The Twelve Yums of Christmas: Part Two

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without my mum's homemade mince pies.  Notice how she makes them in two sizes, large and small, so you can never argue that you're too full for an extra mince pie?  Now that's clever.

The Twelve Yums of Christmas: Part One

Hello!  Have you missed me?  The past few weeks have been crazy busy, and silly things like WORK and PARTIES have got in the way of blog updates.  To make up for this inattention, I offer you a bumper package (ooh!) of all things food- and Christmas-related.  Yay!

My birthday is a couple of days before Christmas.  This is rubbish, for several reasons (guaranteed bad weather, having to wait all year for presents) but it does mean that the Christmas holidays are extra super-duper fun for me. 

This year my mother put on a traditional birthday tea for me. Complete with egg sandwiches with the crusts cut off, cheese-and-pineapple on sticks, iced gems, party rings, and mandarin-flavoured jelly.

Oh, and champagne.  I don't remember that turning up at my seventh birthday party, but who am I to quibble?

(The daffodils were sent by post from Truro by B's sister.  Aren't they beautiful?  So nice to have a little touch of spring in the middle of deepest darkest December.)

My sister-in-law made cupcakes for pudding, iced in blue, green, pink and purple. 

They were delicious. 

Quick & Easy Cheese Straws

Tis the season to be jolly!  Fa la la la.  Tis also the season to over-indulge on stale mince pies and get drunk on cheap wine in front of your colleagues:  yes indeed, tis the season of the Work Christmas Party!

We were all asked to pitch in for the Christmas party at the tin mine this year, so having sent B on a mission to source Santa hats and adding tacky decorations to the supermarket shopping list, I had just one task left to complete:  party food.

I always find party food a bit tricky.  You just know that fourteen people are already bringing mince pies, so they're off limits.   You could bring carrot sticks and hummous, but let's face it, nobody eats healthy things at parties, and you run the risk of your contribution sitting sadly untouched on the food table at the end of the night.  You could just buy some multi-packs of crisps and call it a day, but some ridiculous alpha-female urge in you wants to rock up with something homemade. 

But this year, I think I have it sussed:  homemade cheese straws.  While these look like you've laboured over them lovingly for hours, they're actually the biggest cheat going, and take all of 30 minutes to throw together and bake.

Ingredients:

2 handfuls grated Parmesan
2 handfuls grated mature Cheddar
1 tsp English mustard powder
1 sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed and unrolled

In a bowl, combine your cheeses and the mustard powder and stir well.

Unroll the pastry sheet onto a lightly floured surface.  Cover half the sheet thickly with grated cheese, then fold the other half of the pastry sheet over the top.  Roll out until about 3mm thick.

Slice the pastry sheet in half, then slice each half into eight or so 1cm-wide slices. 

Butter a baking tray, then, using a fish slice, carefully transfer the straws onto the tray.  (A word to the wise:  if you don't use a fish slice, the cheese will all fall out in transit, and that's annoying.)  Scatter the slices with any leftover cheese, then bake at 200 degrees for about 20 minutes until the pastry is puffed-up and golden.

Hey presto!  Super quick, super easy, and super impressive.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dig out my festive jumper and 'ironic' Santa-shaped earrings. 

Ham Hock Slow-Roasted in Apple Juice

We're lucky enough to live within walking distance of Victoria Park, which means we have the following wonders on our doorstep:

1.)  Coffee at the Pavilion Cafe.

2.)  The Ginger Pig, where, it turns out, you can buy a ham hock for £4.  Yay!

We studded the hock with cloves, then nestled it carefully into the slow cooker, where it got covered with apple juice and surrounded by shallots and garlic.

Slow cooker on, sofa and telly action for us.  After about five hours, the hock looked like this:

SCRUM.  Some roasted parsnips and cabbage completed the meal.

The best thing about a roast hock?  Cold ham for the next couple of days for sandwiches.  A ham, tomato and mustard sandwich takes some beating, I think you'll agree.

Baked Eggs & Celeriac

Happy December!  How many mince pies have you eaten so far?  My tally stands at a very modest one.  I will addressing this in the coming days.

Since the weather has turned so cold that I feel like a chilly penguin from Frozen Planet, my food focus recently has been on hearty, filling dishes that can warm up the long dark evenings.   Baked eggs and celeriac is a recipe that comes from this book - and it's fantastic, for the following reasons:

1.) It uses celeriac.  Thank goodness!  Else what on earth would we do with this weird knobbly vegetable that's such a feature of the winter veg box?

2.)  It uses lots of butter.  Big plus point.

3.)  As the book describes, it's a hearty winter dish that isn't brown and sludgy.

Method (serves 2)

Peel the celeriac and chop into smallish pieces.  Boil until tender, drain and mash with tons of butter, salt and pepper. 

Put the celeriac mash in a baking dish and spread out evenly.  Make four indents in the celeriac, and crack an egg into each.  Sprinkle with a little more pepper, and dot a piece of butter onto each yolk. 

Bake at 180 degrees for 20-25 minutes until the eggs are set and the celeriac is turning slightly golden.

Serve with plenty of hot buttered toast and you have the recipe for a delicious winter's feast.

A Collection of Oddities

Guess what we're having for dinner tonight?  Yep. 

Since this is a repeat recipe (the shame of it!), here are some other things to keep you entertained.  Ever wonder what happened to our chilli plants?

B made chilli oil.

Probably enough to last us through the next five years.

Any idea what this is?

It's a PERSIMMON!  I know, I'd never tried one either.  But they were on sale in Tesco so I took a gamble.  It turns out you can eat them like an apple, skin and all.  They have a soft-ish texture and a mild flavour, kind of similar to melon.  Yum!

And that's your lot today folks...proper service will resume tomorrow!

Roast Chicken & Gravy-Boat Squash

Hurray!  Finally, part two of the November Squash Challenge!  I just know you're on the edge of your seats waiting for the next installment...but you can relax, for lo, it is finally here!

Probably the easiest way to prepare squash is to roast it - no fiddly peeling, or much chopping involved.  Just hack the squash into quarters, scoop out the seeds, baste liberally with olive oil, and you're away.  A word of advice - it always takes longer than you think for the squash to get properly soft and delicious the whole way through.  Reckon on 45 minutes to an hour to get the perfect texture.

If you're so inclined, you could serve the squash with a whole roast chicken.  Why not?

B made up an onion and garlic gravy to go with the chicken, and we found that the squash quarters were the perfect little vessels in which to transport it.   Serve with a crisp green salad and plenty of wine.

Build Your Own Potatoes

Oooh, I do love a good baked potato.  (True fact: a couple of years ago when B went on a week's business trip, I had a baked potato for dinner nearly every night).  And I've perfected the cooking technique: ten minutes or so in the microwave to soften up, before being rolled in olive oil and put in a hottish oven for half an hour, until the insides are fluffy and the skin is just so. 

Oh dear, I've made myself hungry.  I might have a baked potato for my lunch.

I'm open to all kinds of topping for my potatoes, too.  Coleslaw?  Yummy.   Tuna mayonnaise?  Why not!  That old classic, beans and cheese?  Definitely.   So when we opened the fridge and decided to throw all the slightly tired-looking bits and bobs we found there into a pan and call it a potato topping, I was all kinds of on board.

So we stir-fried a leek, some sundried tomatoes, and a chorizo sausage until soft.  Oh, and grated a massive bowl of cheese, of course.

Nom. 

London For Less: Dinner at The Montagu

Apologies for the delay in getting this post up  - it's actually taken me fifteen years to take the photos off my phone, because I fail at technology.  But I finally managed it, so here we are!

What's the second best way to brighten up a dreary November evening?  A fancy dinner.  What's the best, best way?  A fancy dinner ON THE CHEAP.  Or so my friends and I think.  So we had a good hunt on the net to see what goodies were out there for us, and discovered a TopTable deal for The Montagu restaurant in the Hyatt Regency hotel on Portman Square.  Three courses and a pre-dinner bellini for £25?  Sold.

As we arrived at the restaurant and handed in our coats, we clocked the most amazing feature of the restaurant: a live pianist at a grand piano in the corner.  We wondered if she took  requests, and what our fellow diners might think of an acoustic version of Bad Romance. 

The restaurant itself has wide windows looking out over the square, and is set slightly apart from the main bustle of the hotel lobby.  We were given our complimentary cocktails and the menus (titled "Last Minute Menu"...they'd clearly pegged us as voucher vultures from the moment we walked in, but they weren't too snobby about it).  I chose the smoked duck breast to start with:

This was a generous portion of tender duck, served with a sweet/savoury plum compote and a tangle of finely-shredded, crispy-fried onion.

The main courses caused a fair bit of ditheration, as there were delicious-sounding beef and lamb options on the menu, as well as an intriguing leek hotpot number.  But in the end I plumped for the salmon, which came with beurre blanc and chanteray carrots:

The salmon was cooked beautifully and the light sauce kept it moist without detracting from the overall flavour.  We ordered a side dish of potatoes for the table, since the meals were sort of carb-light. 

So far, so lovely - but then came the dessert.  Now, I am a pudding fiend, and dessert is always my favourite part of any dinner.  So I had high hopes of an apple and almond tart with chocolate sorbet, which sounded right up my alley.  But when it came, the pastry case was thick and dry, and the chocolate sorbet had been plonked on top which made it impossible to tell where the pastry finished and the filling began.  I had severe menu envy with the other girls' choice of a white chocolate mousse with cherries. 

We had a glass of wine each, plus the additional potatoes, and the bill for the three of us came in at under £100 - not too shabby for a fancy dinner and the live pianist (yes, I'm still impressed by that).  An excellent beginning to the London for Less series...where will we be road-testing next?

Romanesco & Pinenut Pasta

Yay!  It's the crazy space-age vegetable again!  It makes me so happy when I see its spiky little face in our vegetable box.  I don't know why, but there's just something about it that makes me smile.  (Feel free to now call me the crazy vegetable lady). 

Last time around, we roasted our romanesco, so we wanted to try something different with it this time.  So we steamed it for about ten minutes, then decanted it to a big bowl and stirred in some sundried tomatoes, garlic, and a scattering of pinenuts.  Because we were lazy, we didn't toast the pinenuts, but you could do if you wanted a punchier flavour.

We heaped the vegetables on top of a big bowl of spaghetti and dived in.  The pinenuts provided a welcome crunch against the softness of the tomatoes, and the flavour of the romanesco really shone through, making it a perfect autumn supper.  

Parmesan-Crusted Plaice

Oh.My.Gosh. Hasn't this been the longest week ever?  There has been too much work and not enough play at Plum Towers this week.  But we've been powering ourselves through with some top-notch dinners.

I squeezed in a quick supermarket dash this week and managed to pick up some lovely-looking whole plaice (which, excuse the bragging, cost the princely sum of £1.80.  My bank balance thanks you, Mr Morrisons.)  I'm not sure I've ever cooked plaice before, and I wasn't feeling inventive, so I turned to Delia for help.

She suggested cooking the plaice with a Parmesan and parsley crust, and I wasn't about to argue. 

Delia also suggested serving the fish with a green salad and lemon dressing.  This, clearly, is ridiculous.

Homemade chips?  Much better.

Kale Pesto

My lovely mother gave us a huge bag of fresh kale over the weekend (I'm sure I saw my dad breathe a sigh of relief as we took it away).  We were thinking about maybe using it in a stirfry, or maybe an omelette - nothing too fancy.  But then I had a quiet ten minutes at work and thought I'd google some kale recipes, just for fun (because yes, I do spend all my free time thinking about food.  And indeed a lot of my non-free time too).  And guess what came up on the search?  This thoroughly awesome-sounding recipe.  I just couldn't resist. 

Of course we adapted it a little bit (the original recipe didn't contain any garlic, much to B's horror - he's militantly anti-vampire in his cooking).  But otherwise, we just put everything in a big bowl and went at it with a hand-mixer (see action shot below).

The resulting sauce was thick and incredibly, incredibly green - I felt healthier just looking at it!  It had a crunchier texture than basil pesto, and an earthier, more vegetable-y taste - delicious, and just the thing to brighten up a dull Tuesday  evening.

Old Reliable: Salmon With Wholewheat Noodles & Cabbage

What's your go-to dish? Is there one meal you always make when you're too tired to be inventive, or you can't face the supermarket and need something cupboard/freezer-based?  Ours is definitely the faithful old salmon-veg-noodles combo.  (See here for evidence).  We always have noodles in the cupboard (we're currently experimenting with wholewheat, which are surprisingly yummy) and we bulk-buy frozen salmon fillets whenever we can, since they're super-versatile and can form the basis of pretty much any meal you like. 

This time we marinated the salmon with soy sauce, tamarind paste, and some fresh dill.  Add that to a big pan of noodles, some stirfried cabbage and carrots, and people, you realise why the old reliable recipe is so reliable - because it's always delicious. 

Roasted Squash With Sausage Stuffing

Oh dear. I've been very neglectful of this blog over the last week or so. I've just been super-busy, and haven't had much of a chance to write.....but fear not, because I still made plenty of time to eat.  You know me!

November is the month of the squash.

We ordered a Riverford box of nothing but squashes, and when it arrived, it was a beautiful thing to behold - cute, fat-bellied butternuts, an alien-looking, pale greeny-blue crown prince, a stripey harlequin.  We've set ourselves a challenge to make a different recipe with each squash, so here is effort number one.

Roasted Squash With Sausage Stuffing

First, prepare your squash.  Split in two and scoop out all the seeds and weird stringy bits, so you're left with a good big receptacle for your stuffing.

For the stuffing, we emptied three Lincolnshire sausages out of their skin into a big mixing bowl, and added one chopped onion and a couple of cloves of finely-diced garlic.  Also into the mix went two teaspoons of dried sage, and two of English mustard, plus a good grinding of black pepper (no salt - you'll have enough from the sausage meat).  Mix well.

We then packed the stuffing into the hollowed-out squash, and put them into a low oven (about 160 degrees). 

Give the squash a good hour-and-a-half in the oven - they need to cook right through until soft and delectable, and that can't be rushed.  Pour yourself a large glass of wine and stick on the X Factor while you're waiting. 

Check that the squash is cooked through by testing the flesh with a sharp knife - it should be super-soft.   Serve with a leafy green salad.

Full disclosure:  the squash itself, especially near to the skin, was a bit dry and crumbly.  You could probably get around this by drizzling the squash with olive oil before putting it in the oven, or by making a couple of slits in the sides and popping in a slice of butter.  This should keep the squash lovely and moist, which would be perfect against the savoury juiciness of the stuffing.  

So that's recipe one from the November Squash Challenge!  Keep your eyes peeled for the second installment next week.   You know, just in case you also have a surfeit of bizarre yet beautiful squashes on top of your fridge!  We can't be the only ones!

Rice Pudding

Sometimes you just have to give into the pudding monster. 

Enter - the rice pudding.  Made with full-cream milk (handily left over from the cauliflower cheese), and bucketloads of nutmeg and cinnamon.

I didn't butter the dish, which meant the rice stuck to it as it cooked.  Which was annoying, but it did create a deliciously chewy crust.  Yum.

Cauliflower Cheese

Let me begin this post by saying I hate cauliflower cheese.  Urgh.  Cauliflower!  A vegetable that tastes like feet.  And the sauce!  It's usually thin and milky and doesn't do anything to disguise the taste of cauliflower, which is surely the point!

But let me share a secret with you.  This is honestly the most awesome cauliflower cheese recipe ever.  It tastes of cheese and nothing else.  Thank you, Rick Stein, you are a god. 

(Recipe adapted from the one in this lovely book, which is a favourite on our kitchen shelf.  It's adapted only in the sense that I've tried to cut down on some of the cream usage.  Because I am a killjoy and care about things like cholesterol.)

You need (serves 2):

1 small cauliflower

1 small onion

4 cloves

3/4 pint full-cream milk

1 bay leaf

black peppercorns

1 oz butter

1 oz plain flour

3 oz extra mature cheddar, the strongest you can find, grated

2 tsps English mustard

Firstly, make up the white sauce.  Chop the onion in half, take off the outer layers of skin and stud with the cloves.  Put this in a pan, and pour in the milk.  Add the bayleaf and a handful of black peppercorns.  Warm the pan until the milk is at boiling point, then turn off the heat and allow the pan to sit quietly for the flavours to infuse.

Give the milk about 20 minutes, and then strain into a jug and throw away the onion, bayleaf and peppercorns.   In another pan, melt the butter, add the flour and stir vigorously for about a minute.  Then add the milk, and allow the mixture to come to the boil, stirring all the while to get a smooth, non-lumpy sauce.  Reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

Boil a big pan of water for the cauliflower.  Cut the vegetables into manageable chunks - use the leaves as well, they add a nice bit of colour to the dish.  Put the cauliflower in a colander above the boiling water and steam for 8-10 minutes, until the pieces are almost tender.   Tip the cooked pieces into an ovenproof dish.

Stir the grated cheese and mustard into the milk, then pour over the cauliflower  (you should have enough sauce to cover it all).  Pop the dish under the grill while you set the table and slice some fresh bread to have alongside.  Serve when the top is golden and bubbling.



Scandi Salmon With Cucumber

I've never been to Sweden, but this is what I imagine the Swedes would eat after a hard day's IKEA shopping (and other cultural stereotypes).

For the salmon:  Drizzle two good-sized fillets with lemon juice and olive oil, and a sprinkling of salt and pepper.  Set aside for ten minutes before griddling for about five minutes per side, until the inside of the fish is bright pink and separates into lovely flakes when you prod it.

For the cucumber:  (adapted recipe from this book, one of the few in there that don't call for pigs' ears or marrow-bones)  Dissolve a teaspoonful of sugar in a glug of white wine vinegar.  Add a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard, and enough olive oil to make a thickish mixture.  Stir until thoroughly combined.  Add a sprinkling of salt and pepper, a handful of chopped dill, and a little less of chopped parsley.  Stir again, and slop over a bowlful of sliced cucumbers.  Use the lot - you'll think the cucumbers don't need it, but oh, they do. 

The dressing works beautifully against the coolness of the cucumbers - it's savoury and sweet at the same time, with a bit of a kick from the mustard.  Sooo good.

Smaklig maltid, everyone!  (Thank you, Google!  You make me look so multicultural!)

Flourless Chocolate Cake

Hello!  Happy November!  I know it's cold, dark and depressing, but at least we have delicious food and strong drink to get us through!   Whaddaya say Franklin?

Franklin says yes.

Anyway, it was B's birthday last week, and I was under strict instructions to make him a chocolate birthday cake (the only acceptable flavour of birthday cake, apparently).  Ordinarily I'd just throw together a Victoria sponge with a bit of cocoa powder added to the mix, but this cake was the take-along dessert for a dinner party and I thought a sponge might be a bit...boring. 

So I decided to attempt a Sachertorte.  I'm not sure what I was thinking.

(Recipe from here.)

It was all going so well - I was whisking up egg whites like Mary Berry herself, feeling very competent and in control.  The thick, gooey mixture got poured into the tin, the tin went in the oven, and off I went to the sofa for a bit of West Wing.  Forty-five minutes later, the top looked crunchy, a toothpick came out cleanly - so I took the cake out of the oven and turned it carefully out onto the cooling rack.

The middle fell out of the cake.

The middle fell out in great, uncooked, goopy lumps.

BIG.EPIC.BAKING.FAIL.

I screamed, B ran in, and together we scooped the batter back into the tin, levelled it, and slung it back in the oven.

Once I'd covered the top in icing sugar, you couldn't really tell.  Ahem.

Posh Sausages & Beans

Remember this entry, where I ranted about sausages only coming in packs of six?

Well.

In Tesco this week, I found sausages in packs of ten.  This must be due to one of two reasons.

1.)  My lobbying for more sensible quantities of sausages has triumphed in the face of big business, and the supermarket giants have changed their ways in face of my excellent reasoning;

or....

2.)  Sausages have always been available in packs of ten, and I've just been unobservant all this time.

Anyway, I celebrated this discovery by buying more sausages. 

B was at a late meeting and wasn't sure what time he'd get away, so I wanted a quick and easy dish that I could just stick on the stove and forget about, whilst I caught up on all the TV I can't watch with him (Don't Tell The Bride, Sex & The City repeats).   We had a big bag of kale in the fridge that needed eating, and a quick Google search of sausages + kale revealed this lovely-sounding number (another version of this recipe can be found here.)  I didn't chop the sausages into chunks (honestly, why bother - that's what teeth are for) and I omitted the cream, and it turned into a no-fuss, no-frills dinner, soothingly bland and sufficient stodgy for a winter's evening. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and chuck some more mini Mars Bars into the mouths of the baying trick-or-treat mob outside our door.  The kids along our street don't really have the Hallowe'en spirit, if you ask me.  Half of them aren't even in costume, and they bellow "MONEY OR SWEETS!" before the front door is even halfway open.  Ah, so charming.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

It was B's birthday last week, and I wanted to take him somewhere lovely to celebrate/commiserate this happy/unhappy occasion.  He's been a Heston fan since we visited the Fat Duck (back in the day when 1.) we were dating and he was still trying to impress me; 2.) you could get a reservation for a Friday night less than two years in advance), so a trip to his new London restaurant was likely to score highly on the good wife-o-meter. 

You can only book by telephone for Dinner, and only a month in advance.  I dutifully called on 1st September to reserve our table, and I was glad I did - despite it being a Monday lunchtime, every table in the room was taken.

Dinner is on the ground floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, and if you're lucky enough to get a table by the window, you can look out on a great sweep of Hyde Park.  The room is all heavy, dark wood and polish - elegant if not spectacular, although with the view it has you hardly need any more. 

We went for the set lunch menu, which at £28 for three courses is a more affordable option than a la carte (where main courses go for between £25 - £35, eeks).  For my starter, I chose the lemon salad, which came with slivers of fruit, soft goat's curd, golden raisins and crisp salad leaves.

It was a lovely dish - all perky, sour fruit playing against the mild goat's curd and the crunchy sorrel leaves.  B went for the other starter option, a ragoo of pig's ears, because he is a carnivore and thinks salad is for rabbits. 

My main course was a beautiful piece of cured salmon with beetroot puree (a recipe which dates back to 1670, apparently -how historical!)  The fish was moist and pink on the inside, and flaked fatly against my fork.  It came with a tangle of leaves and a slick of bright, savoury puree - nothing too complicated, which allowed the flavour of the salmon to really shine through.

I should mention, if you're thinking that the portions look a bit of the delicate side, that we had two complimentary platters of crusty bread and salted butter to start with, and these provided all the carbs we needed.  There are side dishes if you're starving, though. 

To finish, we split the two desserts on offer - a prune and tamarind tart (above) and a raspberry pain perdu.  The tart was a sweet pastry case filled with an egg custard-y filling, which wobbled satisfyingly under our spoons.  The pain perdu was crunchy and sweet, with a scoop of coconut and raspberry sorbet on the side.

Complimentary petit fours are a surefire way to win my heart.  We were served adorable little teacups of chocolate mousse, with a biscotti dipper - much more chocolate than mousse, although you'll hear no complaints from me about that. 

A completely non-food-related observation:  the bathroom was magnificent.  All marble floors and dinky little handsoap dispensers and individual towels.   I do love a good bathroom, and this was epic.

After lunch, we walked off our huge meal through Hyde Park, where the leaves were a-whirling and the ducks were a-quacking.  I think it was a pretty good birthday, all in all.

Tinned Peach & Ginger Crumble

This isn't going to be a long post. (Try to contain your disappointment.) It's going to be short because I've got a date with my husband, a whisky-and-ginger nightcap, and a particularly scintillating episode of Match of the Day.   I will be making insightful comments such as, "ooh, isn't he running fast!" and "which team is playing in blue, again?"  What a lucky man B is.

We've got just enough time before MOTD kicks off (ha! a football joke! AMAZING) to talk crumble.

I love me some crumble.

So easy to make and so comforting to eat.   The Holy Grail of winter puddings, I think you'll agree.

Crumble is even better when you don't mess about stewing fruit for the filling and just open a tin instead.  Sophie Grigson says it's OK.   She also says to put ginger in the crumble topping.  This is OK too.  She also says to scatter some pinenuts over the top before baking.  That was a step too far for me. 

The super-sweetness of the tinned peaches works amazingly with the warm, gingery, crunchy topping.  Happy winter eating, everyone.

Naughty But Nice: Takeaway Night

Er. Well, I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.

Do you like how I've taken these photos with an arty iPhone filter to make them look a bit classier?  Hmm.

The Cat was very disappointed not to get a single crispy duck pancake of his own.

Colourful Chicken Curry & Rice

Are your eyes ready for the most colourful bowl of food, like, ever?  They are?  OK then.

The red chicken curry was made in the laziest way possible, by cooking some chicken thighs, a sliced onion, and some garlic with a tin of coconut milk and some ready-made Thai curry paste.  

The yellow rice - by the way, so much prettier than normal rice, don't you think? - is made just by adding a couple of cloves and a teaspoon of turmeric to the pan as the rice cooks. 

This is the ultimate cheer-up food...I defy anyone to be sad when your meal looks as bright as this!

Buttery Lentils With Broccoli and Bacon

Ha ha ha.  Did you see how I tried to disguise the "lentils" in the title above by surrounding them with more delicious-sounding ingredients, like butter and bacon?  That's because I know that any recipe involving lentils inevitably has a certain hemp-sandal, hippie-commune feel to it.  Sigh.   Anyway, I think lentils are yummy, and that's why, when I saw this recipe on the Riverford website, I thought it would be a perfect weekday supper and forced it upon B at the first chance I had.

Action shot!

Enjoy whilst braiding straw into baskets and tending to the family goat.

Spicy Baked Chicken & Roasted Romanesco with Tomatoes

Have you ever seen this vegetable in the supermarket?  Doesn't it look like something that just crash-landed from space?  I love it!  It turns up in our veg box deliveries from time to time, and we've always just treated it like broccoli and thrown it in stirfries.  This time, however, we thought we'd branch out and try something new.

Riverford recommended roasting the romanesco for about twenty-five minutes until soft, and then tossing it with some chopped sundried tomatoes and olives (full recipe here).  We had to improvise (as always, we didn't have all the ingredients we needed, and we are much too lazy to walk to the shop), so we omitted the olives and the breadcrumbs.  The roasted romanesco got covered with a tomato-and-garlic paste that we'd thrown together in a small saucepan, and cooked down until soft.

We wanted an oven-based dish to serve alongside the romanesco, to minimise on effort.  Since we haven't eaten chicken in forever, I decided to make some spicy drumsticks, which are quick to do and big on flavour.

Spicy Chicken Marinade (for 2 people, ie, 4 drumsticks)

2 teaspoons hot smoked paprika

1 teaspoon ground cumin

4 cloves garlic

Olive oil, to coat

Pound the garlic cloves with the spices and then add enough olive oil to make a thick paste.  Place your drumsticks in an ovenproof dish and smother with the marinade.  Leave in the fridge for 30 minutes (or longer, if you have time).

These will take about 30 minutes to cook at 180 degrees.

If you like spiciness, you can serve the leftover marinade in a little pot and dip some bread into it.  This is what Franklin the rabbit would recommend, and he's a bunny of excellent taste. 

Pasta With Spinach & Feta

This was intended to be a spinach and feta tart.  But someone - naming no names, but let's point out that it wasn't me, and it wasn't The Cat either, I'm just saying - forgot to buy pastry.  So, the tart ingredients got jumbled together with some sliced onions and garlic, and mixed into a big bowlful of pasta. 

And very good it was too.