Cathryn Dresser's Roasted Vegetable Strudel

I want it to be summer all over again.  Well a proper summer, not the non-event of a summer that we've just had.  But a proper warm, English summer when you know that you have several weeks of good weather guaranteed ahead (the last time this happened was circa 2003) and you can plan an outdoor social event with confidence. Because I want to make and eat this strudel again.  And share it with my nearest and dearest who wouldn't whinge and whine that it's meat free.

Ready to eat

This recipe is from the current series of the Great British Bake Off and to cut a long waffle short, the flavours in this were amazing.  And I didn't even stick to the actual recipe because I don't have the time, space or patience to make my own filo* nor could I find Slipcote Cheese in the local Morrisons and so I made do with regular feta.  I only made enough for one person - okay so it was a greedy one-person portion that could have been eked out to two people with a green salad, a bottle of chilled chablis and a decadent dessert to follow - but I'd love to go the whole strudel (it's meat free, remember?) and serve this at an evening soiree held at the end of a beautiful summer's day.

Although the recipe sounds involved, it's actually not.  Chop up a lot of veg into little pieces and roast them.  Make some couscous.  Wrap it in liberally buttered filo with some cheese and herbs.  Butter again. And again.  This is a very James Martin-esque recipe.  Bake.  And butter again.

Dame Mary admitted during the programme that she finds it perfectly acceptable to buy your own filo so that makes the whole experience easier.  Plus if you read the original recipe, you need to make the pastry on a massive clear space like your huge, country kitchen table** or similar space.  Or just cheat and use shop-bought filo which will save your time and sanity.

Inside - pre-bake

I learnt from this recipe that the art to successful baked Filo wrapped things is to butter in between every layer.  Ordinarily, I just butter the outside to keep the fat down.  But having buttered the pastry to within an inch of its life, the crust was perfect and crispy - just how I like it.  My arteries are slightly more furred than they were this morning, but it was fully worth it.  Definitely on the make again list.

You can find the recipe online here.  Even though the weather is as miserable as sin outside, and everyone only wants to eat huge, fat winter stews, I can highly recommend this little taste of the Mediterranean to blow those autumn blues away.  And I'd like to wish Cat the best of luck with the rest of the GBBO.

*If you didn't see the episode where Cat made this, she was being shown the Filo-whacking technique by one of her fellow bakers and her pastry ended up on the floor, covered in bits of green carpet.  I don't know if this added to or detracted from the bake that was served on the tellybox, but a similar accident in my house would leave it full of dog hair and bits of chewed up crayon - hence why it's easier to use pre-bought pastry.

**Why is it that none of the GBBO contestants have tiny, clutter-filled kitchens like I do?

Olympic Food Challenge: Bamya Alich’a Okra with Quick Injera - Ethiopia

If there is one certainty at any summer Olympics, it's that the Ethiopians will take home medals for running.  This year, they've fielded 35 athletes in just two disciplines (athletics and swimming) and have (so far) gained two gold and two bronze medals.  Running is 'my sport' - the one thing I actively participate in - and it's one of the few sports where the masses can participate in events alongside the greats.

I've been lapped at the Bath Half by some of the best runners from Ethiopia and there is nothing like the resounding cheers and applause from fellow runners as they speed off towards the distant tape whilst the rest of us trudge round on our second loop.  It always brings a little lump in my throat to be in the presence of such talent and I have enjoyed watching them race on the tellybox.

I went a bit overboard on the okra to tomato ratio

As for the cuisine, I was a little apprehensive when I saw Ethiopia on my list.  I was also slightly shocked at myself when I realised I had no clue about Ethiopia and it's culture other than memories of the terrible famines that have wreaked destruction across the country on so many occasions.  LiveAid and BandAid are rooted firmly in the memories of my childhood and I suppose I never considered anything other than the images of starving orphans that haunted the telly for endless months.  More shocking than that was the number of times that I heard 'all you'll need is a bag of grain with UN stamped on it' I mentioned having Ethiopia on my list.  It appears I'm not the only one ignorant of the country's own cuisine.

A typical meal is a stew with bread and grains.  Stews usually consist of a rich vegetable sauce, often with meat such as beef, chicken, goat or lamb.  Injera the most common type of bread is actually more akin to a buckwheat pancake then bread and is leavened using a sourdough starter.  One thing that surprised me is that pasta is commonly available in Ethiopia too.  And they snack on popcorn.

I really wanted to make Injera but struggled with sourcing Teff flour.  Teff is apparently a super-healthy   alternative to wheat (higher protein than wheat flour, easily absorbed iron source, lots of good nutrients)  and accounts for one quarter of Ethiopia's grain production.  It can be added to soups as a thickener or cooked like porridge.  Because the recipe also requires a sourdough starter to be left out in the sun, I must admit I did start to look at alternatives but eventually came across a recipe for quick Injera that uses regular flour and doesn't need the long fermentation time.


Being a sourdough expert now (ha ha), I know that the quick version of the recipe doesn't have the same taste potential of the proper sourdough, but it was good enough for a midweek meal.  The resulting batter made for very soft pancakes and because the husband has 'rationalised' my cooking implements after he had a bit of a barney with the utensil holder last night, I couldn't find my fish slice so ended up shredding them trying to toss them with my tiny icing palette knife.  But they still tasted good.

I chose an okra dish to go with the meal purely because the only time I've ever eaten okra before, they were disgusting.  We were on a trip to see my father in his native environment and I was already in a bit of a grumpy mood (unusual for me(!), but my father brings out the very worst in me).  We'd gone native for dinner.  The husband couldn't deal with the chicken and rice dish he had ordered not having come in plastic packets from Sainzlebobs and having been determined that I would try some of everything Vincenzian on the menu, I'd ordered fried okra.  I was expecting something akin to crispy little hairy chillis without the heat.  What I got was a plate of green slime.

But this is an Olympic Food Challenge and having barracked our esteemed leader @EwanMitchell about him having chosen breadfruit (another bad memory of Vincenzian cuisine - along with cassava, plantain and conch (or maybe it's just my stepmother's terrible cooking??)), I felt I should take one for the team and try cooking okra myself.  Ewan had said he'd had a less than good experience with okra in the past but has become an okra convert thanks to this recipe he'd tried for the OFC.  He inspired me to step up to the plate and try cooking it myself and yes, whilst I won't be rushing off to the supermarket to buy them by the bucketload, I won't necessarily shy away from dishes that include them in the future.

Even Miss A loved Bamya Alich'a Okra (minus the okra - she's a toddler and they "don't do green food") and she ate all of my Injera (she was supposed to be having pasta) so I will be awarding this dish a silver.  Give it a go.  You may just learn to love okra too.  Unless you're a toddler of course.

The recipe for the okra can be found here and the one for the quick Injera is here.

Olympic Food Challenge: Pap and Chakalaka - Lesotho

Landlocked entirely by South Africa, Lesotho (pop 2.06m) has sent five Olympians to London 2012.  Lesotho is one of those countries I've heard of and I knew it was in Africa, but thanks to both GCSE and A-Level Geography being all about Central Business Districts, population distributions, vegetation, and some geology, I couldn't have even guessed whereabouts it was on the continent.

I'm ashamed to say that when I was sitting GCSE Geography, the then seven-year-old @BridestockBride was able to pinpoint more countries on a map than I was.  And this all in spite of my second favourite book being my Readers Digest Atlas of the World (I was only interested in the bit at the front about the planets and volcanoes - also covered at GCSE/A-level).

Not long after I met the husband, one night in a drunken stupor, he decided to buy a map of the world for the hallway.  Unfortunately, having not sat any secondary school exams (he was a rebel and dropped out), he thought he was buying a 60cm wide map which he could frame.  It was actually sixty inches and has dominated the walls in our previous residences - and solved many World Cup related 'discussions' - until it got relegated to the loft so our immense caricature of London could have pride of place on the lounge walls.

But thanks to the joy that is Google, I was able to find out everything I ever wanted to know about Lesotho.  Originally I'd planned on making a banana souffle because I've still managed to avoid souffles this year but then I figured that it didn't seem very African, even though it's a very popular dish in Lesotho.  A little more research led me to Chakalaka and Pap which I just had to make because I fell in love with the names.

Chakalaka is a tomato-based stew and delightfully simple to make.  Just chop up carrots, tomatoes, a chilli, an onion and a red pepper.  Fry.  Job done.  Pap is just as simple.  It's actually plain polenta seasoned with salt and pepper.  And had a double benefit of further reducing the bag of polenta that's been lurking in my cupboard since I bought it to make cornbread for this blog some months back.

Interestingly, I got tweeted by Dan aka Mr @SoupTuesday (and co-author of the SoupTuesday blog) last night with a comment that he thought that these dishes were South African.  I was a little worried that I was about to be found out as @KasariW (aka Mrs Soup) is from SA but thankfully she concurred that the dish is common to both countries.  I've found this with many Eastern European dishes - and similar in the Caribbean.  There are dishes that are similar save for a slight tweak here and there.

Lesotho Flag

What I fell in love with in Turkey as borek are served in many other countries - Greece and Cyprus to name a couple.  But it can also go by the name of Spanokoptika in Greece when it's formed into one single pie and in Serbia, they have the same dish which, according to my Serbian friend Vukan is called Cheese Pie.  I'm sure it's really got an exotic Serbian name, but I'm happy to go with Cheese Pie.  It does what it says on the tin and his is the best I've ever tasted.  I'm a bit gutted I didn't get Serbia because I've been meaning to try his recipe for years.

Anyhow, this is a really simple, tasty combination that will get me out of a hole in the future when I'm left with a few random veggies in the fridge and the need to cook something for dinner.  I don't think I ever expected something with such a fab name to become a store cupboard staple.

You can find the recipe here.

Rachel Khoo's Terrine Forestiere

One of the questions I get asked most about this blog is how much has it cost me since day one.  Part of me wishes I'd kept track.  But like when we got married, I just engaged advanced ostrich mode and pretended that it didn't matter.

I'm very lucky to earn a decent salary that allows me to do this although with things rapidly heading south for us financially, it's a good thing that there are only two months left because otherwise I'd be writing about the different ways to serve beans on toast.  Okay, that's a little flippant because I know you can eat really well on a budget if you shop wisely.  And maybe that's what I should try to do over the course of my next blog.  But pretty much with the exception of cooking with expensive seafood (I really wanted to do lobster, scallops and oysters but continue to be put off by the cost), I've not really considered too much about what I've spent.

The most expensive things are fresh herbs which I never would've bought previously.  They really make a difference to so many dishes.  I know I could grow my own - I used to have two huge herb pots when I was a kid and loved the smell of the basil on a hot summer's day - but I've not had any success with growing them at our current house.  Other more expensive items have mostly been meat-related.

So today, I gave some consideration to the cost of this meal.  The recipe is basically a baked mushroom omelette using wild mushrooms.  It's the wrong time to forage and I'd probably end up making myself ill anyway.  I know that our local Morrisons has a good selection of fresh wild mushrooms but last time I bought 100g they cost me a fiver and this recipe called for 450g.  I'm not that stupid - not even for a special occasion.

Low fat and great value

In the end, I made half of the recipe and used 250g of chestnut mushrooms (£1) plus a handful of dried mushrooms (quarter of a £1.99 pack).  The eggs were about 20p each (2 of), half a 90p tub of creme fraiche, quarter of a 60p pack of parsley (15p), three spring onions because I didn't want to buy a huge bag of shallots I won't use (so about 25p-worth).  And some salt, pepper and garlic which don't really count in the budget but probably about 15p worth.  So around £2.75 for the recipe.  Which cuts into about eight small slices if you're using it for an appetiser and would serve four with salad.  I've already road-tested it for a snack and will have another serving for tea.  It will go in my lunchbox tomorrow and I'll probably snack on the rest at some point over the next two days.

At 70p per portion, that's not too bad.  But if you were making it with wild mushrooms, it's ridiculously expensive.

But it's very tasty.  The herbs absolutely make a difference.  And I like the way it was baked in a loaf tin, making it easy to slice and transport rather than faffing around with trying to fry and then grill a round frittata to get it to set.

The only thing I will recommend is using full fat creme fraiche as mine was a bit watery. I used low-fat to keep the calories down.   Or maybe I should've dried my mushrooms in kitchen paper after frying them off.  


And if you're on a carb-free diet, it's a really filling and tasty option.


You can find the recipe on page 130 of Little Paris Kitchen.

Stuffed Peppers

At the moment, I'm reading Nigel Slater's 'Toast'.  Although he was born in 1958 and is a contemporary of my mother and my uncle; many of his food references could have been picked straight from my own childhood.  Brands like Cadburys Smash and Mini Rolls; Birds Custard; Dairylea on Cornish Wafers; and tins of Teatime Selection Biscuits.


Like Slater, as a child, I used to pore over my mother's recipe books and dream of eating many of the things on those glossy colour plates.  Never the things that were drawn or photographed in black-and-white; just the things in glorious technicolour.  Sadly, secondary school cookery (and my mother's assertion that catering was a bad career choice) put paid to any foodie aspirations.

Need to practise with the Instagram aperture setting!

One of my favourite books as a youngster though was a copy of Cookery for Children.  Despite most of the pictures being coloured drawings, there was something exciting about the idiot-proof step-by-step guide to making chocolate orange cheesecake or egg-in-the-window.  I also had copies of Gardening for Children and Modelling (as in craft!) for Children.  All three of which were much thumbed.  But I never once made anything from any of them.

I'm sure the books are probably still stashed away somewhere at my grandparents house, waiting faithfully for me to discover them on that sad day when we'll have to clear the house out.  They are most definitely on the list of things that will be being saved.

My mother recently bought Abigail a cookery book and I was amazed to see that despite technology having progressed so much and it being far easier to do step-by-step photographs, the pictures are still reassuringly hand drawn.  You could almost believe the artist is the same as the style is so similar.  It's only the modern recipes that give away the fact that it's not the same book.

Leafing through it at the weekend, I came across a recipe for stuffed peppers.  As a child, my mother used to have a habit of stuffing anything that found its way into the kitchen and didn't move after five minutes.  Of course, chicken and turkeys expect to be stuffed, but she also stuffed rolled pork joints, capsicums, aubergines, marrows and all manner of offal things.  The thought of stuffed hearts still turns my stomach to this day.

Her stuffed peppers were filled with mince and rice.  I have no idea why I refused to eat them (I guess I was a child and it was my prerogative).  Instead, I got mince, beans and rice - basically chilli without the chilli and using baked beans instead of kidney beans.  She also used to stuff her peppers by slicing the top off, filling the middle and then serving them with the lids back on top, mince peeking provocatively from the top.  Even that didn't sell it to me.

Much as I'd love Abigail to eat stuffed peppers, I think that day is a long way off in the future.  In the meantime, the sentimental side of me couldn't let another children's cookery book go unloved so I decided to make the peppers for my own lunch today.

It's not exactly the weather for such fresh, healthsome food.  These demand to be eaten outside in the sunshine with a crisp green salad, a glass of wine (not for the children of course!) and some crusty bread.  It's a good storecupboard recipe for using up random things from the fridge - I have five more capsicums to do something with before we go on holiday next week.

I also added a handful of pine nuts to the recipe for a bit of crunch, but this is one of those very forgiving recipes that you can tweak to your hearts content.  I also used arborio rice and think next time, I'd cook the rice in stock (as per adapted recipe below).

Can see this working well with chilli con carne (my review of Lorraine Pascale's is the second most popular post on this blog) and loaded with sour cream.  Served of course, like my mother made hers with the top serving as a lid, goodies just about ready to spill over the side.

Forgot to write down the details of the book, but will update the post with the correct references later.

Serves 4

Memories of my childhood

• 4 bell peppers, halved and de-seeded
• 125g arborio rice
• 125g cheddar, grated
• 25g parmesan, grated
• 1 small onion, finely diced
• 1tbsp olive oil
• 2 tomatoes, de-seeded and diced
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely sliced
• small handful each of parsley and basil, chopped
• 25g pine nuts, toasted
• half a chicken or vegetable stock cube
• salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan/350F.
2. Add the stock cube to a pan of water, bring to the boil then cook the risotto rice for 12 minutes. Drain under cold running water to stop it cooking further.
3. While the rice is cooking, heat the oil in a small frying pan over a medium heat and saute the onion for 3-4 minutes until translucent.  Add the garlic and cook for a further 1-2 minutes, taking care to not let the garlic burn.  Remove from the heat.
4. Place the peppers onto a baking tray.  Mix the onions, garlic, rice, tomatoes, cheeses, pine nuts and herbs together.  Season to taste.
5. Bake for about 30 minutes or until the pepper shells are soft.

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

Leith's Carrot and Coriander Soup

Today was one of those rare days when the 'rents take Miss A out, meaning that hubs and I get some precious peace for a few hours.  Of course, I made a lot of noise about welcoming the time to catch up on all the long overdue housework that I don't get time to address (most notably the epic mountain of clean laundry that lives on the bed in the spare room) but having successfully decided to bake some gingerbread butterflies to restock the biscuit barrel, made a fruit loaf and started the soup for my tea, I killed the hour that it took the husband to get organised so only had time to give the floors a cursory mop and off we went for a walk along the Wilts and Berks Canal.

What's up doc? Uninspiring soup, that's what.

A couple of hours later, we returned home to trade wellies and mud-spattered jeans for something a little more suited to an afternoon in Tetbury and let the dogs out for a while.  The spaniel was suspiciously loitering in the corner of the kitchen near a puddle of yellowy liquid and I assumed that he'd had a little mishap (he has a dodgy tummy so sometimes hews up on the floor).  Further floor mopping meant I'd done more housework in one day than I'd done in the last month so consoled myself with insisting we went for a club sandwich at the Blue Zucchini in Tetbury.

I love that place.  It's one of those really cool restaurants-cum-coffee bars where you should go to eat brunch and read the Sunday papers.  When it's sunny, we normally sit outside on the pavement tables and watch the world go by.  In fact, last time we were there, I was on day two of my blog and wondering what the hell I'd committed myself to.  In all honesty, I really didn't expect that I'd still be writing daily by now.  Or at least if I was, I assumed it would be a quick one or two lines saying 'I liked this recipe or this recipe was crap'.  Not boring the world to tears with the trivial details of my life.

Having planned to starve all day to allow me to eat one of their gorgeous clubs, I was....erm....mightily disappointed to see that they've changed the way they serve things and you now get double the amount of chips in a little bucket on the side.  In fact, there were so many that for once, I couldn't finish mine (of course, hubs managed to help out!) and now I feel like I won't eat again for about a week.

Blue Zucchini Club Sandwich Sept '11

Blue Zucchini Club Sandwich May '12

Returning home, I went to put the cooled gingerbread into the biscuit barrel and noticed that the worktops were covered in sticky, wet liquid.  And then it hit, that the dog hadn't made the floor messy - he was cleaning up the liquid part of the soup.  In a vain attempt to be tidy, I'd poured the soup into the blender ready to liquidise later and the stock had seeped out of the jug and run everywhere.  Grrrrrr!  Another black mark against my Kenwood Prospero!

Luckily I managed to salvage the soup by just adding more stock and blending it.  But still being full from lunch, I only had a spoonful to test the seasoning was okay and it's now gone into the fridge for a meal tomorrow.

Wilts and Berks Canal

So the verdict on one spoonful of soup?  Well the recipe is from my Leith's Simple Cookery book.  When I first got the book, I flicked through and was disappointed that a book by an institution such as Leith's should use lots of pre-prepared sauces and the like in their recipes so I've barely looked at it since.  But now I'm so short on time I realised that there can be compromise.  And if some of the recipes call for a shop-bought tomato sauce, there's no reason that I can't make my own if I feel so inclined.  So you will see more Leith's inspired recipes as I crawl towards the finish line of this year.

And of course, soup isn't exactly known for being a complicated thing to make.  I picked Carrot and Coriander because I bought a giant bag of value carrots for a cake I promised one of my colleagues I'd bake this week and needed another way to use them up.  I normally only use one or two carrots a month (hubs doesn't eat veg and Miss A doesn't like carrots - yet) but had a fit of thrift and bought the 1.5kg bag for 50p as it sounded like a good deal.

The flavour was good and nice and light for springtime; although I think I overdid the herbs a bit and consequently, it tasted like a sweet chicken and coriander soup, such was the subtle flavour from the carrots.  I think I would probably make it again if I had a need to use up a massive bag of carrots, but I wouldn't go out of my way to make it if I didn't have any carrots in.

You can find the recipe on this website.

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.

Chickpeas with Tomato and Spinach

Today's recipe didn't set my world on fire.  It was a pretty okay store cupboard recipe and would be a good side dish to something more substantial.  It's from BBC Good Food and having now read the reviews, I think it may well have been better made the night before to allow the flavours to develop. Of course if I'd not been a greedy cow and eaten it all, I could've tested this theory tomorrow (I did only make a half-recipe-worth).

I'd probably make it again when I was feeling guilty for not having eaten anything vaguely resembling a vegetable for a few days.  There had to be at least three of my five a day in this one meal.  And served with a Dan Lepard Frying Pan Naan, it's a really filling meal.

I also faced up to me reticence when it comes to fresh tomatoes and cooked and ate those.  Although I guess as they're cooked, they're not far different to using chopped, tinned tomatoes.  Nevertheless, I had to eyeball their slimy innards when I chopped them up - something which is normally enough for me to quietly shuffle them off into the dogs' bowls.

It has green stuff on the top - must be healthy

But it did bring back a memory.  Of making curry in the late eighties.  I can't remember where the recipe first came from, but what a performance it was to make.  In those days, you could only buy Indian spices from specialist shops.  My mum used to go to this tiny health food shop in some back street of Winchester and come home with little white plastic bags containing spoonfuls of turmeric, coriander, cumin and saffron.

They were then consigned to an old ice-cream tub in the back of the cupboard for fear of them making everything else smell of curry.  And when you took the lid off of the box, it immediately just smelled like of curry from the intermingled flavours.  That ice cream tub still lives in the back of the larder at my Grandad's house (I grew up living with my grandparents) and there are still random bags of spices in there.  The smell has dulled over time but it still brings back the memory.

These days, I have a spice rack that is jammed full of pretty much every herb or spice that my local supermarket cares to sell.  In fact, I have so many that they're also randomly scattered across work surfaces (much to the husband's eternal consternation) and stuffed in the back of random cupboards (the husband's reaction to me randomly scattering them across work surfaces).

Of course, the modern glass jars ensure that my kitchen only smells of damp dog (the worst thing about this infernal rain!) and not of curry spices waiting to be used.  But you only get that evocative smell on cooking.  There was something quite comforting about sneaking a sniff from that ice cream box.

Although my Grandma was about as Indian as Birds Custard Powder (now I've said that, someone will go and tell me it was invented in India), the smell of that box reminds me of her because it smells of her curry.  And there are times when I make something with spices that they come together and make that smell.  Sadly, today's recipe wasn't one of them.   I hope that one day when I'm old and decrepit, there will be some smell that Miss A will forever associate with the kitchen of her childhood.  I'm hoping it will be something lovely we've cooked together rather.  And not just the current pong of wet spaniel.

Baked Mushrooms with Polenta

In the cupboard under the stairs, we have some plastic shelves procured from a large national DIY chain that have become the equivalent of the larder that I would so love to own.  They're currently groaning under the weight of half used bags of flour (plain, self-raising, wholemeal, strong white, strong brown, 00, canadian bread flour, gram, rye, buckwheat); bags of sugar (granulated, caster, light muscavado, dark muscavado, soft dark brown, soft light brown, icing, fruit); various bags of pasta shapes (spirali, rigatoni, macaroni, linguine, papperdelle, spaghetti, vermicelli).  And a bag of polenta.  Plus assorted tins of beans, pulses and tomatoes; more tins of tuna than it's safe to eat in a year; and packets of microwave rice and saag aloo (for the husband).

The husband gets frustrated every so often that they're a mess.  To the untrained eye, they may look that way, but I can lay my hands on anything I need just like that.  When I go to the mothership's for the weekend, the husband occasionally takes it upon himself to 'have a little tidy' and suddenly, things go missing.  If I so much as dwell by the shelves for more than thirty seconds, I get accused of untidying them so I end up buying more of what I can't find in the next weekly shop - only to find a week or so later that I've now got two open bags of xyz flour or abc sugar.  You get my drift.

Sunshiney polenta to brighten a grey day

Anyhow, the polenta has been busy cluttering up the shelving ever since I made cornbread with Miss A.  As that was a resounding failure in terms of broadening the family's food horizon (Miss A and the husband both thought it was cake and were both sorely disappointed), I have - on occasion - been sorely tempted to quietly dispose of the polenta.  In all honesty, there was a time when I probably would've done.  But times are hard now we only have the one salary, a mortgage and an extra mouth to feed, and I am making an effort to be thrifty.  Especially because in doing this challenge, my food expenditure is sometimes higher than it would be if I wasn't.

Having Googled about a bit for ideas for the field mushrooms that arrived with my weekly shop (I don't know why on earth I bought them - I failed on the planning front this week), I happened across a recipe on Taste.com.au for stuffed mushrooms with polenta.  Problem solved.  

I didn't stick to the actual recipe (which you can find here) because I didn't have the fancy-schmanzy shallots and couldn't be bothered to chop a tiny bit of red onion for just one mushroom so I made a simple breadcrumb mix with a little garlic paste, some parsley, olive oil, breadcrumbs and seasoning.  I then made the polenta as per the packet instructions, beat in some parmesan, a teaspoon of half fat creme fraiche (the packet suggested butter and marscapone but I'm trying to compensate for all the chocolate I've been eating of late) and some seasoning.  

Then I licked a bit off of the spoon and nearly binned it.  The package said to cook for just one minute for soft, mash-potato-style polenta and that it would come away from the edges of the pan when it was ready.  Which it duly did.  But the texture was just shy of semi-cooked couscous with a weird "I'm not quite pasta thanks to the parmesan" taste.  But then I got on to having to poach eggs for the husband's ham, egg and chips and whilst I was doing so, the polenta obviously finished expanding and ended up tasting like a really good cheese-mash/pasta/couscous hybrid.  I really enjoyed it.

In fact, I enjoyed the whole dish so much, it's going on my list of new meat-free Monday meals when I'm finished with this blasted blog and it's dictation that I have to try a new recipe every day.  Hugely tasty vegetarian meal and hearty enough that you don't even notice that it's meatless.  I'd always made stuffed mushrooms filled with Philly and topped with breadcrumbs before but always served them on their own with salad.  I couldn't think of an appropriate carb to go with them, but polenta is it.

If you've never tried it, I insist that you do.  I hope you love it as much as me.  

Thomasina Miers' Spring Tacos with Mushrooms

Just after hitting 10,000 views

Firstly, I would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all my readers for helping me make it to 10,000 page views in just over six months.  I am amazed and humbled that people have spent time reading my words.  I never thought in my wildest dreams that anyone other than my mother* and my lovely cousin Laura would read it.  But to reach 10,000 page views in such a short space of time has made me all warm and fuzzy inside.  So a huge thank you to everyone who has read, commented and tweeted me about it.  It's been fun and you've all kept me going.  And given me a reason to see it through to the bitter end in late September.

I would love to name everyone who I know has taken the time to read, but I'm bound to miss someone out.  Don't take offence if I do, but in no particular order thanks to Laura B, Tamara, Chantelle, Pauls L and W, both Kate S's, Dicky, Robs A, B and C, Hubby (for letting me pick on him), Paul L, Phil, Nelly, Sadia, Jaime, @UnderTheBlueGum, Amy (@WeeklyBakeOff), Laura (@Philosophobia), both Jules', Lisa, Allison, Alison (yes one has one 'l' and the other has two), Ewan who is letting me join his Olympic challenge (more about that on another day) and to all the people who have had cake foisted on them when I've had a baking frenzy.

Anyway, on to today's recipe.  Despite living in a 'Market Town' we don't actually have a proper market.  There are a few token stalls strewn down the high street on a Saturday - most selling tat, the with a couple of local producers selling cake and a few veg - but nothing to allow you to stock up.

Driving home midweek and in need of just one chilli I was sulking to myself that I'd be forced to buy an entire packet that I'd either have to use or would end up rotting slowly in the fridge.  That's the trouble with generally cooking for one.  Or cooking for three - but cooking three separate meals.

Fungi

I stopped in Morrisons for some odds and ends and was amazed to see that the latest revamp has turned the fruit and veg section into a proper market place where you can actually buy small quantities of things.  And most stuff is loose.  Meaning if you want one chilli, you can spend 8p (as I did) rather than 65p on pre-packaged ones that will go to waste.  I got overly excited by the fact that you can buy all manner of exotic things which will be great for some recipes on this blog over the remaining months.  

So having fallen out big style with Ocado, I gave up my blessed Friday afternoon off this week in favour of doing my shopping myself and buying exactly what I need with minimal waste on both food and packaging.  See David Cameron, I'm doing my bit.

The most exciting bit is that they sell loose exotic mushrooms so expect many mushroom based recipes in the coming weeks.  I have always loved mushrooms and can't believe so many of my friends don't share my passion.  At one point, I was surrounded by so many mushroom-fearing that like a parched man in the desert, I literally jumped on the husband (he was not even boyfriend back then) like he would be my foodie saviour.  Desperation leads to hasty assumptions.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I'd had a few rubbish relationships around this time so with a good friend, came up with a list of ten criteria that any new beau had to meet.  Liking mushrooms was on the list.  The list became my dating yardstick and the husband was the only one who ticked all ten boxes.  

Cooked mushrooms taste better than they look!

Anyhow, although he's not being subjected to experimental mushroom-ness tonight, tea tomorrow will also contain exotic mushrooms (see no waste here now).  Like my mother, tea for him must contain meat, so I chose a recipe that would allow me to share part of the meal and for him to have chicken.

Thomasina Miers has a section in her book (Mexican Food Made Easy) about tacos and different fillings for each season.  I made the summer ones early on in this challenge.  The spring one is mushroom based so I gave this a whirl to great success.  Instead of using her taco recipe, I made Dan Lepard's corn oil tortillas.  The dough is pretty similar and I really should've just made a few smaller ones to replicate a taco - but I'm greedy so went for two bigger wraps.

As for the taste.  It sounds weird, but it was just like eating a spring woodland, in the nicest possible way!  The mushrooms - being proper mushrooms than bog standard white button mushrooms - had an amazing earthy taste.  I had a mix of Pied Bleu, Shitake and regular chestnut.  And despite having probably sat on a shelf in Morrisons for a day or two, they tasted like they were freshly picked.  I've picked mushrooms in the past with an expert, but wouldn't be brave enough to do so myself.

With a liberal sprinkling of parsley and coriander in place of the tarragon, the flavour was lifted with a kind of fresh, grassy flavour.  And the saltiness of the feta (Miers recommends this if you can't get Pecorino) gave it a depth that seasoning alone couldn't achieve.  

If I could afford to buy piles of these mushrooms (the Pied Bleu were something ridiculous like £30/kg), I'd eat this dish time and again.  As always,  top marks to Thomasina and also to Dan for the tortillas.  These I now make regularly as it's far less stressful than trying to open a packet of shop-bought ones and a darn sight tastier too.

Sadly, the recipe for the tortillas still isn't online but it's just another reason to buy the book.  But they do get rave reviews from lots of the lovely people I Tweet with.

Cooking time: 15–20 minutes

No matter how you look at them, they're not that attractive...

• 25g butter
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 750g St George's, Morell or mixed mushrooms, sliced
• Sea salt and black pepper
• 1 tablespoon truffle oil (optional)
• 2 shallots, finely chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped a small handful tarragon, chopped

To serve

• A small handful of parsley, roughly chopped
• Grated Pecorino cheese
• Addictive sweet chipotle paste

1. Heat half the butter and olive oil in a frying pan and add the mushrooms, seasoning with salt and pepper.

2. Cook over a high heat until the mushrooms have released their juices and the juice has started to evaporate, about 10 minutes. Add the rest of the butter and the oil (including the truffle oil if you are using it), the shallots and garlic and cook until soft. Sprinkle with the tarragon and check the seasoning.

3. Spoon the mushrooms into a heated earthenware dish that will look fun on the table and sprinkle over the parsley and cheese. This is incredibly delicious with my sweet chipotle paste, but also yummy with the Fresh tomato salsa on page 26 and a dollop of crème fraîche. 

*My mother doesn't have time to read my blog apparently.  She'd much rather spend her time playing Cityville on Facebook.

Day 183: Halfway! Aubergine, tomato & Parmesan bake

So here I am at the half way point.  Or rather at the start of the second part of this challenge.  This is my 186th post - I've double blogged on three days.  Back when I first came up with this idea, one sunny day back in September, I'm not sure I really believed myself that I would get this far.  I know the husband didn't think I'd make it past the first week.

I'm not sure what's been more challenging - the recipe selection, cooking something from scratch every single day (okay some days have been a bit lame) or the writing about it.  Nor am I sure whether I have enjoyed the eating or the writing bit more.

Sunrise snap on my phone whilst out running

The scope has certainly changed over the six months as I've gone from an idea of getting my family to eat a more varied diet (still on my radar, but very challenging) to trying new things myself (haggis, cooking squid, making laminated dough for danish pastries) and fattening up my colleagues with an array of baked goodies.  Some days, I'm really excited about trying new recipes whether it's something completely new or a twist on an old favourite.  Others I just crave the idea of having a bit of toast with cheese for my tea (never cheese on toast as I don't like it) but duly cook something new and write about it.

I've also (as regular readers will know) have taken to whittering on about the trivialities of my life.  This isn't a traditional food blog as I'm not selling you my own recipes, instead, I'm kind of reviewing someone elses and in a roundabout way documenting how that fits into my rather busy life.

Having hit 8,000 views in six months a few minutes before writing this post, I am truly amazed and humbled by the interest people have shown (lots of this has come off the back of me Twittering).  I only hope that you've enjoyed reading and will continue to visit - especially because the husband reckons I won't make 16,000 views by the end of the next six months.

One thing I do love is lists of random things so here are ten things about me and my blog

1. The first and second most popular posts on this blog are about recipes by Lorraine Pascale.  Number one is her chilli (which I didn't even post the recipe for) and number two is her salmon and sweet potato fishcakes
2. The third most popular post (so far) is about Eric Lanlard's banana fritters.  I blogged about this, Eric retweeted me and it had 124 page views in just over 12 hours.  The power of social media.
3. My oldest cookbook is 365 Cakes and Desserts by Ebury Press which I choose as for my reward at a school prizegiving aged eleven. I've never cooked anything from this book although it's been pored over many a time.
4. My favourite book by far is Short and Sweet. Every recipe just works and turns out beautifully.  Everyone thinks I have 'mentionitis' when it comes to Dan Lepard. But it's an amazing book, and Dan is really friendly and helpful too. Follow him on Twitter!
5. I am a little bit addicted to any recipe that has chorizo in the title
6. BBC Good Food website is my saviour when I have random ingredients and need an emergency recipe
7. Haggis isn't actually that bad.  Just so long as you don't think about what goes into it.
8. I need to be more adventurous over the next six months - and I will cook something with liver and kidneys and not just buy them and then cook them for the dogs when they've reached their expiry date.
9. The reason why people select to read certain posts seems entirely random.  The presence of pictures or the lack of a recipe (and no link to the recipe) doesn't deter people from reading.  Sometimes even posts with chocolate in the title have had less of a glance than ones about squid. I find this interesting and would love to do a more detailed statistical analysis if I had the time. I'm sad like that.
10. I sometimes don't know when to stop typing :)

Really rubbish picture of a tasty meal

Anyhow, I really wanted to do something special (like Lorraine Pascale's Mini Beef Wellingtons or Dan Lepard's Sour Dough) to celebrate the half way mark, but in the excitement of a sunny weekend and all that, I forgot it was the 26th until I was driving to work this morning.  By which time I'd already had to resort to Good Food for a recipe to use up the aubergine I randomly bought with my shopping this week.  So all you get tonight is Aubergine, tomato & Parmesan bake or a version of Melanzane Parmiagiana.  I must confess that I've tried another, similar recipe before and wanted to compare like for like

I enjoyed this one, but prefer the other one more as it uses stringy mozzarella.  It was simple, tasty, easy to make although I'm not sure the egg topping did the parmesan any favours as it went crunch rather than melting but it tasted good so that didn't matter so much.  And if the husband hadn't been off scouting edgy photography locations, it would've been a great meal to have in the garden as the sun set with a glass of white wine to celebrate.

The only downside is that it really didn't photograph that well.  When I tried to cut it with the serving spoon, it just all came out in one big, gloopy, tomato and cheesey mess.  But it's not all about the presentation.  So to make up for it I've included a picture of the sunrise from my early morning run the other day.

Right, I need to stop now so here's the recipe - knock yourselves out.  

It's all downhill from here-on-in!

'Green Parcel Pie'

Most parents know the delights of a craftily snatched cuppa whilst the children watch five minutes of CBeebies.  As much as I dislike my daughter watching telly, I know that I can brush her hair during Mr Tumble or Justin's house and grab a cuppa during I Can Cook With You (ICCWY).

As it's National Pie Week, I decided to try to succumb to Abigail's demand to cook when I got in from work, give in to her adoration of Katy from ICCWY and let her make her own tea this evening.  We've seen the 'Green Parcel Pie' episode more times than I care to remember (thanks Sky+) and she always says 'Yummy for Abi' when the finished product is revealed so I figured this would be a good time to give it a go.

 I'd bought a courgette for this a few days ago and whilst I was hunting for something in the fridge, little fingers lifted it off of the counter, snapped it in half (thanks for teaching her this Katy!) and put one half in a mixing bowl, inside her new pram and walked it round the house for half an hour.  I also had to battle with her trying to 'pop a pepper' with my bag of capsicums whilst we did the shopping last Friday.

Her mixing and egg cracking skills are second to none for a 23-month-old.  I'm sure there are many adults who can't do this as well as she does.  Who says telly can't be educational?

Get ready for an egg-splosion

No shell in the bowl :)

Mix, mix, mix

Filling the pie

The only sore point was when it needed to go in the oven and she wanted to put it in her pram and take it for a walk again.  The tantrum was only held off by giving her the remaining piece of courgette to baby.  I love her little foibles.

Overall, it's obviously a simple recipe because it's aimed at 4-7 year olds, but it's actually really quite tasty - although I'd probably add salt or use some feta cheese to give it a bit more flavour if I was making it for adults.  The instruction to use three sheets of filo was a little off in my book - maybe it depends on the brand, but three sheets of Jus-Rol were too big in my opinion.  Next time, I'd cut them in half as there was far more pastry than there was filling.  

Finished pie.  Requires less pastry and more filling IMHO

I'd also double or possible treble the amount of filling to make it a more generous dish.  For that, I figure you'd need to cook longer at a slightly lower temperature to ensure the filling cooked without the pastry topping burning.

It would work well as a simple summer dish with a nice green salad and a glass of crisp white wine.  Not that I like wine, but that's what chef-y types say - I'd probably go for a chilled cider myself.

As for Abigail's opinion?  Well she poked it with her fork, ate a couple of mouthfuls and then left the rest, but oddly wouldn't let Mummy try any (I had to sneak into the kitchen for my taste test).  I'm sure we'll get there one day when the fussy toddler phase passes.  Not that I'm wishing her life away, but I'm seriously looking forward to her learning to love food.

Next task is to go through my M&S kids cookery book and see if she can find something in there she likes besides the gingerbread men and give one of those a whirl with her.

You can find the original I Can Cook With You recipe here

Stir Fry Vegetables with Cashews

"What's exciting about this?" I hear you ask.  I never professed that these recipe choices would set the world alight (especially when I have to get through 366 different ones on 366 consecutive days).  My personal challenge was to broaden the food horizons of my family.  As you know, I struggle with (but haven't totally given up on) the husband and the child, so most days it's just me trying out new recipes on me.  That said, the child actually ate chicken today, which is another first so she's getting there slowly but surely.

Anyway, after a day where I spent most of my time sneakily grazing on bad stuff  (I worked from home today and was unusually working downstairs ie near the kitchen, making face stuffing far easier than when I'm banished to the study on the second floor of our house) so I felt the need to compensate somewhat with a healthy choice for tea.

Earlier in the week, with virtuosity in mind,  I'd bought some pak choi with the intention of doing a prawn ramen soup.  Except I forgot to check that I had all the necessary condiments and so rather than have prawns and chinese cabbage in boiling water, and having failed to find any mention of pak choi in 95% of my recipe books (they're either too old for something so trendy or about cakes) I settled on a BBC Good Food recipe.

It's a really simple stir fry that most people just whack together of an evening.  And once you've made this recipe, you'll probably never refer to the website again and just make it up as you go along.  But sometimes, we all need a starting point and for me this the start of a new veggie stir fry.  I had a really good chicken and cashew stir fry recipe that was a staple of our weekly diet until the husband decided on consecutive weeks that he didn't like the carrots (too orange), then he didn't like the bamboo shoots (they make the kitchen smell like stargazer lilies which in turn smell like burnt saucepan handles), then he didn't like the mange tout (too squeaky), then he didn't like the peppers (too crunchy), and finally he didn't like the nuts (too nutty).  So we were effectively left with chicken and rice.  Of course the rice was home cooked basmati rather than Uncle Ben's Express so that got the chop too (okay this bit is poetic license, it didn't quite get that bad!)

And I miss the once a week ritual of eating all five of my fruit and veg in one sitting.  And hoping that by having fruit salad for pudding I can store up extra fruit n' veg points for other days of the week when I forget to eat more than two or three.  So this works really well and is great for assuaging any giant-chocolate button-snorfing-induced-guilt that may be hanging around.

Your five a day in one healthy meal!

Incidentally, I happened across an article on the Guardian website today that 'analysed' Nigella's eating habits based on her Twitter feed.  Apparently she eats quite unhealthily with a lack of wholegrains and vegetables.  What the author chose not to highlight until right at the end was that she only had the meals that Nigella chose to post to base her opinion on.  Hell, if she read this blog, she'd probably think I lived on nothing but cake and only ate vegetables about once every three months.  What a slanderous judgement to make (although thinking about it, it might actually be true!)  Anyway, if you want to read about how the Domestic Goddess herself indulges her Twitter audience, you can do so here.  Interestingly, there was no mention of the bacon brownies that I know Nigella tweeted about last week...

I adapted the recipe slightly by adding a teaspoonful of ginger which gave a lovely subtle flavour to the leaves of the pak choi.  I also used chilli olive oil instead of vegetable oil - something I always use for stir frying as it adds a little heat to Chinese dishes without blowing your head off.  And finally, I roasted my cashews first as this gives them a more intense flavour and a better crunch.

Ingredients - serves 2

• 2tbsp chilli olive oil (or plain vegetable oil if you prefer)
• 1 red onion sliced
• 1 red pepper , sliced
• 200g mushrooms , sliced
• 2 heads of pak choi , cut into quarters
• 1 garlic clove , crushed
• 1 tsp fresh ginger, grated
• 100g cashews, roasted
• soy sauce , sesame oil, chilli oil to drizzle (optional)

Heat 2 tbsp oil in a wok or large pan. Add the onion and cook for 2 minutes. Add the red pepper and mushrooms and cook for 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the pak choi, ginger and garlic, mix well and cook for 2 more minutes. Finally, add the cashew nuts, mix and serve with a drizzle of soy, sesame oil or chilli sauce if you like.