Category: Vegetarian

We’ll Meat Again

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“I don’t feel a house is a home until there are leftovers in the fridge, and Christmas leftovers are my all-time favourite.”

-Nigella Lawson

At times like these Nigella is highly reliable for a quote about food that doesn’t get eaten. She is possibly the only person I can pluck out of the air that fits this description. Having said that, and not surprisingly in a house of five voracious people, there really isn’t that much food left after The Christmas Dinner, so my visions of playing what Jade from ANTM 6 would have called “Leftover Lady” have been somewhat quashed. Nevertheless:

Above: Paprikasburgonya! Although it sounds as though it should be followed by the word Gesundheit, this is actually the name of what I made for Tim and I on Monday night to go with the rest of the sweet, sweet ham, and comes from my lovely Jewish Cooking for Pleasure book. And no, I didn’t pair the kosher with the pointedly non-kosher just to be funny…the opportunity merely presented itself when I discovered I had all the ingredients.

The title doesn’t lie: it was indeed a pleasure to make. Whole, boiled potatoes are cubed and fried till crisp, with capsicum and onions, sprinkled with paprika and swirled with sour cream. Although it sounds stodgy it tasted surprisingly light and used up the rest of the sour cream that went into the rugelach pastry. Pleasingly circular, no?

Last night I thought I’d better use up some of the chicken, which was stirred into penne pasta along with some of the cream cheese (it sort of melts into a sauce), peas, tomatoes, capers, feta and walnuts. Not sure what I was going for, but it certainly tasted alright.

Above: We ate this while watching Coro…which was really just something to occupy our time until Outrageous Fortune. We were all lulled into a soft fug of warm-fuzziness at Loretta being nice and sisterly to Pascalle, and at how adorable Van was being, when we were slapped in the face with Munter’s arrest! Not kind, wise Munter! Not to mention the inevitable fireworks that will ensue at Wolf’s return – oooh he makes me nervous…

I have the day off work today, which means I can have a leisurely breakfast rather than the usual hastily snatched feed before dashing off. Although breakfast isn’t usually my thing – I mean, Weet Bix, those overpriced sawdust-cakes, barely deserve the title of food, and who has time to make stacks of pancakes or blueberry waffles on weekdays, like the supermom in Sweet Valley High “who is often mistaken for the twins’ older sister.” I suppose this attitude stems somewhat from my years at boarding school, where the only options for breakfast were depressing cereal or cold toast with margarine, not butter. They fed us well there, it wasn’t some kind of Dickensian institution, but the breakfasts left a heck of a lot to be desired.

What a rant! Never realised how I felt about the first meal of the day, when all I was trying to say was that I had something nice to eat this morning.

Above: Toast with the most:Nine grain bread, toasted and spread with avocado, linseeds and Maldon sea salt. Worth getting out of bed for!
I have noticed that tons of food bloggers lately are cooking from La Lawson’s new book, Nigella Express. If I were a character in a comic book, there would be wiggly lines above my head surrounding the word COVET!! I had a quick look at it in a bookshop in town the other day, and it looks seriously gorgeous. There aren’t many things in this world that get me all anticipational like the idea of new Nigella material. But, it is also a lesson in restraint (she says, having cooked a million kilos of meat this week) in that I could probably afford to buy it but need to keep money in the bank for rent and bills and the like.
Also, while I am musing indulgently, you may have noticed a new addition to my Pet Sounds – Loveless, the album by My Bloody Valentine. I got this from my younger brother, a guy with relatively impeccable taste in music (he does like some rubbish stuff, but hey, I like Rent) This is my New. Favourite. Album. I listened to it on my iPod at work yesterday, and as soon as it was finished I listened to it again. It is seriously dreamy, and lush, and swirly, and shuffling, and all those other nice words, and slightly Cocteau Twins-esque, and a little difficult to listen to with all the layered guitar- I like music that doesn’t just hand it to you on a plate. I played it for Tim and he didn’t really like it. Now, I am always trying to get Tim to like stuff (haven’t succeeded yet with Rent, but finally managed to convince him that a life without Neil Young is a life wasted) but I had to admit it did sound a bit rough coming out of the computer. Then I tried listening to it this morning through these really good headphones that we have, and it sounded incredible. So, I have concluded that this is an album to listen to by yourself, with headphones, unless you have high class speakers, otherwise it will just sound jarringly messy.
By the way, I seriously apologise for the massively chunky paragraph above, I have tried a million times to enter a break between the separate points, but for some reason Blogger isn’t having a bar of it. It stings the eyes!

Everybody Must Get Sconed

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Before you ask, I didn’t make scones just so I could use that as a title. I am not like the oily Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, who stored up delicate compliments and witticisms in the hopes of being able to drop them in the conversation at some stage…Ah, who am I kidding.

Outrageous Fortune is about to start and I’m blatantly not going to finish this by 9:30 – I guess I will have to dash back in the ads. If Judd doesn’t come back, or worse, if Cheryl pashes Gary I wouldn’t even try reading any further because it probaby won’t be coherent.
There is much to be excited about this week: David Beckham, old Goldenballs himself, is gracing our fair shores and the entire Team Hadfield (plus some ring-ins) are going to see him and LA Galaxy playing the Phoenix team this Saturday. Then on Sunday is the annual Hadfield Christmas Dinner (well, we had one last year, which is as good as a tradition to us fickle youth.)
The menu will run thusly, and you will be finding out about all this later on in the week.
Dinner:
Fully Festive Ham (From Nigella’s Feast)
2 Roast Chickens
Roast potatoes, pumpkin (if I can find someone to chop it for me) and kumara
A big green salad
Boiled peas.
I may attempt bread sauce. Am also toying with the idea of making challah, but don’t want to end up a gibbering wreck and not enjoying myself at all.
Dessert:
Lemon Prosset
Platter of Chocolate Truffles, Rugelach (a Hanukkah treat also from Feast) and Malteaser traybake, a recipe I found on Nigella.com which I am quite wild to try out.
I have already booked my slab o’ piggy from the butcher and will be picking it up on Saturday morning. I need to do a big grocery shop though – especially since Tim and I are still living off what was in our cupboards before we went up home last week. Like Santa, I will be making a list, and checking it twice. Last night’s dinner, by the way, was a vegetable curry with brown rice – the curry consisted of cauliflour, carrot, and parsnip, and although it tasted good the parsnip gave it an odd sweetness.
Above: Vege curry, brown rice, retro plate! To beef it up (ironically), I added some baked cauliflour on the side – it is a Nigella suggestion to dust them with ground cumin, which I didn’t have, so I used some garam masala instead. I prefer cumin, but it is a fine substitution. I realise the word ‘cauliflour’ doesn’t exactly make one’s knees quiver with excitement, but this is a great way of cooking it.

Above: It wasn’t Salute to Cauliflour Day or anything…I just had a lot of the stuff. Just bake florets, dusted in cumin, in a hot oven for about 20 minutes.
The scones I made quickly, without a recipe in fact, not because of some smug sense of self-importance, but because I wanted it done quickly. I do realise that a recipe gives you more chance of success, but I’ve never been one to roll out the dough and stamp out rounds – I prefer it more free-form, which also means you don’t handle the dough so much.
Above: “They’ll scone you when you’re at the breakfast table…” Once baked, the warm scones were eaten while we watched Knocked Up on DVD, a movie which is not for the faint-hearted but seriously, intensely funny.

Outrageous Fortune update: Loretta, don’t give away your baby! Cheryl, don’t go near Gary! And once more, Judd! Come back! Only two more episodes till the season ends which means only two things: things will get even more fraught on the show, and there will be a black hole in our Tuesday evenings till Season 4 starts.

"Once in a while I return to the fold…

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…of people I call my own.” Tim and I have about 20 minutes before we are to jump on a bus to Rotorua for my cousin’s 21st, after which we are going up to my home for a spell. Didn’t get to sleep till 2am last night, because Ange was visiting and Team Hadfield was united once more! Nevermind – we will have alllll the time in the world to sleep on the bus. For anyone not from NZ – find a map, look at where Wellington is and then where Rotorua is – you will see what I mean.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I have been trying to cook purely from what’s in the cupboards, since we are going away. It’s actually a good excercise in restraint. Last night I made the Union Square Nuts from Nigella Bites, which were incredibly moreish and quite beautiful looking, all burnished in varying degrees of gold.


Above: these are maaaarvelous; mixed nuts tossed in a little butter, brown sugar, cayenne pepper, and rosemary before being toasted in the oven.

Keeping with the nutty theme, I made some satay sauce to be poured over brown rice, which was just too overwhelmingly brown to take a photo of – trust me, it didn’t look so good on film. All in all a very unhealthy dinner – turns out I was labouring under a misapprehension that nuts are good for you, apparently the little blighters are densely packed with pure unadulterated fat. How depressing! They are very filling though, Tim and I ended up staggering about in a nut-filled stupor for a while after.

Am very much looking forward to going home, I’m sure I’ll get a chance to cook dinner and put it up here – not to mention a few gratuitous photos of Rupert and Roger the cats.

Farewell to Feta, But Hopefully Not Jethro…

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Thought I’d better post before Outrageous Fortune as it finishes late and looks like a weepie episode tonight. Will Jethro or Van go to prison? I hope not! It has been raining here but it isn’t dark yet, and the quality of the light is bizarre, almost sepia toned, and all the trees around us in the valley have taken on a hallucinogenic green colour. Yes, it sounds odd. I tried taking a photo to show what I mean, but it didn’t come out so well. And yes, I do live in the city but also adjacent to a verdant valley – welcome to New Zealand.

Anyway, what we have been eating lately:


Above: Nigella’s Greekish Lamb Pasta from Forever Summer, with some of its ingredients behind. This is truly delicious, and comfortingly reminiscent of spag bol for Tim (okay, he’s not hard done by in the food stakes but I know he appreciates something recognisable.) It was not, however, the last of the scenery-chewing feta…


Above: Parsnip and Brocolli Soup, which was tonight’s dinner. I didn’t use a recipe for this, just sweated the veges for a bit (such an unpalatable term!) simmered them in some stock and whizzed it up in my food processor with the last chunk of feta. In hindsight I probably should have crumbled it over the soup, I don’t know what I was expecting but whizzed up the flavour just disappeared. Nevertheless the soup was lovely, but really would have benefited from a bucketload of cream. Sigh. Afterwards we had pasta dressed simply with butter and nutmeg so it’s most likely a good thing the soup was relatively austere.

I am by no means on a diet, but after breaking a nail trying on some jeans at a shop the other day I figure it wouldn’t hurt to up the veges and lessen the butter. I’m always reminded, whenever I have moments like these, of that scene from the Simpsons –

Homer: “Marge, how could you let me get so fat?”
Marge: “I’m not the one who put butter in your coffee!!”

Somehow I think Homer and I are kindred spirits.

On a different note, I got an A for my Writ paper (bask!) for which one of my assignments was to write a review of something in the media. I chose Nigella’s How To Eat, which got an A-!! She did not fail me – and more importantly, neither did my lecturer.

Update: Outrageous Fortune has just finished and Jethro is okay! Phew! It is HOSING down here, and the sky is erupting with thunder and lightening. It is nice to go to sleep to though. I used to worry when Tim did midnight shifts at McDonalds in weather like this…I hope it has stopped raining by 5.30am tomorrow when he has to go to work at Starbucks!

"To Huevos Rancheros, and Maya Angelou"

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Yes, I realise referencing Rent in the title of my blog, at the bottom of my blog, and in the latest post of my blog may seem a little excessive, but let me tell you, I didn’t just make Huevos Rancheros for dinner tonight because they appear in a song from this musical. It is the reason why I made it the first time though…

After our weekend of excess I felt like something quick, but packed full of vegetables. I first made Huevos Rancheros from a recipe in The Accidental Vegetarian, which turned out wonderfully, indeed, exactly like the sort of dish you might sing about while doing scissor-kicks on a tabletop in a show of defiance against the “yuppie scum.” (What better way?)

Tonight I made it without a recipe, as I think it is open to interpretation depending what you have in the fridge. My salsa was made of capsicum, onion, fennel, celery, and chili, all of which I simmered together. Once it looks hot enough, carefully break in a couple of eggs, clamp on a lid, and leave a couple of minutes till the hot sauce has cooked the eggs. Genius!

Above: You can’t actually see the softly poached egg under all that salsa but it’s there. I sprinkled chopped coriander over because I think the flavours suit. When we last had this, I made a batch of Nigella’s cornbread to go with which Tim and I ate, buttering each slice as we went and dipping it into the tomato-ey sauce. It was a fantastic, and natural combination but I was looking for something faster and less likely to be ending up buttered. I couldn’t find any rice, so used my usual fall-back-carb of bulghur wheat, which couldn’t be easier, if somewhat unusual paired with this!

From tomorrow I enter my Thoroughly Modern Millie phase as a working girl, however unlike Millie I am not working simply to find a husband. Our student loan payments end this week so from now on I’ll be working 9-5 (what a way to make a living) and paying things like rent (oh how we have come full circle tonight) solely from whatever I earn. I realise that for many, many people this is just life, but for a uni student it is a comparitively big step…

For once: not Nigella.

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Apologies in advance if this post is a little lacklustre – have just watched a lot of telly and am pretty tired.

I have a difficult time staying consistently ‘healthy’ in my eating habits. I’ll do pilates, have some soymilk, and then follow it up with a buttered chocolate bar. Okay, I’m joking…barely. Last night’s dinner was a good enough example of this – salad and lentil soup (healthy) with homemade mince pies (unhealthy.) However, in my opinion, as long as there are lots of vegetables and other good things present, it can’t be too bad.

The lentil soup came from Alison Holst’s Dollars And Sense cookbook. I have no snarky comments to make – it was great soup, very easy and made from stuff I had in the cupboard. Yet another reminder of why this book is worth reading over.
Above: Lentils, vegetables, spices, water – this pretty much cancels out buttery pastry…right?

So taken was I with the beetroot and feta tarts that I thought I would make the pastry shells again and fill them with (much cheaper) mince to make a kind of homespun Big Ben pie, if you will. As you can see I got a little excited with the leftover pastry scraps…

Above: Twinkle, twinkle little pie…These were not just a pretty picture, they tasted rather lovely too. I could only manage one (my pie tin makes four) probably because I’d eaten too much pastry while making them, but Tim snarfed his down. He had my second one for breakfast this morning and said it was the best he’d ever had. Well, I guess anything beats Weet-bix (to which I have a particular aversion.)

Finally, balancing this out was a salad of beans, cucumber, and our old friends feta and walnuts. I didn’t have cucumber so replaced it with fennel, quelle surprise! This recipe comes from the New Zealand cookbook, and is a fabulous combination with a lovely lemony dressing. Tim and I hoovered it up in about ten seconds – it’s very more-ish.
Above: Hopefully everyone isn’t sick of seeing things scattered in feta and walnuts…

Dinner tonight was something I’ve been craving all day- a vast pot of pasta. I don’t know if there is Italian blood coursing through my veins somewhere but few things make me happier than pasta. Of course, creamy cheese-laden pasta dishes are a lot easier to love than the more austere tomato sauce that we had tonight, yet it was still richly flavoured and filling and all those other good things. I based the sauce on a Moroccan recipe in The Accidental Vegetarian, which adds cinnamon, cumin and tumeric to give aromatic depth. I biffed in a handful of red lentils and let them simmer away into nothing. It was delicious! I suppose it didn’t help that I ate half a packet of wine gums while watching America’s Next Top Model (oh the irony!)

Above: Made with canned tomatoes for 60c from Kmart! Tip for the wise: never buy your canned tomatoes from the supermarket, they are much cheaper at Kmart or the Warehouse. By the way…I crumbled some feta over the pasta, as you can probably see, but hastily stirred it through so it wouldn’t be a focal point of this picture.
Right, am off to bed now: being crosseyed and dozy does not make for a sparklingly witty blog.

“My conscience, thou art feta’d…”

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On the one hand: overkill. On the other hand: It’s what Shakespeare would have wanted…

But really, I am going to have to reign it in.

Last night’s dinner used up the last of the pork. I thought there wasn’t much left on the bone, but once I started digging I amassed a sizable pile. To go with I made Feta Bread from The Accidental Vegetarian, and the Red Peppers with Feta and Almonds from Nigella Bites. Except I didn’t have almonds so I used walnuts. I like to get the most out of my luxury items (guess which two things they are this week?) which is why you may notice some repetition in ingredients this week…


Above: Doh! This is the dough after rising for an hour or so – I halved the recipe, and this is our biggest bowl – I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d kept to the original proportions. I don’t know why this photo came out so dark, but I rather like how it looks rather sinister and dark side of the moon-esque…

The recipe was incredibly easy, the only difficult bit was kneading in the feta, mint and olive oil after it rose. I think if I were to make it again, I’d add the oil at the start, as putting it in at the end made the dough completely uncooperative, and nothing would cohere. I eventually managed to bully the dough into incorporating the feta but it looked a bit messy. Luckily it cooked up well and tasted amazing!


Above: The finished product. It tasted wonderful! I think it would be great as part of a ‘bread and dips’ selection.

As I mentioned up there, we had red peppers sprinkled with feta and walnuts to go with. For the two of us, I cut one large red pepper into six – they are still pretty expensive, hence the holding back, as I could eat cooked peppers till the cows come home! This is a very simple recipe – just shove the peppers under the grill for a bit, and that’s about it. I added some sliced fennel for contrast and, well, extra presence of veges. The combination was, not surprisingly, fantastic.


Above: Pretty, too! I imagine this would be fab chopped up and stirred through pasta as well.

After that we all drank wine and beer (prompted by Emma, who had her last exam yesterday) and stayed up yarning till 3am asking all those questions that life throws at you – like, “why are students taxed so bloody much when we earn so little?” and “is it pronounced di-PLOD-oh-cus or dip-lo-DOH-cus?”

Is This A Beetroot I See Before Me…

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After handling the stalks and leaves of a bunch of beetroot yesterday, I came to the conclusion that Shakespeare is trying to tell me something from beyond the grave…Hamlet style! Or perhaps more in the style of Richard III, after all…okay, I’ll stop, I mean I have finished my exam and everything.


Above: Out, damned spot! I guess it makes sense that if beetroot make your hands red, so will their stalks. If there is one thing I enjoy more than a pun it is a visual pun, and as soon as I saw my hands turn so “incarnadine” I knew that somewhere out there, Shakespeare was endorsing my continued delight in misusing his words.
Anyway –

Above:These are the intensely pink stalks of beetroot, which, with the leaves, went into my intensely healthy lunch yesterday: Noodles with Beet Greens from Nigella’s How To Eat. I made this because I had noticed that our beetroot from the market was so, erm, well endowed with stalks, and didn’t want to waste them, even though it had never occured to me to eat them before. A word of caution – apart from the obvious, that they stain – only use the very thin stalks, anything too thick will taste unsurmountably fibrous and woody. So: into boiled soba noodles go the steamed and wilted beet bits, followed by a few Asian flavourings.

Above: Once I got over the fact that like a panda, I was eating shoots and leaves, I really liked this. The greens (and pinks) had a strong silverbeet flavour which went well with the soy sauce I’d put in, and it was satisfyingly filling.
For dinner we had leftover pork, which I augmented with some Beetroot (waste not, want not) and Feta tarts from The Accidental Vegetarian. Well. They are incredible. I simplified the recipe somewhat, making my own pastry – smugly, I didn’t even use a recipe. Well, I think pastry is justifiable to be smug about, but then maybe it’s not – all you do is use flour, half its weight in butter, whizz it up, add a little water…and that’s it!
I got to use some awesome little tart tins that I bought impulsively at the Food Show earlier this year (all the while telling Tim “of course I’ll use them!!”) The very cool thing about them is that the base lifts out of each little indentation to make it easier to lift them out.

Above: I can’t believe something that dinky sprang forth from my hands.
I filled them with a mixture of roast beetroot, parboiled brocolli, feta and walnuts. Ooooooh they were good.
Above: Ooooooh. Words fail me.
I guess it goes without saying that after dinner we watched Outrageous Fortune…

Gentlemen Prefer Blondies

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I bought some more pork. I wasn’t going to, but I thought – My public needs me. However, I made a different recipe to the last, semi-disastrous time, mostly because Marsala is relatively pricey and the Roast Pork Cinghiale uses rather a lot of it. I turned instead to the much simpler Slow Cooked Pork from Nigella Bites, actually a recipe for 12 people (with 9 1/2 kilos of pork!!) so I had to scale it down…a lot. You are supposed to cook it in a low oven overnight, after smearing it with a chilli-garlic-ginger paste, but I just left our comparitively meagre 1.6kg in for about 5, while Tim and I went off to do our exam. Still tender as a woman’s kiss. I presume.

Above: An actual photo of pork! Look, you guys didn’t miss out on much last time because…I still haven’t figured out how to make pork look good on camera. I believe studio lighting and some photoshop might help.
To go with, I made a dish I’ve been eyeing for some time, from The Accidental Vegetarian: Fennel, Asparagus and Roast Potato salad. I fiddled with it slightly, in that I didn’t add the Italian dressing or rocket leaves, but it was amaaaazingly good. The roasted potato gave crunch, the asparagus gave its own brand of magical deliciousness, and the crisp shards of fennel gave cool, fresh contrast, not only to the slight oiliness of the other veges but also to the rich pork.

Above: The reason I am thankful for the vege market.
We ate this while watching The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, which is a pretty amusing film, though I think I prefer the book. I particularly like how the doors on the spaceship open and close with a sigh – and how we caught a glimpse of New Zealand at the end when they are zooming all over the world. Then, as you know, we went and watched the spectacular fireworks, from the top of the Cable Car lookout, which is a 5-10 minute walk from our place. It was a very clear, still night – miraculously – so perfect for such an occasion.
When we got back I was going to make something for dessert but didn’t have the energy. The idea of having to measure flour made me want to weep like a bairn, so I left it till this morning to make…White Chocolate Brownies (or Blondies, if you will.) These come from Nigella’s How to Be A Domestic Goddess and are child’s play to make.
Speaking of which, I found the following amusing:
Above: Zoom in – gorgeous white chocolate.
Above: Zoom Out – Why yes, that is a pack of loo roll and half a roast chicken on our dining table.
Anyway, melted white chocolate and butter goes into beaten eggs and sugar (I used half brown to give it extra fudginess) and flour gets folded in (or flung, in my case – I can never keep the stuff in one place.)

Above: photo by Tim, who is as adept at capturing slow-moving batter as he is with fireworks. Even though you can only see about 1/18 of my hands (okay, 1/3, they’re pretty small) what is visible is very floury and smeary. Imagine That!

Above: The finished blondies. These are great, in that they are no effort to make and yet repay you with such gratifying squidginess. The only thing that I think would improve these is a handful of white chocolate chips or the like in the batter but…I just really like white chocolate (even though there is a vogue for claiming to love the intensely bitter 300% cocoa solids dark chocolate these days.)

No pudding again? Souper…

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First post of November! Wait, it’s November already? Aaargh! Tim and I spent 4 hours at the library today, watching the BBC production of Richard III, which although erring on the side of endless, is really very enjoyable, with lots of fantastic lines. But still: Four Hours. I am drained…

I have restrained myself from making pudding lately, because, well, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to lay off the sugar a little. And boy, do I miss making pudding…sometimes a quartered orange just doesn’t cut it, but it is, as Nigella accurately notes in How To Eat, “something to stave off that moment of loneliness and despondency that always threatens to settle when you realise eating is over for the day.” Though it pains me a little to quote Meatloaf, she took the words right outta my mouth. The words were no doubt covered in butter.

Last night I made another recipe from Nigella.com, Tomato, Red Lentil and Chorizo Soup. I realise that chorizo probably isn’t the thing to eat if one is worrying about having too much pudding, but I figure the inclusion of red lentils and canned tomatoes instantly squashes any of that…At any rate, it was flavoursome and full of veges (and lentils!) and was very easy to make.


Above: Everything looks good in the bowls Ange left at our flat. Thanks, Ange.

Speaking of which, this soup would, I’m sure, be fine if you wanted to take it in a vegetarian direction and leave out the chorizo, or indeed you could replace the chorizo with bacon or somesuch to make it gluten-free. Now that I’ve talked it up, I feel I should provide the recipe, which is…here! Note – I halved it, used canned tomatoes, and didn’t have any capsicums. Still great!
To go with, I used a recipe from Annabel Cooks, a book by a very pleasant NZ cook, which I haven’t really used much because of the…expensive…nature of many of her recipes. I realise that someone so devoted to Nigella can’t throw stones but it’s different with her!! Anyway, Annabel Cooks is all “feta cheese” and “creme fraiche” this and “pine nuts” and “boneless skinless chicken breast” that. I did however find a recipe containing things I had in my cupboard, which was her variation on a dish that I consider to be a Kiwi ”classic” – potato bake.

The main difference in this one is that the potatoes are grated (kindly done by Tim.) It bakes slowly in the oven, ensconced in a mixture of eggs, milk and cheese, and comes out almost like a giant baked rosti, with lots of delicious crunchy bits on top and creamy yielding potato below.

Above: Looks good, right? Also vegetarian and gluten-free…oh what a world we live in.

Tonight’s dinner was a bit dull because I was pretty drained after all that Richard III and hadn’t planned anything exciting (and obv there was no pudding.) More soup though – something from Alyson Gofton’s Flavours cookbook, which is a million times superior to her schilling Watties products for Food in a Minute. Flavours has a good concept, too – each recipe is dedicated to a different flavouring, some familiar, like cocoa, vanilla pods, and ginger, some a little more interesting, like sherry, tumeric, and walnut oil, and some are those “I bought this on a whim and now what?” flavourings like saffron, verjuice and tamarind. I made the Garlic Soup, which although worryingly flatulent in title is nothing more taxing than onion soup with garlic in it. It is easy to make, with a lovely creamy texture – despite no cream – and is good for when you don’t think you have anything in the cupboards.
Above: Someone else: “Why is that photo cut off…let me adjust it a…” Me: “It’s supposed to be creative!” Just as some people can strew throw-pillows about their houses without looking messy, while others just look like they dumped cushions everywhere, well…you guess which category I fall into.
PS: Without wanting to sound like I’m asking for them…Don’t be shy with comments!