Enchiladas! Finally!

I mentioned the other day that I'd been meaning to make these butternut squash enchiladas for about 10 days...and last night I finally managed to make them!

The original recipe called for quite a lot of cheese, and browned butter, but I wanted to make it healthier so I left out the cheese and butter, used unsweetened almond milk for the sauce, and instead of tortillas I used Mountain Bread corn wraps (which I get from my local organic supermarket). I also halved the recipe - although I ended up getting a bit overenthusiastic with my squash chopping, so I had some of the filling left over which I'm going to have with pasta for tomorrow's supper. And I got some lovely black kale in my veg box this week (no Veg Box Day post, though, I'm afraid - I got home late on Tuesday night after a book launch party and just chucked everything in the fridge!) so I put some of that into the filling as well.

It wasn't the most attractive of things to photograph...

...but it tasted really good!

On another note, the Christmas lights are up in Ealing. I checked back through last year's posts, and they've been switched on a whole 10 days earlier this year! I suppose it's definitely beginning to look a little bit like Christmas...

Autumn jam-making adventures...

As I mentioned, some of the rhubarb from my parents' garden found its way into a crumble, and some was destined for jam. A few months ago my mum was given a jar of homemade rhubarb and ginger jam by a neighbour, and it was so good that she had to find out how to make it. A quick Google came up with this ridiculously easy BBC Good Food recipe - you just chop up the rhubarb and stem ginger and put it in a big bowl with the jam sugar, lemon zest and juice and grated fresh ginger, and then once the rhubarb has released all of its lovely juice and the sugar has dissolved a bit (we left ours overnight) you just boil it all up until it reaches setting point. Easy! And absolutely gorgeous.

 

Then we used more of our home-grown apples to make our favourite autumnal jam - caramel apple. This is the third year we've made it and it's always good (you can see the 2010 and 2011 batches here and here!) and again it's a really easy one to make. Apples, two types of sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, and boil boil boil. The original recipe calls for pectin but we never bother with that - we just boil it up until it reaches setting point, as apples have plenty of pectin in them.

Two lovely jam recipes to see us into Autumn...and the weather definitely seems to have turned autumnal as well!

Veg Box Day: 21/08/12

I had an amazing weekend - a wedding on Saturday, a country show featuring cider, ice cream, big pigs and The Wurzels on Sunday, and as I'd also taken Monday off work we headed down to gloriously sunny Lyme Regis for lunch and more ice cream.

But more of that later! Yesterday was veg box day, and here's what I got...

...salad leaves, spring onions, portobello mushrooms, charlotte potatoes, cherry tomatoes, carrots and the biggest pointed cabbage I've ever seen!

I also finally got round to buying myself a salad spinner - all the things like salad leaves, spinach, rocket and watercress that come in the veg box need washing, and until now I've been washing them in the sink and then using industrial-sized volumes of kitchen roll to attempt to dry them. But now I have this!

Of course I had to get an expensive one (well, it was more than the flimsy £5.99 ones in the cheapo kitchen shop, anyway) because I only wanted a small one. This one fits in the fridge (if you store your salad in the spinner it keeps longer, apparently) and it's solid and the plunger on top locks flat onto the lid so it's really easy to store (very important in my tiny kitchen).

So supper last night was a salady affair - some of my freshly washed leaves with grated carrot, toasted pine nuts, new potatoes, a hard-boiled egg and a dressing made from tahini, lemon juice and a bit of water. I'll have to think of something to do with that cabbage now!

Cat and the Cream cupcakes...

Can I just take a minute to say OH. MY. GOD...

That, my friends, is a banana, walnut and chocolate chip cupcake with butterscotch icing from Cat and the Cream. Not only is it utterly delicious, it's also vegan and wheat-free (they don't use products containing gluten either, but can't legally label their food as gluten-free or coeliac-friendly as they don't have a specifically dedicated gluten-free kitchen) and they use ingredients that are as natural as possible, like unrefined sugars and nut milks.

I was in Piccadilly earlier and happened to stumble into Whole Foods (whoops...) and then I happened to stumble upon this beautiful range of cupcakes in the chiller cabinet. Look at the cute little container - perfect for keeping your cupcake in pristine condition!

There were all sorts of amazing flavours, but I chose just the one - I'll definitely be going back to try some of the others, though! The cake was quite dense, but that worked with the banana bread feel - I was tempted by the 'pure chocolate' cupcake so I'll have to try that one next and see what their chocolate cake is like! And the icing was gorgeous - so often buttercream can be really sickly but even this butterscotch version wasn't too sweet and it wasn't at all cloying.

They were quite expensive, £2.69 each, but if you're vegan or wheat-free and you want a seriously incredible indulgent treat, I'd get my hands on one of these if I were you! I'm now trying to work out how to get back to Whole Foods to pick up a selection to take down to Somerset for my family next Friday...

Amazing fish pie...

I made this fish pie when I was at my parents' last week, and it was amazing firstly because it tasted gorgeous (I used ordinary cod, smoked cod, prawns and peas, but you could use haddock or any white fish, or salmon even) and secondly because it was completely gluten- and dairy-free! I based the recipe loosely on good old Delia, just to get an idea of cooking times really, but it's obviously nothing like Delia's fish pie. Here's what I did...obviously if gluten and dairy aren't a problem for you, you can just use 'normal' ingredients! It sounds quite involved but it's really easy and it's a lovely thing to do if you've got a Saturday night in.

Fish pie

Serves 4 greedy people (like me and my family) or probably 6 normal people

2 smoked cod fillets
2 plain cod fillets or loins
1 pint non-dairy milk (I used unsweetened almond milk)
About 300g raw king prawns
3 tablespoons rice flour (or other gluten-free plain flour)
1-2 tablespoons sunflower oil
Large handful parsley, chopped
Large handful frozen peas
About 1kg floury potatoes, peeled and chopped into 2" chunks
About 1 tablespoon Pure sunflower spread
Big splash of non-dairy milk or soya cream
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 200C.
2. Place the fish fillets into your ovenproof serving dish and pour over the pint of milk. Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes until just opaque.
3. Lift the fish out of the milk and place on a plate to cool slightly, then sieve the milk into a jug.
4. When the fish is cool enough to handle, remove any skin and bones and place in large chunks back into the serving dish, along with the prawns and peas. Season (not too much salt as the smoked fish may be quite salty).
5. Make the sauce by combining the flour and oil in a pan to make a roux. Cook for 1-2 minutes on a medium heat, then remove from the heat and add the milk you poached the fish in. Whisk to get rid of any lumps, then return to a low heat and whisk until the sauce thickens. Season with pepper and stir in the chopped parsley. Pour the sauce over the fish and leave to stand.
6. Make the mashed potato by putting the chopped potato in a large pan, covering with water and boiling until tender. Drain and mash with the Pure and a splash of non-dairy milk or soya cream. Season.
7. Top the pie with the mashed potato, fluffing up the surface with a fork. Bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes, until the top is golden brown.

Amazing yogurt and tahini dressing

The other night, I made this aubergine salad for supper and it was lovely - but what was really lovely was the yogurt and tahini dressing that went with it. The amounts in the recipe made a whole jam jar's worth of dressing, so last night I had it with roasted carrots, potatoes and chickpeas and I think it was even nicer having been in the fridge for a couple of days!

It's creamy and garlicky and lemony, and there's quite a kick from the cayenne pepper (I added a good pinch, but you could obviously use as much or as little as you liked) and it's ridiculously easy to make. You can also make it as low-fat as you like by using fat-free yogurt - I actually used some plain soya yogurt that I had in the fridge and it was fab and dairy-free to boot. I reckon it'd be amazing with grilled fish, or any kind of roasted vegetables, or a peppery rocket and watercress salad.

Gluten-free vegan peanut butter cookies

I do like a bit of peanut butter. Recently I was discussing peanut butter with some friends (mainly the controversial issue of whether to butter one's toast before spreading it with peanut butter - I say absolutely not!) and the subject of Meridian's no added salt or sugar peanut butter came up. Apparently it's the best there is! So of course I went out and bought some...and then wondered what to do with the half-jar of Whole Earth (which might be organic but has added oil and salt) sitting in my kitchen.

I had a bit of a Google for peanut butter cookie recipes, but most of them seemed to include a ton of sugar, or sugary things like maple syrup. So in the end I totally made up my own recipe, and I was amazed to find that it worked really well! I made them gluten-free because I fancied using buckwheat flour and I thought 'in for a penny, in for a pound, let's make them totally GF!' And they happen to be vegan as well. They're seriously easy and really tasty. I'll definitely be making them again!

Gluten-free vegan peanut butter cookies

Makes around 20 cookies

1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 cup Doves Farm GF plain flour (or ordinary flour)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 ripe banana
1/2 cup (around 130g) peanut butter

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and line a baking tray with baking parchment.
2. Mix the flours and baking powder together in a bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, mash the banana well, then stir in the peanut butter until well combined.
4. Tip the flour mix into the peanut butter and banana, and stir together to form a dough.
5. Break off pieces of dough and roll into balls about 1" across. Place on the baking tray and flatten with the back of a fork.
6. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until golden brown.

Weird Food: chia seeds

I've been reading about chia seeds on food blogs and healthy eating blogs for ages now, but I hadn't tried them until this week. Until quite recently they were reasonably difficult to get hold of in the UK - or they were expensive, with the only bags I'd seen being massive £12 ones in Holland & Barrett. But now they do little 100g bags for around £2, and so I decided to take the plunge and buy some.

I was inspired by Laura's raspberry chia seed jam, and so that was the first thing I tried. It wasn't really a recipe - I just mashed about 100g of raspberries, added 5g of chia seeds, and stirred it all together. Left in the fridge overnight, the chia seeds did their thing and made it quite gelatinous in texture, very much like a slightly runny jam. It's delicious - I didn't add any sugar because I had gorgeous sweet British raspberries, but it is quite tart so if you decide to have a go you might want to add a bit of icing sugar to taste.

I think I'm going to try mixing some chia seeds with Kara chocolate coconut milk (one of my new obsessions - it makes the most incredible hot chocolate!) for a chocolate pudding-type thing...we'll see how that goes!

Veg Box Day: 26/06/12

I've got another really summery veg box this week, with wild rocket, vine tomatoes, a big red pepper, a pointed cabbage, a bunch of carrots and a bag of new potatoes. I've got a bit of a new potato mountain at the moment, as I haven't really used the ones from my last box, but I've made an effort over the last few days with a bright green spinach and potato frittata (which was totally excellent after Monday night's run)...

...and a lunchtime salad with new potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, black olives, tuna and a bit of mayo. I'm going to have some of the rocket with the rest of the salad for tomorrow's lunch, and I think the tomatoes might go into a pasta sauce tomorrow evening. For the first time in ages I actually have a reasonably quiet weekend coming up, so I'm hoping I'll be able to do lots of cooking!

Veg Box: 12/6/12

Another lovely summery veg box!

This week's box had spring onions, cucumber, a salad bag, courgettes, broad beans, new potatoes and some very exciting carrots with their green tops still on. It's a shame it still isn't salad weather! We've had horrible drizzle and murk for ages now.

Nevertheless, I decided to make something summery with some of my veg, and eventually settled on baked falafel, which I had with a yogurty cucumbery raita/tzatziki/dip/sauce thing (just some fat free Greek yogurt with grated cucumber, garlic and salt and pepper).

I based my falafel on this recipe from The Intolerant Gourmet, which I used over the Jubilee weekend with great success, but as usual I just had to change it a bit! I wanted to use some of my veg box produce, so along with the chickpeas I added some of the carrots and broad beans, and as I didn't have any herbs I threw some of the carrot tops in as well for some extra greenery. I got 16 good-sized falafel out of my batch of mixture and I can't wait to have the rest for Thursday's post-haircut (my God do I ever need a haircut...) supper!

Baked carrot and broad bean falafel

100g carrots, chopped
50g broad beans (that's the beans themselves, out of their pods)
5 or 6 spring onions, roughly chopped
Handful of parsley/mint/coriander/carrot tops/whatever leafy herbs you have
400g tin chickpeas, drained
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce or mango chutney
Whatever spices you fancy - cumin, coriander, paprika etc etc
4 tbsp chickpea flour (gram flour)
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 200C.
2. Put the carrots, beans and spring onions into a food processor (one of those little ones will do, that's what I have!) and pulse until finely chopped.
3. Add the chickpeas, herbs, garlic, oil, sauce and spices and blitz until smooth (like really chunky houmous).
4. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and add the chickpea flour and seasoning, and mix to form a dough (it will be slightly sticky but you should be able to handle it easily).
5. Line a baking tray with baking paper/greaseproof, then make little 2" patties with the falafel mix and place them on the lined tray.
6. Bake for 30 minutes, turning them over halfway through the cooking time so they brown on both sides.
7. Serve warm or cold - they'd be gorgeous in wraps with a spicy sauce!

Jubilee eating!

As you might expect, I've done rather a lot of cooking, baking and eating over the holiday weekend!

First off, I made coconut meringues on Saturday, to take to yesterday's barbecue. The thought of throwing away a load of egg yolks always puts me off making meringues, but now some genius people have come up with the idea of selling cartons of egg whites! Fabulous. I used this recipe by Miss Igs and it was perfect...

Then I was inspired to make some scones by a conversation I saw on Facebook! I used Delia's classic recipe, but having read on the egg white carton that you can use three tablespoons of that to replace a whole egg, I decided to give that a go, and I didn't have buttermilk so I just used almond milk instead. And the scones were lovely! I had one as a cheeky afternoon tea, with some caramel apple jam, and froze the rest (I got eight scones out of my dough rather than the 10 Delia suggests).

And then there was the barbecue itself! We had salads, beetroot and carrot slaw, grilled halloumi, veg kebabs (and some lamb bits and sausages) and I made baked falafel. Everything was totally delicious and we even had red, white and blue crisps!

Portobello mushroom and wet garlic risotto

'Wet garlic'...it doesn't exactly sound appealing, does it. But it is! Wet garlic is very young garlic, harvested before the bulbs form. I'd never tried it before it turned up in this week's veg box, but like wild garlic leaves it has a fresh, garlicky flavour and it behaves rather like a leek, with the slices breaking up into little rounds when you cook them.

As I had some lovely fat portobello mushrooms as well, I decided risotto was the only way to go. Mushroom risotto is never going to photograph well, but here we go...!

I don't really have a recipe for risotto - I just do the usual thing of frying up some onions (and in this case the mushrooms and garlic) and adding some wine, which I let bubble until reduced, and then I add the rice (80g per person) and stir it around for a minute or so before adding stock bit by bit and letting it all soak into the simmering rice. I don't add any cheese or cream if I'm cooking for myself, as the starch in the rice makes the whole thing lovely and creamy anyway, but as a special treat a handful of grated Cheddar, hard goat's cheese or Parmesan would be lovely scattered over the top! My risotto was topped off with some ribbons of basil and lots of black pepper.

Veg Box: 29/5/12

Definitely not soggy this week! And how lovely and summery does all of this look?

I've got butternut squash, beetroot, beans, mushrooms, vine tomatoes, onions, potatoes and some bonus free wet garlic (the leeky-looking things on the top there). One thing I do love about Riverford is that if you get one of the smaller boxes, they don't give you whacking great squash or tons of beetroot or whatever - it's all in nice manageable amounts.

Having said that, a weekend away and a few nights out meant that I still had squash, potatoes and beetroot left over from my last box! So I decided to have a bit of a clearout, and I roasted up a big tray of veg - the beetroot, potatoes and squash, plus some onion and some cherry tomatoes and carrots that were hanging around in the fridge. I like to give my veg a quick steam in the microwave before I roast them, because that way they take less time in the oven (definitely a bonus in today's warm and humid weather) and they all cook evenly with fluffy insides and crispy edges. Yum yum! So supper was a big bowl of veg, topped with some basil and a little bit of super-spicy Reggae Reggae barbecue sauce...

I also couldn't resist showing you this photo from earlier - I popped into central London for a meeting and Regent Street is all decked out in Union Flags ready for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee! I have to admit I'm getting sucked into the whole Jubilee celebration thing and am planning to go to a few events over the weekend - and of course, I can't wait for a whole four days off!

Unexpected fish!

That's not a phrase you hear often, is it!

An email landed in my inbox today from a colleague who only works a couple of days a week, saying that she'd bought some bream from the (excellent) fishmonger down the road from the office, but had forgotten to take them home with her, and would anyone like them? So three of us nabbed a fish each, and this is what I did with mine...

The easiest thing to do would have been to bake the fish in the oven, but as the great British weather has decided that this week it's summertime I thought it was too hot to turn the oven on (I know, last week I was moaning about the rain making my veg box soggy and this week it's too hot...!) so I cooked my bream in a pan with just a tiny bit of oil. I had some beetroot and some very elderly watercress in the fridge from the aforementioned veg box, so I shaved off slices of the beetroot with a peeler and left them for a few minutes to marinade in a little bit of balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, and then I made a sort of watercress pesto with toasted sunflower seeds, garlic and a bit of olive oil. It all went very nicely together, I thought!

Soggy veg - Veg Box Day 15/5/12

Thanks to the marvellous spring weather we've been having, my veg box was a little bit wet by the time I got home! No harm done, though, and inside was a punnet of cherry tomatoes, four onions, a butternut squash, a bag of potatoes, watercress, summer greens and four massive beetroot!

I was heading to the pub on Tuesday night for a meeting about the Ealing Eagles 10K run, which (in case anyone fancies signing up) is happening on Sunday September 9th in Gunnersbury Park, so I didn't have time to make anything spectacular with my veg, but I did put together a quick and delicious pasta sauce using one of the onions, a small tin of chopped tomatoes, some of the cherry tomatoes, a few black olives, a small tin of tuna and a big handful of the purple sprouting broccoli that I nicked from my parents' garden at the weekend. It was gorgeous!

Holidays, random acts of culture and gluten-free pastry...

Crikey, I've neglected my blog for a rather long time! First I had a particularly nasty bout of tonsillitis, and then (on a happier note) I went off down to Somerset for a week's relaxation and pampering with my family. It was my sister's birthday last Wednesday so the week was packed with celebrations and days out and, obviously, lots of food and drink.

We went to rainy Lyme Regis (where my sister comprehensively kicked my bum in a hilarious moose-shooting arcade game...)

...and rainy Bath, where we went to see the Roman Baths and where I found the Oasis butterfly-print pleated dress I'd been lusting after for months HALF PRICE. I actually jumped up and down and squealed in the shop.

Then, on Friday, the weather suddenly improved and we wanted to get out and enjoy the sunshine. Reading the local paper the evening before, I'd spotted that Antony Gormley's Field for the British Empire was on display at Barrington Court, a mere 15 minutes or so from my parents' house. None of us had ever been to Barrington Court before, despite having lived so close by for 25 years, and I'm so glad we went! The house and gardens were beautiful, and the exhibition (which unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos of) really was quite spellbinding. According to one of the guides, the most common reaction from children on seeing the rooms full of little clay figures was 'Meerkats!', while several adults had remarked that it reminded them of concentration camps. It's amazing how different people react to things!

In other exciting news, the lovely girls from Domestic Sluttery very kindly asked me to do a guest post on gluten-free cookery, and I had a great time coming up with a truly simple and delicious recipe for gluten-free shortcrust pastry. My sister was absolutely over the moon with the curried potato pasties I made, and we're already planning lots of other ways to use the pastry!

And finally, here's a photo of the gorgeous Lily of the Valley that's growing right outside my mum and dad's front door!

Veg Box Day: 24/4/12

This fortnight I've got spring onions, asparagus (yay!), carrots, potatoes, a red pepper, more purple sprouting broccoli (yay again!) and courgettes - I was meant to have portobello mushrooms but the quality wasn't up to scratch this week so they swapped them for the courgettes. Fine with me!

I seriously need to start finding things to do with potatoes, mind you. I don't really eat potatoes very often but I'm going to have to seeing as I now get a bag every fortnight! I've got a bag and a half to use now! To that end, I decided to make a warm Nicoise-inspired salad for tonight's supper, with tuna, spring onions, asparagus, potatoes, black olives and a hard-boiled egg. With a drizzle of balsamic vinegar it was absolutely delicious, and definitely a great way to use a couple of those spuds!

Baked oatmeal adventures!

A few weeks ago I posted about making raspberry baked oatmeal to fuel my half marathon efforts, and since then it's become my new favourite breakfast, so I thought I'd do a proper post with my made-up baked oatmeal recipe.

I based the recipe on one I found online, but only very loosely - most of the baked oatmeal recipes I've seen seem to involve tons of sugar, or cream, or both, and while I'm sure they're lovely and very indulgent, that's not quite what I want as a healthy everyday breakfast! So I took the basic proportions and went from there, and this is what I do:

Baked Oatmeal


1 ripe banana
1 large egg
1 1/4 cups almond milk
2 cups oats (I use a mixture of oats and millet flakes)
Whatever fruit and add-ins you fancy (so far I've done one with raspberries, one with an extra chopped banana and some unsweetened shredded coconut, and my latest is blueberry)

1. Mash the banana in a mixing bowl using a fork, then use said fork to beat in the egg and almond milk.
2. Add the oats and whatever else you're using and mix everything together.
3. Bake at 190C for around half an hour, until the edges are golden brown and it's firm in the centre.
4. Serve warm with milk and extra fruit, or cold as a portable snack (it's like a flapjack or a piece of dense banana bread). Yum yum!  


This is today's blueberry version, straight from the oven...

I cut each batch into five lots of four squares, to make breakfasts for the whole working week. As a very rough guide, if you're interested in the calorie contents then the basic recipe with just berries as an addition is around 200 calories per serving, and for the one I made with the extra banana and coconut (about 1 tablespoon of coconut for the whole batch) it was around 230 calories per serving.

Storm clouds gather over London...

...and I make a frittata.

Seriously, the weather is getting beyond a joke. We might have had the driest two winters on record, and we might be in the middle of a drought with hosepipe bans and all the rest of it, but you wouldn't have thought it judging by this week's weather! I couldn't believe the sky on my way home this evening...

The photo doesn't even do it justice...the bit of sky below the clouds was green. Just after I got to the station, there was a massive hail-and-thunder storm!

There's only one thing to do on a day like this, and that's to get home as quickly as possible, pour yourself a glass of wine, and make something nice to eat. I've been rather busy this week so I've still got quite a lot of veg box veg in the fridge that needs using before Tuesday, so I decided to make a frittata, which I baked in the oven. I totally made the recipe up, but it went something like this...

Baked vegetable frittata

Serves 2

1 small onion, sliced
1 small potato, cut into dice
Six or so cherry tomatoes, halved
1 small chunk of frozen leaf spinach (you know, if you buy the bags it comes in those chunks...), thawed and patted dry
3 eggs
150ml almond milk (or regular milk)
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 200C and spray a small baking dish with oil.
2. Microwave the potato chunks with a little water for about a minute and a half, until softening. Add to the baking dish along with the onion, and roast in the oven for about 15 minutes until just starting to brown.
3. Add the cherry tomatoes to the dish and roast for another 10 minutes.
4. Beat the eggs and milk together in a bowl, then stir in the spinach and season.
5. Once the tomatoes have started to bubble, pour the egg mixture into the baking dish, return to the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes until just firm in the centre.
6. Allow to cool for 5 minutes before serving with salad (and I added a blob of mango chutney!)

Carrots, chickpeas and solving a kitchen problem...

My kitchen is tiny. Not quite as tiny as Rachel Khoo's teeny weeny Paris kitchen (if she didn't fold her bed away in the morning she'd practically be cooking in bed) but it's small. There's just about enough room for one person to cook and one person to stand by the fridge drinking a glass of wine and passing the odd ingredient over from the fridge. And, as I've been here three and a half years and have accumulated various bits and pieces in that time, every now and then I encounter a serious storage problem. I've recently acquired a couple of new mugs, and there was literally nowhere for them to go, and the top of the microwave was absolutely covered in stuff too - something had to be done!

Then I happened to see a post on Laura's blog, Keeping Healthy Getting Stylish, where she mentioned using a cheap wooden shoe rack as kitchen storage. I did some online research and some measuring, and discovered I'd be able to fit a shoe rack on top of the (excellent) custom-made set of shelves my dad designed for me when I moved in. Brilliant!

It looks fab and it frees up tons of space elsewhere. In an ideal world I'd do a DIY job on the shoe rack and the shelves and paint them a lovely sage green or a nice warm cream to match the kitchen tiles, but that's for another weekend!

This evening's supper was just as successful - yet more veg box produce used, and yet another recipe from River Cottage Veg Every Day tried and tested! This time it was Hugh's spicy carrot and chickpea pitta pockets - lovely buttery carrots with lots of cumin and orange, served in Hugh's case with pittas and in my case with homemade wholemeal flatbreads.

I used this recipe for the breads, halving it and using wholemeal plain flour, and I didn't really change much about the carrot recipe except for halving it, which made a good main course-sized portion (it'd easily serve two as part of a mezze spread or as lunch) and using less butter and oil than directed (probably a quarter of the original recipe). I was a bit worried about the carrots burning, so I put a lid on the pan and sort of braised the carrots, shaking the pan every now and then, until they were tender.

It was seriously lovely, and definitely one I'll make again - it was so easy. I'm not even a fan of oranges, but I went with it and the zest and juice went perfectly with the carrots and cumin. Yum yum!