the report on Campbell Live tonight (bless his enthusiastic socks) and it is just unnacceptable (okay, I feel the pain more keenly than some about the lack of butter, but whatevs) that butter can be sold for upwards of $5. You practically need to take out an overdraft to make a bowl of macaroni cheese. A family was interviewed and they are driven to using margarine instead of butter because it’s too expensive. Margarine? What is happening to my country!?

Rant over.

I’ve been experimenting, by the way. With lentils. And rhubarb. Now, I know there are a lot more potentially exciting things I could be experimenting with, but I am totally smitten with making up recipes.
Above: I didn’t make this up. I wish I did though, it’s so head-smackingly simple but also seriously delicious. It is basically pasta, baked with onion, garlic, tomato passata and cheese, and the recipe came from this great Medditeranian Vegetarian cookbook I got for Christmas. My mother is determined to keep me in pink peppercorns, so I thought I’d use some to mildly pungent effect sprinkled over the top, along with what’s left of our dismal parsely plant. We had this for dinner the other night and I can see it becoming a regular fixture.
Above: Now this, I actually did invent and I am rather proud of it. It is a very simple salad and goes as follows:
Raw Zucchini and Carrot Salad (sorry, that’s not a very enticing title)
-2 good sized carrots
-2 zucchinis of the same size
Wash, but do not peel the vegetables, and grate them. Yes, this is a pain, so you might want to employ the nearest child/friend/other half to do it for you.
Mix your orange and green shreds together in a large bowl. Pour over 1 teaspoon of basil oil, then stir thoroughly, and repeat. I only have basil oil because my parents gave me some, so if you don’t have any I’m sure good olive oil and chopped basil will do. Finally, sprinkle over some good salt, stir, sprinkle over a little more and stir again. This is important, it sort of brings the flavours together (or gives it flavour in the first place, if you will.)
Not to talk myself up or anything but I personally find it very edible. I could just sit there and eat a whole bowl full.
Above: Despite Tim being all “when I was a kid we ate what we were given” he is kinda picky about mushrooms (and eggplant!) but Nigella’s mushroom risotto was hoovered down without complaints when I made it for dinner the other night. (Okay, I’ve just made him sound like a whining vacuum cleaner when he’s really so much more appealing than that…) 
Above: This festive burghal wheat salad is from Nigella’s Feast and is part of a menu for a Mezze party (oh, how I long to throw a Mezze party now). Since I pretty much had all the ingredients I thought I’d give it a shot for last night’s dinner. However Tim really wanted to go to this all-you-can-eat restaurant (I said I didn’t want to because my head cold was being unpredictable and I didn’t want to pay for a meal I couldn’t taste) but it was with a sinking heart that I cooked this because I knew nothing could really live up to the imagined wonder of an all-you-can-eat. Which reminded me of that Simpsons episode – Lawyer: “Tell them what happened next, Marge.” Marge: “We drove around looking for another all-you-can-eat restaurant.” Lawyer: “Then what?” Marge: “We went fishing” (sobs) Lawyer: “Does this sound like the actions of a man who’d had all he could eat?”
Ahem, anyway, I used some dried cherries that I got from Santa, and substituted juicy pomegranite seeds for the pomegranite molasses, and walnuts/pinenuts for the pistachios but it was basically the same burghal wheat salad Nigella had in mind. It was also seriously good- fresh and not at all heavy but also somehow deeply flavoured too, and Tim was won over by the meatballs I made to go with.
Above: Well, this is definitely something I’ll be making again. It is from Jill Dew-plee-icks’ New Food (okay, her surname is Dupleix but NCEA Level 2 French isn’t getting me any closer to figuring out how to pronounce it)
Cooked brown lentils (ooh, lentils!) are simmered with onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, and canned tomatoes till they form a richly textured earthy sauce, and natural yoghurt is stirred in before you pile the lot onto cooked pasta. It is SO good and I am disproportionately happy to find another good lentil recipe. Again, why didn’t I think of this? By the way, the yoghurt was homemade- my aunty gave me her yoghurt maker and it is my New. Favourite. Toy.
Above: Rhubarb and Apple Crumble Tartlettes. Does that sound like something you’d want to make? I got the idea for these the other day and since I had all the necessary ingredients I had a go at trying to produce, in food form, the vision that was in my head (I know, I know, they aren’t the bloody Sistine chapel, but this is pretty exciting for me.) And my idea actually worked! They are a triumph! Seriously, I finished making them this morning at 11.00am and by the time I got back to the flat from work at 5.30pm there were only two left. Once I figure out the minor details I can post the recipe here if you like. They are pretty easy to make, even easier if you don’t make your own pastry like I did (I acknowledge the two schools of thought, one being “Life’s more rewarding if you make your own pastry” the other being “Life’s too short…”) And crucially, they taste pretty fantastic. I think I’m drunk on my own power.
Yesterday was seriously humid as well, not the most pleasant weather to be at the Vege market but Tim and I trekked in all the same (eh, he does all the heavy lifting.) Tim went to work and Ange came over, and we watched Chicago. Do you know why? Because I realised that oh-so-smooth Taye Diggs (ie, Benny from Rent – and Mr Black from The Wild Party, if you want to go even further) is the anouncer/piano player guy. Yeah, we are boffins. He certainly makes a fine MC but it’s a shame he didn’t get to sing. Also it’s scary how healthy and alive CZJ looks next to Renee Zellweger, who, all the same, does a stirling job – I can’t even imagine Ashlee Simpson taking the role of Roxie in the West End – ugh! I’d forgotten what a good movie Chicago is, I think its strength lies in the fact that it is so darn SLICK. And John C. Reilly is pretty heartbreaking.
PS – I know I said I’d been experimenting with lentils, and it’s true – I tried cooking up red lentils and using them in a muffin recipe. I decided to call them Lentil-Bran Patties (even though they were actually muffins, this title was mostly to annoy Tim- “But they AREN’T patties!”) but they were remarkably good. A little stodgy, but…yeah, good, and of course, very, very healthy. Another thing to catch a cab back to the lab for…’cause I KNOW you’re all gagging for the secret recipe to my Lentil-Bran Patties.

Anarchy! Revolution, Justice, Screaming for Solution…(and Buttercream)

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I realise, looking back, that the last post was bordering on being unbearably wordy, so kudos to you if you made it to the end without vowing never to return. As anyone who had received one of my emails from England knows, once I start typing about stuff I’m a bit excited about, I find it hard to stop.
In order to appease you, this post is largely made up of pictures. Soothing pictures. (Especially if there are any Generation-Y kids reading, I’ve seen how, bless you, growing up amongst all this technology has stunted your attention spans!) The reason for this is that the Auckland posts took ages to do but in the meantime, dinner kept happening and needs blogging about.

Before I launch into it though, I have news that is potentially exciting to me only! The Levin Performing Arts Society is putting on a production of Rent! Okay, it’s not the damn Nederlander theatre in New York, but Levin is only an hour from Wellington and if it looks like it won’t be entirely rubbish I kinda want to go. It’s odd though, I’ve passed through Levin on the bus before and it doesn’t look like the sort of place that would take on such a production. Shouldn’t be all judgy though, as I know nothing about the company…I just hope the actors are decent. Because – Rent!! Opportunity!


Above: Nuts! When I was up home (for less than 24 hours, can you believe) I made Mum some more of Nigella’s muesli from Feast, which she has taken a real shine to (mercifully, as I gave her some for Christmas. I don’t think she’s just being polite.) It is very plain, simple, and good breakfast fare: Rolled oats and raw nuts, toasted in the oven for a bit, stirred with sultanas and a spoonful of brown sugar. That’s all. You could add whatever dried fruit or seeds you want. It may sound dull, but let me tell you, there is something quietly Zen about making one’s own muesli.


Above: Don’t you feel all warm and wholesome just looking at it?


Above: This may well look like baby food…which is what I suppose risotto is, in a way, baby food for grownups. What I mean, is that it is so mushy and comforting and formless that it is rather like…well I’m not entirely sure what I mean, I just don’t want to insult any Italians that might be roving by. That is, if they aren’t already offended by this dish’s Anglo title of “Cheddar Cheese Risotto.” Now I didn’t actually have any proper cheddar to hand, so I used a pleasantly golden mixture of Emmental, Parmesan, and er…Edam. This came from Nigella Express and we ate it for dinner when we got back from Auckland. Despite some trepidation about whether normal cheese and risotto belonged together, it was seriously fab-o.


Above: While in Auckland, I got a cookbook from Borders by a guy called Vatcharin Bhumichitr, called Healthy Salads From Southeast Asia. It was, apparently, one of Nigella’s top ten books of 1997 – is there indeed a higher recommendation? This book looks stunning, I want to make everything from it. But I started off with this bean salad. Very simple flavours of soy, lime, garlic – not the first things I’d think to pair with beans but simply delicious.


Above: This is a chicken salad from the same book, and let me tell you, this photo doesn’t do it justice (do any of my photos, come to think on it…) This salad was soooo good, I was almost disappointed that I had to share it with Tim.


Above: For some reason, whenever I hear someone say “Ratatouille,” I always want to say “Rata-three-ee” just to be facetious. Anyhow, I had the opportunity to do so when I cooked it for dinner the other night. Tomatoes, capsicums and zuchinni are cheap and plentiful, and after Auckland we really oughta eat some vegetables. So it all worked out rather nicely. I didn’t use a recipe, just kind chopped and stirred and simmered stuff together with tomato passata.

Above: Okay, so there have been salads and the like but I know what people reeeally get excited about is the sweet stuff. It was Waitangi Day on Wednesday, and I don’t know why that equated to butterfly cakes in my mind but that’s what I really wanted to do with my time. I used the recipe from Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess, it couldn’t be easier. I also used these nifty silicone cupcake-holder thingies that I got for Christmas from my godparents, not only are they useful they also suited my colour scheme!


Above: Now, I’m not one of those girls who is all “Pink pink pink pink! Everything must be pink!” But you know as well as I do that it is the only colour right for the buttercream.

You don’t know how hard it has been not to eat the entire lot in one sitting.

As well as that, I made up a cake recipe. That’s right- I’m actually super excited about it, as I have massive admiration for people who just make recipes out of their heads. Now that I’ve started, I want to make more – it is rather intoxicatingly fun. Or weird, depending on how you look at it.


Above: As you can see, I had a pink icing thang going on that day. This cake doesn’t as yet have a name, although I was inspired to ice it pink with walnuts by a description of a cake I read about in Anne of Avonlea (what is it with me and Canadian cakes? “What’s your business in Canada” indeed!) Anyway, the working title is “Coffee Cinnamon Sour Cream Walnut Cake’ although I concede that it is a schmeer cumbersome. I can’t pretend that this is the only cake in the world with these flavourings, but I haven’t seen one recently, and I didn’t use any recipe books.

More importantly, the cake tastes gooood. I got Ange and Tim to give me harsh feedback, but they had nothing but praise. And good thing too, or it would be a bit of a waste of ingredients. Anyway, I might make it a few more times before I settle on the ur-recipe, but trust me: it’s an exhilarating experience, making up a cake recipe. Do you know how finite and precise baking has to be? Do you realise how imprecise and unmathmatical I am?

Okay, so in the manner of Green Day in the Simpsons Movie – “We’ve been playing for three hours now, but we’d just like to take a minute of your time to talk about the environment!” They were booed, and eventually killed. Please hear me out though- it’s a little serious and political, but to be fair, I am so rarely either of these things. For what it’s worth (as it were):

The country village I grew up in – Otaua (always fun to spell out over the phone) – is being threatened by a company called Waste Petroleum Combustion. They want to put massive oil silos – for more than a million litres of oil – and start a treatment plant. Across the road from my parents’ house. Next to a whole swag of farmland. A stone’s throw from a school. I can’t speak on this with too much authority, but as it would happen, we got on the national news show – you can read the story here – but I wanted to say something, to use my blog as a kind of platform. I realise that this will probably only reach a few foodies in Australia and England, and my mother, but then look what happened with the Rufus Wainwright video below. I have mentioned this here before on my blog (if nothing else, I got a really pleasing Rent analogy out of it) but it seems to be getting serious so I thought I might as well mention it again in order to make people aware. I’m not sure what we are going to do about it but my Dad is now the President of the Otaua Village Preservation Society (“We are the village green preservation society…”) which is a promising start. If nothing else, we could try feeding the people of Waste Petroleum Combustion some pink butterfly cakes – if that can’t win someone over, I’m not sure what could.

Damn the man!

“Napoleon, Make Yourself A Dang Quesadilla!”

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This Monday is Wellington Anniversary Day; which I can’t honestly say means too much to me except that I get to neatly evade the worst day of the week. Hoorah! The weather has finally sorted itself out, and is actually being summery. For a while there it was both humid and windy, which is the worst of both worlds; you’re sweating like a mule and your hair’s a disaster.

I have been cooking more goodies out of Nigella Express. Witness:
Above: Sesame Peanut Noodles – the dressing has peanut butter and sesame oil in it and is seriously good. Oh and yes, that is a Nigella Mini Whisk, which I bought on a self-indulgent whim recently, and used to make the dressing. Already I’m wondering how I lived without it…like a true Nigellavangelist. You may have noticed that I am trying very hard to work my word into the common vernacular (surely there are endless possibilities for its use?) but Google hasn’t been very useful for information on how to copyright a word.
With these noodles we had Nigella’s cocktail sausages, which is, admittedly, an incongruous pairing, but as they were cooked with similar flavours – sesame, soy, honey – it actually worked. Unlike the photo, which I won’t post because it showcases how filthy our roasting dish looks…

Above:Two of Tim’s friends stayed for the weekend, and I made us all dinner last night. Nigella’s Quesadillas were very well received (there’s nothing like the smell of melting cheese…) which I served with a rice pilaf and a salad of avocado and roasted cauliflower and capsicum.

Above: I got some cheap avocados at Moore Wilsons…I think I could eat an avocado every single day and never get sick of them. They always taste like a treat, you know?
Above: Something completely impractical and yet somehow necessary: DIY chocolate croissants. They are really far too small to bear the name of croissant in my opinion, but they are so easy and lovely and it is such a novel idea. Thankyou, Nigella. Two ingredients: puff pastry and chocolate. The most difficult thing, for a geometry-challenged gal like myself, was cutting the triangles correctly. In case you were concerned, I made them on the washing machine because…it was the only benchspace we had that morning. By the way am I the only one who thinks the rolled up pastries look not unlike the tiny paper creatures that torment and chase Haku in Spirited Away?

Above: Sorry again for the overexposed photos. I am no Annie Leibovitz. Heck, I’m not even Nigel Barker. But you’d think I could figure out how to make photos people can actually look at…

Back to the wee pastries – they were delicious, and fun, and just as easy to eat as they genuinely were to make.

Above: Sticking with the chocolate theme, I decided to make a cake, for general picking at over the weekend. I used a Nigella recipe from How To Eat which is a fantastic, one-pot melt and mix sort of thing which produces a luscious, moist cake with very little fuss. Note the mini-whisk again, which did a stirling job of amalgamating this darkly rich mixture.
Above: Caution: I baked the mix in two 20cm tins, with the hopes of sandwiching it together with custard buttercream…but they turned out super flat, like chocolate pancakes. Delicious chocolate pancakes, but nonetheless, I recommend just using one tin, like she says in the recipe. It still tasted great though and the buttercream filling that I made plumped it up somewhat.
I have to say we have been eating a lot of what some might call junk over the weekend…which may have something to do with going into town last night…and not going to bed till 4am…

It’s a Lot Better…

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With a lot of butter, to paraphrase the old TV ads. Tim still isn’t back, which makes cooking a little interesting, not because I can’t eat without him (quite the opposite, unfortunately) but because I can’t do a big grocery shop. I’ve moved on from bags of twisties for dinner but am still requiring comfort food it would seem, to wit – starch. Ange and I went to the vege market this morning, and came back via New World Metro, where I purchased about 12 different varieties of carbohydrate (tortillas, egg noodles, arborio rice…okay that’s it really.) I’ll just deviate briefly here to rant about how unbelievably expensive dairy is at the moment! $15 for a kilo of cheese! You could get a kilo of ground almonds for that price (trust me, you can!) In this land of milk and honey, it’s no wonder parents are giving their children coca cola to drink, because the milk is too expensive. Dairy me! (but really.) Don’t even get me started on the insultingly non-summery Wellington weather.

I have finished reading Nigella Express, and despite being a trifle apprehensive at first (it has recieved a mixed reception) I am in love. What a fantastic, practical book, positively brimming with recipe after recipe, perfect for midweek dinner. Everything looks so inspiring and fresh and delicious. There has been a bit of brouhaha (or fooforah?) over her use of canned foods and prepackaged things; I think this is rediculous. Firstly, she explains that she does this because it saves time, secondly she stipulates that you use excellent quality canned stuff, thirdly, she does it so self-deprecatingly that you know she hasn’t completely turned into some kind of person shilling for microwaved meals. Again, this book is so practical I could see myself using it every day of the week. I still haven’t cooked anything from it though – I’m waiting till Tim gets back, whenever that may be.


Above: Sorry the photo of my mushroom risotto is a little psychedelic; I had to borrow Stephan’s camera and for some reason the flash was very intense.

For dinner tonight I made myself Nigella’s Restrained Mushroom Risotto from How To Eat. I had some button mushrooms from the market, some dried porcini and Knorr porcini stock cubes from my aunty Lynn, and some Porcini powder from the lovely Linda. A ‘shroom extravaganza, you could say. I decided in the end to leave out the whole porcini, I thought it might be a little strong, and opted for a more mellow triple-shroom combo of buttons, stock, and powder. Indeed, this risotto would have been titularly restrained, healthful even, were it not for…the mountains of butter I kept stirring through it. I can’t even blame this on Tim’s absense, I am just pathologically drawn towards the stuff it would seem. The risotto tasted incredible though – definitely something I will make again. It was rich, creamy, and intensely flavoursome, and the porcini powder – although essentially glorified dust – gave it a genuine, woodsy kick.

I made a cake yesterday: The Damp Apple and Almond cake from Feast, which is presented as a pudding option for a Passover feast. There were no such celebrations at Casa Hadfield, but the cake was enjoyed all the same. It is gluten-free, incredibly moist, and very easy to make. Not a cheap cake – 8 eggs and 300g ground almonds – but as I’d bought a kilo of them from Moore Wilsons before Christmas (telling myself it was cheaper in the long run) I figured I was halfway there.


Above: Told you it was eggy…Wooden spoon courtesy of my younger brother who got me a bunch for Christmas – I can never have enough wooden spoons. Like I said, this is a very easy cake to make – all you do is cook some apples to mush, then the rest is light stirring. The mixture is very dense, as you could imagine with all those almonds.


Above: The cake was delicious, very grown up tasting and quite filling – it’s not often you’ll see me stopping at one slice.

In other news, Ange and I watched Rent the other day and…she loved it. I could not be happier with this turn of events, indeed it gives me hope that one day Tim will like it too. I also like this movie better than ever – some movies grow worse for repeat viewings but this one actually gets better every time.

“Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful”

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But let me tell you, this cheesecake is delightful.


Above: It worked! Oh how it worked. Nigella has a whole stash of cheesecake recipes that up until now I’d put in the basket labelled “hmm looks pleasantly gratifying but a little too hard and – waterbath! Heck no, sister!” Am now a complete convert.

It shows that you really should trust more in Nigella, when she says not to be put off by the waterbath…well, don’t be. Wrapping the batter-filled tin with foil and placing it in a roasting dish, which I filled with boiling water and then got Tim to ferry precariously to the oven – well it wasn’t that difficult at all. Now I’m looking forward to trying out in the future her chocolate cheesecake, New York cheesecake, apple cheesecake…and maybe taking out shares in Philadelphia cheese.


Above: Just to put it in context, (and because it’s not all about me) I’d better mention that we had a shared dinner on Wednesday night – it was supposed to be a barbeque but it was hosing down with rain, in a non-summery kind of way. Naturally, it was the day that Tim and I picked three weeks ago to go Christmas shopping. What a long day! I was exhausted by the end of it all, (and terrified to look at my bank balance!) We went into the Christmas Grotto (or whatever they are calling it these days) at Kirkcaldie and Staines, and nearly had a hernia at all the blinking lights. There were different ‘concept’ trees everywhere, and Tim and I (okay, mostly Tim) estimated that one tree alone -we checked some price tags- would cost upward of $3000 if you wanted to duplicate it in your home. We also found this music box that – would you believe it – recreated the entire Nutcracker ballet with little cake decoration dolls and scene changes and everything. I dragged Tim through the Cuisine section (“This would be such a thoughtful gift for someone”) before we trudged out into the rain to recommence.

Tim made some sugar free jellies in my old fashioned moulds for dessert on Wednesday. One was a 21st birthday present from my mother’s sister, and the other was something I scavenged out in a second hand shop. He turned them out onto the plate with ease and don’t they look all jewel-like and festive! The cheesecake tasted lovely – very creamy but also tangy with lime, and the chocolate base was very, very moreish.

I made kedgeree for dinner last night, in one of those “Good grief what on earth will we have for dinner” moments that occur sometimes. Kedgeree always reminds me of Dad because he would often cook it for us at home, though I admit it’s not something, to paraphrase Nigella, that you would serve to the ambassador of India. What we ate last night was merely cooked rice with frozen peas, a tin of tuna, some hard boiled eggs and spices stirred through. Still delicious and a good store-cupboard fallback.

Can’t tell you what else I cooked last night because there is a good percentage of my readership for whom it will be a Christmas present! I know something you don’t know…tee hee.