One Year On - Chicken and Chorizo Pasta

Well it all began a year ago today and because I a) can't let go just yet and b) still feel guilty that I didn't manage a picture of the very first recipe I tried, I decided to make it again to bring my year full circle.  In fact, I've just realised that if I was to re-cook every recipe that I did over the last year on the same date for the next 12 months, I could avoid the cleaning until 2013.  Now there's a plan....

Actually, it's been quite refreshing today to not have to worry about finding the time to cook something new and photograph and write about it.  When the food plan for today got de-railed by the weather, it didn't matter that what I'd planned for tea was in jeopardy.  Nobody would've cared if I'd not made and blogged about the recipe other than me.

I kept pondering if anyone would care if I skipped a day throughout the last year.  I managed not to with some careful planning and creative thinking at times.  And I've been touched by the number of tweets and emails I've had from people asking if it's really all over.  Although 48,000 page views in just 366 days shows that people are reading the blog, the messages really mean something because it makes me know there are some people out there who actually take the time to read what I write and don't just click a link from Google and then wander off elsewhere when faced by the waffle.

I also spend a lot of time if people are more interested in what I've cooked or what I'm waffling/whining on about on any given day.  Today, the husband gave me perfect blog fodder - which I'll save for the next instalment of my blogging voyage.  I often get asked about if he minds me writing about him.  In truth he does, but he also knows that it's my way of working out my issues with him and laughing at stuff that would otherwise have me down at the doctors looking for narcotics.

366 days on, still need to work on presentation!

What surprised me most was yesterday when I said I'd completed the last of the 366 recipes and posts and there was no more blog and he looked me incredulously and said 'what never ever?  Aren't you going to at least do one a week or something?'  After his comment when I watched Julie and Julia the other day, I was floored that he was happy for me to continue in some way.

Whatever, thank you to everyone who has been with me on this journey.  From the tweets of support, to the bloggers who have let me try and blog about their recipes (in no particular order Sadia, Mike, the two Jules', Dan, Rachel, Fi, Cathryn, Paul and Jaim); Dan Lepard for being the nicest cookbook writer ever and for making my day and following me on Twitter; my Twitter 'Family' (Paul, Kate, Dicky and Maria), Sarah-Jane for letting me coerce her into starting Cake Club; Ewan for letting me join the Olympic Food Challenge; my gorgeous cousin Laura who inspired the blog in the first place; Miss A for keeping me in cracked eggs when it's been a baking day; my second-chief cake tester* who was the best mentor ever; and all other those poor souls who've taken one for the blog and had cake foisted on them (it's a tough job, but someone had to do it).  There's no way I could've made it without you all.

And the biggest thanks of all to my long-suffering husband.  Thank you for betting me that I wouldn't make it - I don't think there's anyone else on this planet that would have made me stick to this challenge so stubbornly as you did.  Thank you for attempting to eat some of the 366 recipes.  I don't thank you for your non-constructive feedback - saying 'I don't like it because I don't like it' is not particularly helpful!  Thank you for putting up with all the washing up - especially when the dishwasher broke right on top of Christmas.  Thank you for moving my cookbooks to the most prominent bookshelf in the house at the weekend and for not burning them as promised.  And thank you for giving me the opportunity to carry on experimenting and writing - even if it is less frequently than before.

So on to the recipe.  Well I enjoyed it just as much as I think I did a year ago when I first tried it.  This time I put creme fraiche in it which made it quite rich.  I also seemed to have masses of pasta - which wasn't bad because I'd not had a proper lunch today (Vanilla Coconut PowerBars do not a good lunch make) but if I make it again, I'd probably drop the pasta to 60g per head - especially as the husband insists on garlic bread with his.  And it definitely needs some green stuff on the side.  I couldn't be faffed to buy rocket which I won't use the rest of this week so salvaged the last tiny bit of my dying basil plant to perch on the top for the picture.

Here's the link to the original recipe which I also neglected to post a year ago.

*Miss A was obviously the first!

BBC Good Food Hidden Vegetable Sauce

"I don't like that.  It's stinky winky!" came the plaintive voice from the dinner table.  I was in the kitchen photographing my own plateful and I knew at that moment that I'd failed.

I'm sure you've guessed from the title that I was trying to fool Miss A into eating vegetables.  It's one of those great bugbears of parenting.  The child who won't eat vegetables.  Thankfully, because I don't have the opportunity to hang round with many other mothers for more than a few minutes - apart from a minute or two's snatched conversation in the Ladies' with equally harrassed looking female colleagues who are also trying to juggle parenting and working - I've not had the misfortune of coming across one of those awfully smug mothers whose child eats every vegetable placed in front of it.

It smells quite nice, actually

Awful person that I am, I almost wept tears of joy when one day I spotted one of my neighbours returning with their child from McDonalds*.  Although deep down I know that Happy Meals are nothing like they were when I was young (I have only read about this in the papers), I was just a little bit smug that Abigail has never been inside the place.  And if I have anything to do with it, won't go in there until she's in her teens.

In fairness, my neighbour is a keen cook and on the rare occasions when we've spent time together, I've nodded sympathetically whilst she bemoaned her own child's adventurous palate.  It's so heartening to hear honesty from another mother.  Women of a certain age and background willing to admit that their child is far from perfect are as rare as hen's teeth.

The closest Miss A comes to eating vegetable is having a bit of lettuce in her mini fajitas.  It's been a trial over this past year to get her to eat meat.  I am proud to say that she no longer has fish fingers or pasta for tea every night and will eat chicken or steak or meatballs with aplomb.  But despite her eating fajitas, she'll religiously pick out every trace of onion and pepper.  It's also difficult to hide them as I make her mini wraps using a pastry cutter from a big tortilla.  They're barely big enough to hold a piece of chicken so the veg is really obvious.

Pretty colours

So tonight's experiment was to make this tomato-based sauce which is rammed solid with carrots, leeks,  peppers, onions and celery.  I thought it would be a good thing to do regularly as I usually end up with various leftovers of all of those rotting slowly in the bottom of my fridge.  In winter I'd throw them in soup but in summer they wilt until I end up feeding them to the dogs.

The sauce is really nice.  Its smell is reminiscent of my grandmother's minestrone and despite processing, it keeps a good texture.  The addition of balsamic gives it a little kick.  Sadly, Miss A didn't like it and although I didn't dare serve it to the husband, he took one sniff and agreed that it was 'stinky winky' and then asked what was in it in his own inimitable style.  The answer did nothing to persuade him it was worth trying.

But it freezes well so I have now stocked up on a great, healthy pasta sauce for me to eat all to myself.  And the grumpy pair can just have plain pasta with cheese.

You can find the original recipe here.

*I wonder what Mrs Sconegate would have to say about that?

Delicious Magazine Red Pesto

Today's recipe is one of those things that's going to end up as something else tomorrow.  I was looking for a recipe for home made chicken nuggets for Miss A.  Not that she's ever eaten a chicken nugget in her life.  Nor that she's ever asked for one.  But reading some other blogs recently about 'fake aways', I thought that I should try some other things out on the family.

We have home made fishfingers (sometimes) and pizza will never come from Dominos again.  Partly because I'm stunned at the expense, but mostly because as someone who hates pizza, I fell in love with Dan Lepard's pizza bases this year and so any future rare pizza treat will most definitely be home made.

Rubbish photo - just proof that I made it really

The chicken nugget recipe I settled on is from Good Food and sees the chicken pieces dipped into red pesto before breadcrumbing. Red pesto is something that's only happened into my fridge once or twice in my life so duly researched a recipe to make my own.  Delicious Magazine had a recipe that I had all the ingredients for - parmesan, pine nuts, fresh parsley, semi-dried tomatoes, garlic and chilli.

The recipe states that it should be chunky rather than completely smooth.  I actually liked that concept because it meant visibility of all the component parts - obvious flecks of parsley, cheese and nuts with cherry red chunks of tomato.  And served for a taste test with pasta tonight, it was really enjoyable and the freshness from the parsley made this a hands down winner over the cloying taste of shop-bought pestos.

It's not very photogenic.  The bowlful of pesto I made looks a bit yucky, but mixed with the pasta, the photo isn't great either so I apologise in advance for this.  However you must try this recipe.  So simple, so fresh, so making it again.

It's not paste-y enough for the chicken nugget enterprise tomorrow so I'll pop it back into the blender with a shade more olive oil.  You can find the recipe here.

Olympic Food Challenge: Swayweih and Kahwa - Oman

Like a lot of my other non-European countries, I new little about Oman before the Olympic Food Challenge began.  It's all been very educational.  I knew it was a Gulf state but would have been hard pressed to pinpoint it straight away on a map.  What surprised me was the cuisine because it seems to be heavily influenced by Indian food despite there being a tract of sea between the two.  I ended up discounting a lot of the recipes because they were things I'd associate with India like Biryani - although the husband might have eaten that.

Coffee wasn't quite thick enough to stand the spoon up

Instead, as Friday is a working from home day, I decided to go with a breakfast option.  Mostly because it is served with Kahwa - or ridiculously sweet coffee, spiked with cardamom.  If there's one thing the Middle Easterners do well, it's coffee.  Dark and thick enough to stand your spoon up in.  Sadly, I had to make do with Colombian (my favourite, but I doubled the quantity of coffee to water) and for someone who doesn't take sugar in her coffee (unless it's a caramel latte and that doesn't count as coffee), it was really enjoyable.

As for the pasta with scrambled eggs, coconut, onion and sugar or Swayweih to give it it's proper name.  Well it was different.  I was expecting horrible.  Onion, coconut, eggs and sugar?  Hardly sweet and sour but neither savoury nor sweet.  But actually, it worked.  Laced with more cardamom (love the stuff although I know it's a bit of a Marmite flavour) and stirred through vermicelli it wasn't half bad and although I polished it off quite quickly, it kept me going from 7am through til 1pm - something I can normally only accomplish if I have a protein bar or get stuck in a meeting at work.

Omani flag

Would I eat it again?  If I'm honest, probably not.  I like my pasta dressed with parmesan.  I like my scrambled egg slightly runny and smothered in Heinz ketchup on top of thick, crusty sourdough toast that's been liberally slathered with salted butter (a once in a blue moon treat).  Onions, sugar and coconut? Not mixed in with my breakfast all at the same time.  But if I ever find myself in Oman and it's on the breakfast menu, I would consider it again.

That said, I think it's probably a good post-run breakfast with plenty of protein and carbs.  The butter will help keep the speed of the sugar release from the white pasta down and the coffee is sure to keep the adrenaline and metabolism pumping for a while after (I wish I'd gone to nutritionist school when I was younger).  You never know, I might just change my mind one day.

You can find the recipe here along with everything you ever wanted to know about Oman.

BBC Good Food Dead Good Spaghetti Carbonara

The worst thing about coming home from holiday is that after a long journey, you can't just relax.  There's no food in the house, and there's a mountain of unpacking, washing and ironing to be done.  In my case, I have to also write an eye-wateringly huge cheque to the local doggery to get my pooches back (two weeks = £408!!).  And then there's the post-holiday diet that needs to be addressed too.

So I'd planned that yesterday and today we'd have two last treats to soften the blow of an epic 12-hour car drive home (without any diversions back via North Berwick or Bempton Cliffs).  But because I'd left the blog on auto-publish and was too plain cream-crackered last night, the posts have come out the wrong way around.  So what we ate for dinner last night has become today's blog.  And today's breakfast is yesterday's post.  People who work in IT (as I do) and use technology?  A sure recipe for failure :o)

A deconstructed ham and cheese sandwich

Tea on the last night of holiday (ie the day we come home) is traditionally Chinese takeaway and I honestly wanted nothing else when we got in.  But I have a blog that needs a new recipe so I went with a simple spaghetti carbonara.  It's something that I've only ever made the husband once, back when he was still boyfriend (if that's the correct term for a 37-year-old) and that was using a tub of fresh sauce from Sainslebobs which I then proceeded to add more ham and cheese to and it still tasted vile.

It was a shame, because he basically lives on ham and cheese sandwiches so it seemed like a perfect addition to his limited eating repetoire.  I never thought about making it from scratch again until a fit of desperation when looking for simple, family friendly recipes for our holiday eating.

I was therefore sold on this recipe for two reasons.  #1 I could pick up the ingredients in an M&S Simply Food on the motorway services on the way home when we stopped for Miss A's babyccino fix.  #2 It had 'Dead Good' in the title, which is usually the sign of a winning recipe from Olive Magazine.  And, as a bonus, it used white wine which meant there was a welcome spare glass at the end of cooking.

Really simple, everyone liked it.  Just a shame that it's so fattening - a whopping 900 cals per serving, excluding garlic bread and wine - so it's definitely off the menu for the foreseeable future.

You can find the recipe here.

Real Spaghetti Bolognaise

Spag Bol is my absolute favourite meal in the world.  I honestly would eat it every day and, provided it was a good recipe, would never tire of it.

I've written before about having to twist my grandad's arm to get him to let my mum make it.  Eventually, we got to a point where he actually made it for the family.  He used to laugh at the recipe I wrote out for him because it included 'two squirts of garlic' in the ingredient list.  We used to use Gia Garlic Puree in a tube (in fact, I still use it sometimes) but because he wasn't a 'throw it all in the pot and see how it turns out' cook, he could never quite figure out how much two squirts was.  I think it's because he was an accountant and everything had to be perfectly counted in his world.

The husband is very much like him.  He used to make spag bol when I first met him.  Whereas I'm very much of the tweak-as-you-go school, he mechanicially made his recipe time after time with no variation.

Spag bol.  On a plate.  Sorted!

Of course, this caused me trouble because no two spag bols I produced ever tasted the same.  Even if I use all the same ingredients and am consistent with my quantities of mince, onions and tomatoes; the twiddly bits (Bovril cubes, Lea and Perrins, bacon, carrots, celery, mushrooms, wine, herbs) may or may not make an appearance - and in varying quantities each time.  For me, it always tasted somewhere between okay and amazing because I adore spag bol.  But the hubby couldn't deal with the variance.

When I started this blog, I wanted to find the ultimate spag bol recipe that I would promise to myself I'd never tweak.  But I've not been brave enough to make it for him again until now.  Miss A and I eat it sometimes but since I found a recipe for meatballs he loves (Waitrose meatballs with Rachel Allen's pasta sauce - homemade of course!), he refuses to eat spag bol.

Given that we're on holiday and I have decided that I will only be cooking one meal each night for the duration, he is going to have to eat up and shut up for once.  I may ask his opinion but sometimes his honesty is a little brutal (I've learned never to ask if my bum looks big in anything - you can read some of his critical feedback here).

I found this recipe by Googling for 'The Ultimate Spaghetti Bolognese'.  This comes straight from a real, genuine Italian chef who is unimpressed by various English variations on a classic dish.  I find that amusing because my understanding was that Italians don't really eat Spag Bol.  Instead, eating a similar meat ragu which comes with something other than spaghetti (can't remember exactly what).  But whatever, I have to give it a whirl if you'll pardon the pun.

Sorry for yet another pre-written blog post - don't worry, I will update them all soon!

In the meantime, if you want to try it yourself, you can find the recipe here.

Updated: 20th July 2012 @ 15:21

Well the verdict was 'It's just spag bol'.  It wasn't a bad spag bol.  For someone who loves spag bol as much as I do, it was very edible.  It just didn't set my world on fire, thus leaving me still bereft of the ultimate go-to spag bol recipe.

There will definitely be further research in this area in the future when I start my new blog and I'm not having to post every single day.  I know that a combination of beef and pork or veal mince is supposed to work very well so I have some options to try.

But I did achieve my ultimate goal of ensuring that all three family members ate the same thing at the same time with this recipe.  Job done.

Updated: Jo Pratt's Chunky Sausage and Tomato Pasta

The seven year itch begins today.  In an attempt to ward it off and remind us that we are a family, I'm enforcing a mutual dinner on everyone this evening.  If you've read other posts on this blog, you'll know I often cook three different dinners each night.  About the only time hubs and I eat the same thing is on a Sunday when we have Chicken Tikka and Naan (a winning combination of recipes discovered whilst writing this blog) or when he persuades me to let him have takeaway.

I said before we came on holiday that we'd eat as a family every night.  So far we've had two dinners, both of which have just been me and hubs due to Miss A having her daily pattern disrupted and being too fractious at dinnertime to sit and eat with the grown ups.  So tonight, we will all be trying this recipe.  I'd pre-written this post as a placeholder in case we had no internet.  We have a sketchy signal so I've taken the opportunity to update the pre-written blog and will hopefully post the verdict on Monday evening.  Unless of course hubs has secretly arranged to whisk me off somewhere fancy for dinner.  Like the North Berwick Fish Bar if I'm really lucky...

The recipe I'm planning on making can be found here

Updated 20th June 2012 @ 07:55

Quick update.  Everyone ate it and everyone loved it.  It actually didn't taste that much different to my normal recipe but it had a lot less sauce and I preferred it that way.  Normally my sauce is made from a mix of pre made tomato and basil pasta sauce, some pesto and tin of chopped tomatoes and some caramelised onions.

The only downside was that there wasn't much sausage.  I used half the pasta as I was only cooking for three and the four stated sausages which was about right for two adults.  If the lack of sausages in the stated meal for four is due to cost then I'd question the use of wine and fresh basil in the recipe at the expense of a filling meal.  But then I'm probably just greedy!  Definitely a make again for the family once the post holiday diet is over.

BBC Good Food (Beef) Stroganoff with Herby Pasta

There was a small flaw in my plan for tonight's recipe.  I forgot to defrost the beef and so it became Mushroom Stroganoff with herby pasta.  Not much to say about this one other than the sauce was really tasty; it worked really well with just mushrooms and I think it's even better with pasta than with rice (which is what my mum always used to serve stroganoff with).  If I'm honest, I welcomed the lack of meat too.

A good store cupboard meal.  You can find the recipe here.

And you can breathe a sigh of relief that for once, I'm not going to waffle.  Goodnight.

It tastes far better than I presented it!

BBC Spaghetti Pomodoro with Chilli Prawns

Do you believe in horoscopes?  I do and I don't.  The rational part of me wonders how the same set of rules can apply to one-twelfth of the population?  And can how different astrologers see different things in the same set of stars? The romantic part of me wants to believe in fate and destiny and that sometimes a higher power is in operation.

There's one particular astrologer whose monthly forecasts I read.  She gives these really long, comprehensive insights with each horoscope and sometimes they're so delightfully vague in over the length that she does indeed cater for pretty much anything happening to anyone in some veiled comment or another.  I tend to read them when I'm having a bit of a navel-gazing time in my life.  Introspective and uncertainty always drives me to look for someone else to give me the answer.

My other foible is that I tend to read them towards the end of the month so I can say 'Oh so that's why xyz happened' rather than at the start of the month when she'll say something that I interpret to mean I'm going to win the lottery when in fact at the end of the month, I actually just found a forgotten tenner stuffed in the pocket of my winter coat or something similar (this month I did win £3.10 on the Euromillions though).

Not quite Pimms jelly

Of course, this month she said that I was due the best weekend of the current decade, ever, over the weekend of 12-13th May.  Well excuse me, but if that was my best weekend of the decade then I'm in for a bloody bumpy ride up until 2020!  But equally, she was right about a career decision that I'd been pressured to make.  She suggested waiting for the right thing to come along.  I chose not to do as I was told and wait.  All without reading the horoscope first so I like to think she's right.  About me and the other half billion Capricorns in the world.

One other thing she mentioned was the current Venus retrograde which would put a kibosh on some of my creative plans. And yes, life has now tampered with my blog plans for today and tomorrow.  So instead of a nice Pimms jelly, planned in advance of the jubilee celebrations and with the hot weather we had been having in mind, I've now had to bring you a pretty pleasant summer pasta dish from the BBC Good Food website at the last minute.  Fresh, storecupboard stuff.  Quick and easy for a last minute dish after a long day at work.  And healthy too.

I also blame the Venus retrograde for compromising my plans to make my jubilee bundt tomorrow.  An action-packed day of work followed by a Jubilee party at Miss A's nursery (I'd intended to make cake for that too but the week has just vanished) and a trip to the doggie doctors in the evening has left me severely short on time and inspiration.  Now wondering what the June horrorscope will hold but of course, I can't look for another thirty days.

Recipe for the prawn dish is here

Leith's Spaghetti with Courgettes and Chilli

I had a couple of moments of madness recently.  The first was agreeing to the husband's request to extend our summer holiday to two weeks.  The second was signing up for the Olympic Food Challenge.  Tonight, I'll talk about the holiday problem.  I'll talk more about the OFC later this week (in the meantime, check out my OFC page and the official OFC website)

We'd booked a week in North Berwick.  Hubs is a keen wildlife photographer and we regularly visit north-east England and south-east Scotland this time of year to see the see the sea-bird breeding spectacles.  This year's cottage overlooks Bass Rock which is one of the Seven Great Nature Wonders of the World  He's very excited about that.  Pre-child we also used to spend a separate week in the Highlands to see the ospreys that nest around the Cairngorms.  Never ever two consecutive weeks.  I worry that we'll end up getting divorced after so much time in close proximity.  Even our honeymoon was only ten days long.

Not only do we have to spend so much time in each other's company, but we also have to contend with the demands of the 366 Recipe Challenge.  It's challenging enough doing this in my own kitchen, let alone someone else's.  And the second week, the nearest supermarket is at least 20 miles away.  And my foraging credentials suck (see this post) so I need to be prepared.

I figured that I'd make a list of twenty simple recipes that could be easily prepared with the minimum of ingredients and fuss.  That would be all well and good, if I had a family that wasn't 'discerning' in what they eat.  Miss A has now fixated on fish fingers, meatballs, and malt loaf - in addition to her favoured diet of bread, Babybel cheese and fruit.  The husband still only eats chicken.  Or ham egg and chips.  This isn't going to be easy.

The non-veggie version...

So far, my list runs to James Martin's Chicken Club with Bacon Mayonnaise.  Yes, that's right.  I'm going to attempt homemade mayonnaise without a food processor.  I will also be packing my loaf tin so that I can maybe make a loaf or two (recipes still to be sourced) and maybe my sandwich tins so I can make a cake - it is holiday, after all.  So that leaves me with about fifteen more recipes to find.  Or they'll be eating fish finger sandwiches every day so I can try something new by myself.

During an idle attempt to come up with some easy recipes, I scoured my copy of Leith's Simple Food.  It's got some recipes that I could use.  If only the husband didn't mind spicy things or meals with 'grassy bits' in.  As I said.  He's 'discerning'.

In doing so, I happened across this little recipe which is a great store cupboard tea.  Although I keep my courgettes and creme fraiche in the fridge.  But you get my drift.

Being even more lazy than the book gives the reader credit for, I forewent the expense of buying a whole pack of chillies when I only needed one and used chilli oil instead.  As this meant that there wasn't red in the dish to contrast with the insipid whiteness of the pasta and the bright green of the courgettes, I then topped it with some crispy prosciutto (thanks for making the decision for me, Twitter!).  The recipe suggests Parmesan shavings as it's a veggie recipe, but the colour and flavour of the crispy ham worked just as well.

One other minor change is that they say to drain the pasta really well.  I found it hard to then stir the courgette mixture through the pasta as it was dry itself.  So I used a top tip I picked up from Jamie O.  Adding a little of the cooking water to the mix to ease the combination of veg and pasta.

All in all, another really easy tea that I love.  I pretty much love anything that comes with spaghetti and this summery dish will help me get my fix rather than a huge bloaty bowl of spag bol or meatballs.  On the cook again list.

Recipe - Serves 2 (adapted from Leith's Simple Cookery)

• 200g dried spaghetti
• 1 large courgette, grated
• 1 tbsp chilli olive oil 
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 2 tbsp low fat creme fraiche
• 1 slice of prosciutto fried or baked until crispy OR parmesan shavings

1. Cook the spaghetti according to the packet instructions.
2. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a frying pan over a low heat and fry the garlic for thirty seconds, taking care not to burn it (which I invariably do and then have to start again!)
3. Add the courgette and cook for a few minutes.  Take care to keep it moving round the pan or it will stick and burn (and you'll have to start again - see step 2!)
4. Add the creme fraiche and mix thoroughly.
5. Reserve 2 tbsp of the pasta water then drain the spaghetti.  Return it to the saucepan and add the courgette mixture.  Add a little of the pasta water at a time to ease combining the two.
6. Divide between two serving dishes and top with either the prosciutto or the Parmesan

Wild Garlic Pesto

I am a crap singer.  So bad, that I'm only allowed to sing in the car.  When I'm on my own.  Even Miss A has learned to say 'No more singing, Mummy'.  That hurts the most because when she was tiny, I used to get away with singing to her lots.  Especially when I was trying to get her to sleep.  Although now I sit here and think about it, maybe she was just pretending to go to sleep when I murdered various lullabies as a way of getting me to shut up because if she cried, I only sang more thinking it would calm her down.

She wasn't this clean when we'd finished!

Since I was a child, I'd wished that life could be just like in the musicals where people just randomly burst into song in the middle of the day.  Singing and dancing (just as badly as I sing) can lift my mood.  My car is filled with CDs I've made to suit my mood and I'm often seen sat at traffic lights belting out some tune or another.  One day I was stuck in traffic in my convertible (this was years ago when I could drive impractical cars) and started singing and bopping along to some tune or another and a drop-dead-gorgeous guy pulled up in a convertible next to me and started singing and bopping along with me.  Of course, if life really was like a musical, I'd be married to him now.  Sadly not.

In fact, if I was to liken myself to a TV character, I'd be like Ally McBeal or JD from Scrubs.  Things happen and my reaction is to sing a song in my head.  I'm sure at meetings people think I must be mad because someone will say something and I start grinning to myself.  Because I've turned on my inner jukebox and started up a tune appropriate to the situation.

If I was singing a song right now, it would be The Great Pretender.  Because a couple of days ago, I thought I'd arrived as a real foodie as I went off foraging for wild garlic.  That's what real foodies do.  They don't just tap their shopping list into their Ocado Android App.  They have food as nature intended - not wrapped in sterile shrink wrap.

Random greenery - I'm sure there's garlic there somewhere

An old colleague mentioned on Facebook that he'd been making wild garlic pesto and it was great.  There's an abundance of wild garlic round where I live every year and it always smells amazing (provided you like garlic) but I've never been brave enough to pick it before in case I was picking the wrong thing.  A quick bit of advice from B and off I went with Miss A and doggie number 1 to find some wild garlic of my very own.

After a trek through a very muddy wood, we alighted on a bountiful patch and with Miss A's help, I soon had a carrier bag-ful.  I bought it home, picked it over, washed it and left it to drain in the sink.  The husband appears and asks why I've been out picking weeds.  I inform him that it's wild garlic.  He's heard me comment on plenty of dog walks as to what's making the smell and I've even shown him the plants.  He doesn't believe me and informs me that I'm stupid and have probably picked deadly nightshade and will end up killing myself.

In my slightly paranoid state, I'd tweeted B a picture asking him to confirm that I was about to pick the right thing.  He responded saying that he thought so.  On second look at the picture, I noted that it also showed bluebells and what I know as 'Sweethearts' - those sticky plants that you pick and then stick to someone's back and laugh raucously when they don't realise how daft they look with a weed hanging from their jumper (of course I only did this when I was about six - honest!).

I then Googled some images.  These were mildly reassuring until B tweeted while I was making my pesto to say I should crush a stem and it should smell of garlic.  It was only a very faint smell, but by now my paranoia was overriding common sense.

Anyway, to cut another long blog post short, I persisted and whilst heating the pesto with some pasta finally got a decent garlic smell from it.  Reassured, I sat down to eat, only to find that it tasted like pasta tossed in freshly cut grass clippings.  No garlic, no taste from the parmesan or walnuts.  Very disappointing.

Wild garlic pesto and tagliatelle

So obviously I'm not a real foodie, just A Great Pretender.  See what I did there?  Or maybe my palate has just been ruined by years of over-flavoured processed food and I am just blind to the delicate flavour of wild grass clippings.  Sorry, wild garlic.

Don't take my word for it.  I'm just one person in a sea of foodies who have all been jumping up and down raving about this delicacy.  I have a huge jar of the stuff so will try some other things with it over the next week or two.  Maybe it will be better when it's had chance to mature for a few days.  Or maybe I really have picked the wrong thing.  In which case, I'll never find it out if it tastes better when mature and this may well be the last blog post I ever write.  Keep your fingers crossed for me!

So if you want to test your foodie credentials, hop over to the River Cottage website and check out the recipe I used.

Olive Magazine Spaghetti Puttanesca

The last two days have been yet another two very busy days in the crazy life that is mine.  I met two new and very different groups of people - both sets of whom got bored to tears with the story of how my blog came about (and my tendency to waffle endlessly when writing - also demonstrated verbally whilst describing the blog!)

Freestanding fork

First set of people were work colleagues who were on a Presentation Skills course.  I've been on several variations of this course over the years with my previous history as a trainer so for me it was a refresher more than anything.  I did, however, learn two new things which are kind of food related and will hopefully stick.  The first is that apparently there is an onion-related theme running throughout the Shrek films.  I've only seen Shrek 1 twice and Shrek 2 once.  I didn't notice this so I know what Miss A and I will be doing this weekend.

Second thing was SUMO.  Food related, because I am becoming rather sumo-shaped from all this over-indulgence and a lack of running thanks to the hacking cough that's still plaguing me.  More appropriate than the fat-bloke reference however (and no, I don't wear black nappies!), was the meaning of the acronym.  Shut Up and Move On.  I'm sure you're thinking that right now!

On to the second group of people.  The Bath Clandestine Cake Club.  What a lovely bunch of people!  Held in a secret location near Bath, with people whose names I can't reveal because I'd have to kill myself, the first meeting of cake club was a great event.  Of course, what's not to like about people that like cake?  Everyone was really friendly.  I felt a bit bad with my over-showy raspberry and lime cake with Swiss meringue buttercream (I got carried away - see yesterday's blog for the proof) and that was why I bored them all to tears about my blog in an attempt to justify getting carried away.

Aside from meeting lovely people, I also ate some fantastic cake.  Most memorable for me were a blueberry cake with cream cheese frosting and a malt vinegar cake (yep, that's right!).  I was also in awe of a beautiful cherry and almond cake where the cherries had been dusted in gold glitter - that one's still in my cake tin, awaiting consumption.

Note the cut off head to preserve Clandestine-ness

The meeting was held in a public place (hopefully I won't get shot at dawn for revealing this) and some people who happened to be nearby came to see what we were up to.  We gave one lovely gent some cake to take home to his wife of 48 years and he very generously made a donation to charity after he wouldn't take the cake away as a gift from the bakers.

A huge thanks to SJ for organising this and I'm really looking forward to the next one!

On the downside, I spent most of yesterday mainlining coffee (I don't know why I do this when I'm on a course) and then after no tea last night, I consumed an exponential amount of sugar.  Consequently, with a 20-woodbines-a-day smokers cough, I was still awake at 3am worrying about the Victoria sponge I'd planned to bake at 5.30am to cover the blog and the subject of my final presentation.

By 4am I'd managed to replan my final presentation to be about how I justify things economically (see the following post where I've talked about this before), thus ensuring that Short and Sweet made an appearance as a visual aid.  I then hit BBC Good Food to find a store cupboard recipe and came back with this one.

I bought a tin of anchovies three years ago to make some salsa verde to go with steak and homemade chips.  I can't remember why I didn't make the sauce, but that tin of hairy little fish has been staring me in the face every time I open my cupboard ever since.  Tonight it was opened, and I finally braved eating the little blighters.

While the sauce was cooking, I honestly didn't think I'd like it.  The flavour just seemed completely wrong and I couldn't work out what was missing.  There was saltiness from the very finely chopped anchovies, a little more from the olives.  A weird tang from the capers. Heat from the chilli flakes.  But I couldn't put my finger on what was missing.  So I soldiered on, fearing I'd end up with a rubbish tea after a long sleepless night and an even longer day.  The final step was to mix in parsley with the spaghetti and sauce.  And bang.  There was the missing ingredient.

I still continue to be amazed by how much just one element can make or break a dish.  Sometimes you can leave something out and it doesn't make much difference.  But for me, the parsley was an absolute must.

Bringing me nicely back to another point I picked up about planning.  Must, Could, Should.  I think it has a life application and definitely relates to cookery.  I was going with that theme for my presentation on the Vicky Sponge.  You must use equal weights of eggs, butter, self raising flour and sugar.  You must use jam to sandwich it together.  You should use vanilla to lift the flavour of the sponge.  You could use fresh cream or butter cream.  But it's not essential (and frowned on by the WI).

So my Must, Could, Should for the next week is as follows.  I must eat more healthily.  I should keep my promise to bake my mentor a banana cake - seeing as how he asked so nicely about three weeks ago.  I could try to make two or less Dan Lepard recipes.  But I'm not making any promises.

In the meantime, I'm loving the puttanesca and will be using this as a quick tea for me on many an occasion in the future.  You can find the recipe here.

Pappardelle with Prawns and Samphire

Years ago, if I'd had to pick a cookery show to watch, anything with Rick Stein would've been way down the list.  I always used to think of him as 'the guy who only ever cooks fish' and whilst that's probably still quite true, having watched clips of his stuff on Saturday Kitchen, he's quite grown on me to the point that I have one of his books in my Amazon shopping basket.  Of course, it's still unpurchased as there's always something else I'd rather buy, but at least I can pretend I'm being adventurous.

The first time he hooked me into something was actually with a fish dish.  But this one had samphire in it. For some reason I became a bit fixated on the idea of samphire - I'm really not sure why and I certainly don't remember what he cooked it with - but it was one of those things that I just had to have.  Of course, living nowhere near the sea any more and what with it being seasonal local produce, the chance of getting some has never arisen in the intervening years.  Until Friday.  When I found myself with a generous handful of samphire and no clue what to do with it.

I have no idea how long it keeps for so I felt bound to try and cook with it within a day or two.  Ewan Mitchell, blogger at Tonight's Menu and creator of the Olympic Food Challenge, suggested a recipe that he recently made with Lemon Sole.  That's another ingredient on my hit list before the end of the year, but living in land-locked Wiltshire fresh fish at short notice is a bit of a challenge at times.  Not having a local fishmongers, I ended up settling on making something up with prawns based on a little bit of Googling about samphire.  And actually, it wasn't all that bad.

Lots of green, healthy looking stuff (swimming in butter!)

For the second day in a row, I feel quite proud that I've eaten something seasonal - even if the produce isn't exactly local with it.  But at least it's not been imported thousands of miles on a freight plane.

Samphire is touted as 'the asparagus of the sea' and it's supposed to have a really salty taste.  I have to admit that I was expecting it to taste like a mouthful of seawater, but actually, it's not that salty.  Or maybe my palate has just become accustomed to too much salt???  From the reading I did, people recommended to not salt the dish.  In this case, I would highly recommend seasoning the pasta a little before finishing as the large, flat ribbons of pasta can be quite bland if picked up sans samphire.  I normally only buy unsalted butter, but for this I'd probably go for slightly salted and then add lashings of pepper to the pasta before serving.

To give flavour, I added some lazy chillies for some heat, garlic for flavour and then sprinkled the top with chopped parsley and served with lemon to squeeze over.  I don't know if this is a sensible seasoning combination, but I liked it.  The samphire has a slightly bitter tang to it so there seemed to be a good range in the dish - bitter, salty, sour, spicy and sweet from the prawns.  If nobody else likes this dish, I know one person who would - my wonderful Grandma who would've been 83 today.  There's nobody else I would've rather had dinner with tonight.

Serves 2

• 250g pappardelle pasta
• 200g king prawns
• 25g slightly salted butter
• handful samphire
• 1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped or 1tsp lazy chillies
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• small handful parsley, finely chopped
• lemon wedges to serve

1. Cook the pasta according to the package instructions.  Drain and return to the pan, tossing in half of the butter and season with some black pepper.  Keep warm by placing a lid over the saucepan.
2. Wash the samphire and cook in boiling water for three minutes.
3. Whilst the samphire is cooking, melt the butter in a frying pan over a medium heat and cook the garlic and prawns until they just start to turn pink and the garlic softens.  Drain the samphire.
4. Add the chilli, samphire and pasta and to the prawns and warm for a couple of minutes, ensuring everything is well combined.  
5. Serve sprinkled with the chopped parsley and lemon wedges.

BBC Good Food Spaghetti with Tuna, Capers and Chilli

I think the reason the husband stopped cooking for me stems back to the very early days of our relationship.  I've mentioned before how I was bowled over by him wanting to cook for me on our first date and was touched that he made the effort to cook from scratch (well he used shop bought pesto) rather than just getting and M&S ready meal.

A few weeks later he offered to cook me his signature dish.  I was impressed.  It's not to say I'd never dated anyone who could cook before - my first long term boyfriend was a whizz in the kitchen, but only at about 3am as he operates on a different time zone to the rest of the UK - but to be offered a signature dish was upping the ante a little.  Or so I thought.  The dish was hot pasta with mayonnaise, chicken, tuna, bacon and sweetcorn stirred in.  I am totally okay with people telling me I'm fussy and ungrateful over this, but I'm sorry, I just didn't like it.

See I have a problem with the idea of tuna with lots of things.  For me, tuna comes as a lightly griddled steak, seasoned with black pepper and lime and still pink in the middle.  Or if it's out of a tin then it should be mixed with mayo and either in a sandwich or on top of a jacket potato.  If I'm feeling adventurous, then  I'll have it in a pasta salad.  But always with cold pasta.  There's just something in my head that can't compute tuna and hot pasta.  Or tuna and cheese - I'm sure tuna melts are very lovely but I'd rather fritter away my lunch choice on something else rather than risking the disappointment of not liking a tuna melt.

So tonight's recipe choice was selected to try to get me to get over my fear of certain tuna dishes.  Originally I'd picked up a recipe for tuna, asparagus and cannellini bean salad.  It sounded lovely and seasonal until I realised that actually, it's exactly the same as another recipe I tried a while back except the green veg in that one was fine green beans.  Although one was from a recipe book and one was from the Good Food website, they were exactly the same, right down to the quantity of dressing.  I smell a rat here.

As that felt a bit cheaty, I ended up choosing this recipe which calls for hot spaghetti to be tossed with cold tuna, capers, raw red onion and garlic, chilli and lemon.  I wimped out on the raw onion and garlic front and sauteed them for a couple of minutes just to take the harsh edge off of the taste.  I need to make sure I overdo the mouthwash tonight and tomorrow morning so as not to offend anyone.

Once served, the dish looked absolutely nothing like the picture from the website.  Now I appreciate that I'm not a skilled photographer or food stylist and I don't have a photo studio to hand with which to photograph my dinner.  But if you look at the two pictures side by side and read the recipe, you'll note that whilst the BBC one is artfully scattered with green herbs, the actual recipe makes no mention at all of using herbs.  Nor does it mention seasoning.  Which I found really helped this dish along.

Guess which one had a pro food stylist?

It wasn't bad and hot pasta and tuna is okay.  I definitely won't make this particular recipe again as I found the pasta really bland.  I should have trusted my instinct and seasoned it in the pan before mixing in the ingredients.  Maybe because it's an Olive magazine recipe, they just assume that readers will automatically season the pasta and they don't need to spell it out like Good Food do for their readers.

Same with the herbs.  Maybe if I was clever enough to read Olive, I'd automatically garnish all my dishes with green stuff.  Ho-hum.  If you want to try the recipe yourself, you can find it here.

Artichoke, lemon & Parmesan pasta

Conveniently, the husband's working this evening so he's exempt from having to try anything new.  It's a win-win situation.  I don't have to get stressed trying to find a new recipe he'll try.  He gets to eat cheese on toast for tea.

So tonight I went for a quick store cupboard supper for one.  The recipe is a BBC Good Food one, which is fast becoming my resource of choice for a quick fix dinner.

Spot the artichokes

It got me wondering about store cupboard suppers and if I'd've ever considered making this dish if I'd not been on this mission.  The answer to that is no.  Partly because I probably never would've had artichokes in my cupboard before.  And in all honesty, if I wanted a quick supper, I'd just go for a bowl of plain pasta with butter, Parmesan and black pepper or a couple of beautifully poached eggs on toast.

This really tasty and simple supper - it literally has only one step to the recipe (although that's depending on how you want to lay the instructions out) - has got me thinking though, that I'll make more of an effort to make my lazy dinners tasty and interesting.  But only on nights when the husband isn't about for tea.  Which will be about once a year.

Serves 2


Ingredients

• 150 spaghetti
• 100g marinated artichoke hearts , drained and sliced
• 1 lemon , juiced and zested
• 25g Parmesan (or vegetarian alternative) , finely grated
• ½ small bunch basil , shredded
• olive oil

1. Cook the spaghetti following pack instructions. Put the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl with 1 tbsp olive oil, season really well and mix. Drain the pasta, keep 2 tbsp of the cooking water, then toss everything together.

Spaghetti with 'Spanish' flavours

This oddly named recipe is courtesy of BBC Good Food.  I don't really understand what's wrong with calling it Spaghetti with Chorizo and Peppers?  Because that's all it is in essence.

Life is busy with the candle being fully burnt at both ends.  I feel I barely have time to breathe some days with juggling a full time job, motherhood, wifehood, running and this cooking blog nonsense.  Tomorrow I'm having to get up at 4am to fit in a five mile run so I can still be at work by 7am, work til 5pm then home for another round of bedtime, dinner and blogging.  And they call this Women's Lib?  I guess thirty years ago (excluding the technological advantages) I wouldn't have been able to have the satisfaction of gradually trying a new recipe every day as the resources just wouldn't have been there.  I'm only in the privileged position to do this because I work full time.

Anyway, enough with the self pity.  To me, spaghetti should always be served alla ragu (or with a bit of Bol) or with rather tasty meatballs.  Failing that, it makes an excellent snack simply buttered with lashings of black pepper and parmesan.  You can keep your carbonara.  It just doesn't do it for me.

But as I'm running tomorrow, I wanted a quicky, tasty pasta dish to sustain me as I won't eat when I get up in the morning.  Or at least that's my excuse.  It's carb-loading, okay?

So I turned to BBC Good Food to help me make something out of the limited contents of my fridge and larder (two days to Ocado arrive and counting!).  And this was what I got.  A tasty pasta dish that was quick to make (and sadly even quicker to eat).  I used dried pasta.  I didn't have fresh parsley so used Garden Gourmet.  I think this is the one bit that could be improved on by using real herbs as you just didn't get those little parsley flavour spikes like you would with the real thing.

This will now be my new quick pasta dish of choice for evenings when I want to pack in the carbs but don't have hours to cook - and can't convince the hubby that it's good to have Spag Bol for the third time in under a week.  As for the flavours being Spanish?  Well it tasted of smoked paprika from the chorizo so I guess it can just about get away under the trades description act.  But only just.

You can find the recipe here

Runner bean & prosciutto pasta

Like a schmuck, I took one look at my husband's crestfallen face when I announced that he was getting last night's Chicken and Chorizo Jambalaya for tea and hot-footed it out the door to the chippie for him.  But because I'm still trying to be good and even though it was a running day and I resisted and changed my plans for my recipe of the day.

I was going to make a plum croute out of the plums that the child snuck into her shopping basket at Sainsburys on Tuesday night but instead, plumped for the Runner Bean and Prosciutto pasta I happened across on Good Food the other day when looking for a way to use up the prosciutto I bought for Christmas that never got used.

I must confess, I'm starting to rely on the Good Food website a little too much for this blog.  But it's so easy.  Rather than having to leaf through twenty different cookbooks to find what to do with the contents of my fridge, I just type a few words in the box and back comes the suggestion.  As mitigation, I do subscribe to the magazine and would leaf through the old issues in the same manner I do with my cookbooks, if only the husband didn't insist on throwing old magazines away.

Bacon, beans and pasta.  Mmmm....bacon!!

Anyhoo, this is a really simple supper to make after a hectic day in the office and something I will cook again on one of those days when I've been up since the crack of sparrow-fart.   The first few bites were disappointingly bland.  After all, pasta with creme fraiche, runner beans (not the tastiest of vegetables) and lashings of black pepper is hardly going to set the world on fire.

But then comes the lovely, salty, bacony bite of the crispy prosciutto.  Class.  It works perfectly against the bland background.  I think the only change I would make would be to make my prosciutto pieces smaller next time - either before cooking or by bashing them up once they are cooked - to spread them more evenly throughout the pasta.  I note the recipe mentions pouring over the pan juices.  There were none in my pan so maybe the presence of some would've balanced the blandness of the pasta versus the saltiness of the prosciutto out more.  It might be because I only used a tiny bit of oil for frying to keep the calorie content down.  Will try a bit more next time.

And I can highly recommend it with the crunchy bits from the bottom of the chip packet on the side.  Hubby refuses to eat anything crunchy which is my favourite bit.  No wonder we rub along okay even though we're often at polar opposites of opinion.  Just call us Jack and Mrs Spratt (although I can't stand fatty meat!!)

Recipe - Serves 2

• 175g tagliatelle (I used spaghetti)
• 200g runner beans , trimmed and cut into short lengths
• 3 slices prosciutto
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 rounded tbsp half-fat crème fraîche

1. Cook the tagliatelle in a large pan of boiling, salted water according to pack instructions. Four mins before the end of the cooking time, add the runner beans.
2. Meanwhile, cut each slice of prosciutto into 5-6 pieces. Heat the oil in a frying pan, add the ham, then fry quickly until crisp. Drain the pasta and return to the pan with the crème fraîche, prosciutto, pan juices and plenty of black pepper, tossing everything together until the pasta is well coated.

Runner's World: Healthy Mac 'n' Cheese

I was meant to go running today so the recipe I selection came from Runner's World magazine.  I was sold by the title 'Fight Fatigue with Mac 'n' Cheese.  I'm invariably tired and the idea of mac 'n' cheese seemed quite an appealing treat after pounding out a few miles.

Sadly the run never happened as I was awake from 1am and was just thinking around 5am that I'd probably be best getting ready to run when I must've nodded off until my toddler alarm clock woke me.

Today is one of those mad-busy days when I'm trying to juggle lots of things.  In an hour or so I'm going to hit the road to Southampton to my cousin's 21st.  It's a fancy dress party so I'm hoping to leave early and get changed 'darn Sarf' rather than having to drive across Salisbury Plain dressed as Cruella de Vil.

As there's only party food, I figured I could probably still get away with the mac dish and as I've not had much sleep, I could test it's fatigue fighting (gimmicky) claims.  I'm driving back home again tonight.  Mad, I know but I have to be back for Miss A.

Comfort food!

It's an interesting recipe that uses cauliflower as the base for the white sauce instead of a traditional roux.  As a fan of cauliflower cheese, it seemed like an ideal dish.  And with a bit of work (or maybe if I paid attention to the recipe rather than my sofa-diving child) it could be really tasty.

One thing I forgot to add was the olive oil which saved 60 cals per serving.  MyFitnessPal.com calculated what I put in to the recipe as 330 cals and having just realised I forgot the oil, that means what I ate was only 270 cals.  Bargain! More nibbles for me later :)

There was also too much cheesy topping to fill my dish.  It's kind of like a cauli soup that you put on top and I was worried that it was a bit thin, but after baking, it had thickened up nicely.  I may reduce the stock a bit next time so that the cheesiness is more intense.

I also forgot the mustard, added a pinch of cayenne to the cheese sauce and put the parmesan into the cheese sauce by mistake rather than sprinkling it with the breadcrumbs.  I reckon this is a better solution and the breadcrumbs would be good with some fresh herbs mixed through instead.

It was REALLY filling.  I thought when I was making it that I'd be able to easily eat the lot, but one portion and I'm absolutely stuffed.  I know what I'll be having for lunch tomorrow.

So a short blog today, and they will be much shorter over the coming weeks as it's back to work Monday Was that a collective sigh of relief I heard blog readers?

Recipe - Serves 4 (I made half)

• 625ml vegetable or chicken stock
• 1 medium cauliflower, cored and cut into florets
• 225g macaroni (the recipe recommends wholewheat, but you have to buy that off the interweb, I used Waitrose regular)
• 40g grated cheese such as sharp cheddar, gruyere or emmental
• 20g grated parmesan
• Pinch of Cayenne
• salt and black pepper
• 40g wholemeal breadcrumbs

1. Preheat the oven to 200c/180c fan. 
2. Cook the cauliflower in boiling salted water for 25 minutes.  Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and set to one side.  Cook the pasta in the cauliflower water for five minutes.  Drain and rinse to cool; put the cooked pasta in a greased baking dish.
3. Blend the cauliflower in a food processor with the stock, both cheeses, cayenne, salt and pepper.  Pour the sauce over the pasta.  Top with breadcrumbs and season with a little more black pepper.  Bake for 20 minutes.

Meatballs with Tomato Sauce

Yeah, yeah, it's red - not green.  More carbs.  Here comes the justification.

The child doesn't eat much meat.  But she'll eat meatballs hence today's red-not-green carb-filled fiesta.  For now.  I don't hold out much hope that this will be a long-term association but while the going is good, I'm happy to run with it.

*Sings* On top of spaghetti, not covered with cheese...

Being a busy working mum, I succumbed to the lure of the shop-bought meatballs but to be honest, they taste like balls of papier mache, no matter how good the sauce you put them in so I am going to try to find a really good, tasty recipe from somewhere.

I know a lot of people make them with half beef and half pork mince or a beef/veal combo but I only have beef and lamb mince at the mo so have gone with the pure beef option this time.  So I chose a recipe by the lovely Rachel Allen from Saturday kitchen.  I have several of her books somewhere, but can't find them.  Maybe they got lost when we moved from London?  But as they're all about entertaining, and I've not done any in the past five years, it's not a loss that has been too keenly felt so far.

I cheated and made the tomato sauce yesterday afternoon as I just knew that if I left the sauce simmering for thirty minutes while Miss A was still about, some disaster would occur and I'd end up burning the sauce and giving in to the husband's demand for chicken and packet rice (again).

Taste wise, I'm still not convinced these are the tastiest meatballs ever.  The sauce was really tasty (not bland enough for the husband) and so eaten all together, it disguised the lack of taste in the meatballs.  Am now wondering if all meatballs just taste bland and it's the quality of the tomato sauce that goes with them that makes the difference or if I should just use Masterchef quantities of seasoning?  Whilst I love that show, it's another one (like Saturday Kitchen and anything by Nigella) that should carry a warning that watching the programme may just cause your arteries to harden.

The recipe can be found here

Spaghetti with Courgette, Goats Cheese and Lemon

Quick and easy.

Found on someone else's blog.

I eat far to many carbs and have realised I nearly qualify as a fake vegetarian.


That is all.