Accidental quiche

I remembered late in the day that I was supposed to bring some food to Monday night's board meeting - an appetizer or dessert, because it was at 6.30 and some people wouldn't have had time to eat. There wasn't much in the fridge, I didn't even have a lemon handy to make scones or muffins, and I knew someone else had already taken the chocolate option.

So my brain, as it sometimes does, lit upon probably the most complicated thing possible and decided that was the obvious choice. I would use that lone zucchini (courgette) in the salad drawer and the leftover cream from a cake at the weekend, and make mini quiches.

My brain also decided it was too good for recipes, or couldn't find anything just exactly right, and so thought it would wing it. This could have been disastrous, but by happy chance things came together deliciously and I ended up with some very nice mini quiches.

But then we had nothing for our own dinner, so I decided we should keep the quiches because there weren't enough for everyone at the meeting, and that I'd make some healthy blueberry muffins (frozen blueberries) instead. I ended up bringing seven quiches and some slightly odd-looking mini muffins (all the blueberries stuck to the pan), and I'm sure everyone thought I was a terrible overachiever.

Apologies for the approximate quantities, but I eyeballed the liquids.


Zucchini (and ham) mini-quiches

Pastry:
1 cup (200g) flour (I used white wholewheat flour)
Pinch salt
4oz (100g) butter (I used some spreadable Dairygold I had in the fridge, which might be what led to the very soft texture of this dough)
1 tablespoon cold water

Filling:
1 zucchini (or any vegetable, probably)
About half a small onion
A slice of deli ham (if you have it, or want it)
Some feta, if you had any, would be a delicious addition
Two eggs
A large splash of heavy cream (if you happen to have some hanging around)
As much milk as it takes to get what looks like the right amount of filling
A good grating of parmesan
A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Turn your oven to 400F.

I made the pastry in the food processor. Put the flour, salt, and butter in the bowl, and pulse until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the water through the tube, pouring slowly. You might need a little more - I was surprised that the dough came together after just one tablespoon. Remove from the processor, smush into a ball, and chill in the fridge for half an hour, if you can spare it.

Meanwhile, finely chop the onion and cut the zucchini into 1/4-1/2 inch cubes. Saute them in a little olive oil until soft but not mushy - maybe five minutes over medium-low heat. Cut your ham into little squares and mix it in with the vegetables. If you have some feta, put that in too.

Mix the eggs, cream, and parmesan in a measuring jug, and then add as much milk as you think will make enough filling. I had perhaps 16oz (500ml) in the end. Better to have too much than too little. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Take the pastry out of the fridge and knead it a little on a floured surface, before rolling it out as thinly as you can. This dough seemed scarily soft to me as I rolled it out, but it stayed together and turned out deliciously. I don't know if it was the flour or the butter or the weather that did it, but I can't swear yours will be just this good.

Use a cookie cutter or a drinking glass to cut circles to fit your well-greased muffin tin or mini-pie pan (I used my mince-pie tin, imported at vast expense from Ireland, but they probably sell something similar here too). Put a circle of dough in each hole, pressing it out to fit the shape, and then prick the base all over with a fork.

(I was afraid at this juncture that I'd made a huge mistake because now my filling would run through the holes, but that didn't seem to happen.)

Bake the pastry cases blind (that just means with nothing in them) for 10-15 minutes at 400F. Take them out when they're still pale - don't wait for them to be golden brown. Take it out and (carefully - remember how hot the tin is) spoon an equal amount of the zucchini mixture into each piecrust. Then pour over the thick and creamy egg mixture to fill each one up.

Bake for about 20 minutes more, turning the oven down a bit to 375F or so, until the top is set and starting to turn brown. Cool before serving, but they're delicious still a little warm.

I had a bit more filling than pastry, so I made three muffin-sized crustless quiches with the rest.

If I'd known how well they were going to turn out, I'd have taken more photos

The momentous and the mundane

Oh, dinner, how you tease me with your needing to be made, every single damn night, unless I was organized and made lots the night before, which works well with winter dinners like chilli and lasagne but somehow rarely manages to cut it in the summer, when I have all these leaves and tomatoes and things.

I don't know what we're eating, don't bug me. There's hours yet to dinner time. Well, one hour, maybe. Dash has a baseball game to which his father will take him, and Mabel and I are on track for an early bedtime, seeing as how yesterday was one of those thankfully-not-common nights when I held her for several hours because she has a phlegmy cough (sorry, were you eating?) and was borderline feverish and I felt she needed to be propped up in bed but couldn't engineer that unless she was actually on me. Which is not so conducive to me sleeping either. It was like old times with a snurfly newborn. Except she didn't nurse. Which really is quite lovely and amazing, because it would have been a lot more tedious this time last year (or even a few months ago) when she'd have been latched on all night as well.

And you know, the funny thing is that she seems (seems, I say, not counting any chickens) to be dropping the morning nurse as well, the only one we have left, the one she was so adamant to keep. A few non-standard mornings have distracted her from remembering at the point when she normally would, and it's possible - just possible - that we will have weaned at four-and-a-half after all. Which is nicely matching her brother's age of weaning, and let me emphasize this may mean that I will soon be no longer lactating for the first time in seven years. Seven straight years. That's a long time. For all I know, my boobs might schlurrpp themselves into tiny fried eggs when they figure out what's going on. Or, more probably into the sort of things I could helpfully roll up before stuffing into a bra. Sigh.

This is not what I was going to say, but is it ever? Stream of consciousness, baby.

Oh, I know.

There are only thirteen and a half days left of school before summer. Hold me.

Gratuitous photo of Mabel, hiding around the corner the more safely to watch a scary part of The Princess Bride.

Spanish-ish dinner

I spent a year in Spain as a student, have I mentioned that before? I must have. I usually describe it as a year "studying", with heavy air quotes, as it took place between my second and third year of college and sufficed to turn my plain old BA degree into a much more high-falutin' BA (Int.). They hadn't quite ironed out the process of the Erasmus year at my home university, though, and told us frankly before we left that though we were quite entitled to take the end-of-year exams in Spain and count them towards our final degree, we'd in all probability do better at home (where our Spanish-literature courses were taken through English, for one thing).

How they thought this would entice us to actually attend classes all year I don't know. I was the most studious of the four from our University, and even I only attended everything I was meant to in the first term, about half my classes after Christmas (the 9.30am modern-literature class was first to go), and nothing at all by summer term. When some members of our department came out to see how we were getting on, at Easter, only one of us was even in town* - and she was the one who'd barely gone to a class at all. She was running a lucrative and enterprising English-language teaching business, but had to employ her considerable acting talents and bullshitting skills to convince the visitors that we were all going to class every day. She may have been rumbled by the end of the night, but at least she got a fancy dinner out of it. (*One had a green card and had gone back to America "early" for the summer, I was sightseeing in Lisbon with some friends, and the third was also in Portugal, busking with an American mate and two guitars.)

Anyway. What I did learn that year, apart from a lot about beer, was to cook for myself. It was the first time I'd lived away from home, and once I stopped going to the university cafeteria, a few of us used to make dinner together every afternoon. We'd make an outing of it and vote on our choice, which almost always came down to creamy pasta or tomatoey pasta. Gradually, however, under the tutelage of someone's Spanish housemates, our repertoire broadened and we learned to make arroz a la cubana, tortilla de patatas, and lentejas (that's lentils). As well as calimocho. (That's cheap red wine mixed with cola.)

Towards the end of the year, when the other foreign students were studing for exams, my fellow Dubliners and I (except the one who'd gone to San Francisco in February) were finding new and delightfully empty bars. One was a little tapas bar called El Cielo (Heaven) where on a Monday night we'd be the only patrons, and the barman (Jesús, of course) would give us a little lesson on how to suck our red wine through the slice of chorizo already in our mouth, to marry the two flavours in the most intense way possible. (We never paid for real tapas, because we had no money to spare. So the free stuff at the bar was all we got, and since this was the centre of Spain rather than the south, a few slices of chorizo and some bread was as much as there was to pick at. If Jesús was feeling generous, he'd even let us have some shavings of jamón serrano and maybe a black olive or two while he polished all the glasses for the second time that day.)

Spanish chorizo is hard to find in the US, especially when people often take chorizo to mean the spicy Mexican sort of uncooked sausage. Spanish chorizo is a type of salami, garlicky and paprika-y, cured and dried and ready to eat - though of course you can fry it up to release some of that delicious fat and make it even tastier. I hadn't cooked with it for an age, but I came across some in our local supermarket last week and decided to invest a few dollars in some memories. It has worked out very well.

Egg and chorizo scramble

First, I fried up a little as a background accent to a pasta and kale dinner. Next I used a little with a scrambled egg and some spinach leaves in a pita pocket for a two-minute lunch. And tonight I used a bit more with chicken and all the spanish flavours I could think of, and the aromas as it simmered transported me back to Valladolid and apparently inspired all that remeniscence you just waded through. So I decided to share it with you, in all its glorious inauthenticity.

About an inch and a half of Spanish chorizo, diced
1 sweet onion, chopped
2 large cloves of garlic (or more), finely chopped
1 chicken breast
3 tablespoons of flour
About half a teaspoon of paprika
1 red bell pepper, chopped
Red wine, about half a glass, perhaps, if you can spare it
1 can of white beans, drained and rinsed
1 can of fire-roasted tomatoes
Good shake of dried oregano
Salt and pepper

First I fried the diced chorizo in a dry pan. Then I stirred in the onion and garlic and let it all soften in the chorizo fat. I put that much in a bowl to one side and added a bit of olive oil to the pan. I mixed the flour and paprika on a plate and tossed the chicken in it before browning it in the pan, and then threw the onion and chorizo back in, along with the red bell pepper. Once all that was hot again, I sloshed in some red wine and inhaled the memories as the alcohol bubbled off. Finally, I added the beans and tomatoes, and some water - about half the capacity of the tomato tin, to pick up the leftovers in there. I sprinkled over a good shake of oregano, some black pepper and about a 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and some red pepper flakes for a little heat. Then I let it all simmer for 20 minutes until the liquid had thickened into a delicious sauce.

You could have it on rice or even with mash, but we just ate it with crusty bread as we had some left over and it works well to mop up the sauce. You could use pork instead of chicken, but you'd probably want to simmer it all for longer, depending on the cut. I won't say it's authentic Spanish food, but it tasted good. I served it on top of some baby spinach leaves, just for extra vitamins and some green.

Of course, if you're not trying to stretch one chicken breast into a healthy dinner for four**, you could just fry the chorizo with the garlic and skip straight to the bread part and put all the wine in your glass, and experiment with sucking the wine through the chorizo in your mouth, and that would be transcendentally glorious too.


** No, of course my children didn't eat this. Even if they didn't have stomach viruses, there's no way on earth they would eat this. So in our house, that's dinner for the grown ups for two nights.

Feast report

Today we went to the zoo. Surprisingly, quite a lot of people seemed to think Black Friday would be a good zoo day, but the weather was perfect as it so rarely is for the zoo, and we did well. We saw a cheetah and the lions, some distant gorillas and a sad orang-utan (do they ever look otherwise), the reptiles and some indolent sea lions. The absolute highlight, however, was the naked mole rats.

Thanks to this book, which we have from the library, the children had heard of naked mole rats. But when I told Dash we could see them at the zoo, he reacted as if I'd just told him the unicorns would be coming up on the left.

"Ha ha."
"No, really. They're in the small mammal house."
"You're just being silly."
"I promise. They exist."
"Really?"
etc.

When we finally got to the small mammals we had to charge past all the (many and various) tamarins, pausing briefly at the two-toed sloth (who looked like nothing so much as a black labrador poking his nose out from under a comatose afghan hound), to get to the perspex tubes (to simulate tunnels) of naked mole rats. They weren't all that exciting in person, but the children were thrilled by their mere existence.

That's a lion in the distance. Left of the tree. See?

*******

But that's not why I'm here, and that's not why you're here either. You came for the food, didn't you? Well, the food is what you're getting. A report on yesterday, that is.

As we had no company for Thanksgiving, and we don't particularly like turkey, and we don't feel any weight of tradition on this culturally-not-ours day, I usually try to do something different. This year I saw a recipe for ribs, and the photo was so enticing that I decided to pull the slow-cooker out of the enforced retirement it's been in since its disastrous maiden voyage in 2004.

I'm here to tell you that it was a roaring success, and I might have to use the crockpot more often than once every eight years now that I've discovered this.

To accompany, we had baked potatoes and lemony green beans, and a nice shiraz which is probably the wrong thing to go with ribs, but we're not fussy.

Of course, I had to make a pie, even if I am anti-tradition. Apple, if you please. It was delish.

Pastry hearts. Because hearts symbolise Thanksgiving, right?

Then I was left with half an hour to spare and some extra pastry, so I took the half-can of pumpkin that was sitting in the fridge, looked up some recipes, and made mini pumpkin pies too. Mostly because Mabel had announced at her school feast on Tuesday that she loved pumpkin pie. She didn't like mine, of course.

Splats of pumpkin

The jury's still out on these, I admit.

The little things

My aim, as I sit here on Thanksgiving afternoon, is to get the children out of the house with their father so that I can read a book, or write something, or just veg out, under the guise of doing Very Important Cooking That Will Affect Their Dinner. Since it's 2.20pm and Dash is only now, finally getting dressed - at least, I think that's what he's doing upstairs, and the Superman and Spider-Man costumes he was sporting before don't count - it's taken a while to get to this point. But I'm still aiming for it, and at least B is outside supervising Mabel now, as she climbs trees barefoot in a tutu.

The tutu, if I may digress, has become ubiquitous lately. She has one that's almost legitimately skirt-like, and two that came from parties and are really just a lot of tulle on an elastic waistband. I don't really care so long as she has underpants on. She wears different tops and tights or leggings underneath every day, and she will countenance a dress in between times; but no trousers have been worn for months, and jeans are totally verboten.

Personally, I can't imagine life without my jeans. Pry them from my cold dead hands (legs) if you can, but until then I'll be happily denim-clad. Despite all my overthinking, and all the plans I may have for honing the perfect capsule wardrobe for our three weeks of festivities in Dublin, and whatever I end up buying - or planning to buy, or thinking maybe I can buy when we get there - I know that I'll end up packing a selection of jeans (bootleg, flare, skinny), a bunch of tops that all more or less go with the bottoms, a few cosy cardigans, and a dress or two just in case I get the opportunity to wear them. And then I'll end up in the same old jeans and the same comfy shoes 90% of the time anyway, and nobody will notice.

Speaking of which. I was inordinately pleased with myself the other day simply because I employed some shoe polish for its intended purpose and it did what it says on the tin. (Maybe I need to get out more.) But shoe polish is the sort of thing I tend to feel is only necessary for men of a certain age, or people who are a little too fussy. Tim Gunn, for instance, or my father, who has shined his shoes weekly - or perhaps morningly - for his entire life. At home we had a little basket containing polish (black and brown), brushes (one hard and one soft for each colour) and a cloth for final buffing. My dad showed me how to use them many moons ago, and every now and then I'd give my black-or-brown lace-up school shoes or mary-janes with brass buckles a bit of a swipe.

So last Spring I got a pair of blue mary-jane flats that were obscenely comfortable. As soon as sandal weather was over, in about October, I re-embraced them - but was sad to see that all the blue had been scuffed off the tips of the toes. They looked pretty shabby, and I feared that I'd have to abandon them. I wore them anyway, but felt less than - aha! - polished. What to do, I wondered. Was this the untimely end of obscene pedal comfort? And then inspiration struck - polish! I needed shoe polish!

A mere three weeks later, I finally remembered to look for navy shoe polish when we were somewhere that might sell it. And lo, I bought it and used it (because luckily my husband also owns some little shoe brushes and a rag for buffing), and my shoes are like new again. Hooray!

It really is the little things that can make you happy, if you'll let them. So today I'm thankful for shoe polish.

I'm also thankful for my beautiful crazy family, and all the luckiness I have in my life. And the Internet, which has made things much better in many ways than they would otherwise be.

And now Dash is dressed, Mabel is probably ready to come in again, and I have to legitimately busy myself with something to do with pie.

Happy thanksgiving, everyone, whether you celebrate it or not. Thanks for being here.

Fortunately/unfortunately

(Format shamelessly stolen from the children's book of the same name.)

Unfortunately, Mabel decided she didn't want to go to school today.

Fortunately, my husband's job is delightfully flexible, so he was able to stay with her while I set out for the run I had planned for after I dropped her off.

Unfortunately, I only got as far as the end of the road before I ran out of steam, decided fighting with Mabel had sapped the energy from my very bones, and went home again. (There probably wasn't much energy there to begin with.)

Fortunately, this gave me plenty of time for a nice long shower with the new shower gel and to shave my legs for the first time in about a month.

Unfortunately (for Mabel), you don't get to watch TV if you stay home for no good reason.

Fortunately, she just got a belated birthday present of some new Lego, so she was able to entertain herself pretty well all morning.

Unfortunately, I still didn't feel like carting her to the supermarket, so I didn't do the shopping.

Fortunately, I can probably cobble something together for dinner from what we already have, even if it's just (not from a box) mac 'n cheese and roasted broccoli.

Unfortunately, our babysitter can't come this weekend so we're not going to get to see the new Bond film as I was hoping.

Fortunately, her mom sent me the number of a friend who has three daughters who would love to babysit.

Unfortunately, Mabel won't countenance the idea of any other babysitter.

[...Maud bursts into tears at the idea of Daniel Craig carrying on without her...]

Unfortunately, I can't find a picture I wish to endorse here, because his magnetism does not work for me in stills. When I first saw him (in Munich, with bad hair) I couldn't figure out why I found him so attractive, but every time he was on screen my eyes just wouldn't look anywhere else.

If the picture's not working, you can go here and feast your eyes on whichever one you like best.

Fortunately (for you), I got over it and found this one anyway. You're welcome.

Points

In no particular order, to get us past this long weekend and on to the next thing:

I made chana masala and dal again last night for dinner. Delicous, economical, and much less swimming in oil than the takeaway version would be: what's not to love? I'm almost glad our local Indian closed down, if it makes me do this sort of thing. Part of the disappointment of takeout meals, to me, is that they're there and then they're gone. If you make it yourself, the coming-together time, the measuring a spoonful of red powder and a half-spoonful of yellow powder and a tincture of orange this and a grating of yellow that, and frying an onion almost to charring point, makes the whole thing so much more satisfying.

It was 72 degrees today and Mabel was barefoot outside again. She'd just got used to wearing tights and we've probably set ourselves back two weeks now. Tomorrow it will be raining with a predicted high of 55. I think we've seen the last of summer. I've said that before, but I think this is really it.

Dash keeps saying "... and so on, and so on, and so forth." Maybe I can make him say "and forsooth." (He just asked me if there's something called "so-a-hundreth".) I met with his teacher today, who said he's got a great vocabulary, he asks a lot of questions ("Oh, you've noticed that?" I said), and he never lets her get away with anything. That sounds about right, for Mr Heightened Sense of Injustice.

I finally have a lull. It seems like it's been the next thing and the next thing and forsooth (as they don't say), for months now, from starting school to October's trip to Chicago to Halloween to Mabel's birthday to our visitor last week. We don't do anything for Thanksgiving, so beyond roasting a chicken or something that's not really a blip in my planning. I think I might be at the point where I start the Christmas shopping now.

Which really means I'm looking for a new pair of boots and I need to get a haircut. Because until I've sorted myself out I can't begin to shop for other people.

Harvest bounty

When I was cooking for myself, all those years ago when I shared a flat in Dublin, I had a basic repertoire of vegetables. Fresh broccoli, red pepper, onions, and mushrooms were about the size of it, with a few tins of tomatoes or beans, and frozen peas, to augment. Along with a protein and a starch, dinner was made, day in, day out, rain or shine, summer and winter. Those were my basics.

Which is fine, but takes no account for the seasons.

I suppose you can argue that in Ireland nothing local is ever in season anyway, except potatoes and turnips and carrots (and parsnips and spinach and kale and cabbages and rhubarb and gooseberries, perhaps), so perhaps that's why it never even occurred to me to try to eat with the seasons. I'm pretty sure my mother bought the same things regardless of the time of year, too - apart from, say strawberries, which were clearly a summer treat, and new potatoes, likewise. (You always got to make a wish when you ate your first strawberries of the year, or the first anything else, it seemed like. It made it special, even if it was gooseberries.)

Anyone American is probably wondering what on earth a gooseberry is right about now. I'm not sure you get them over here, but they're little hard, smooth, light-green berries with stubble on them, and faint stripes running from pole to pole. You stew them with lots of sugar and stick them under a sweet crumble topping and they still make your mouth pucker with the sourness, but somebody somewhere decided they were a fruit and therefore worthy of dessert. They flourish in the Irish climate in the late summer.

It probably wasn't until we were living in Texas that I noticed certain vegetables were cheaper at particular times of year. The asparagus, for instance, was $3.99 a pound until suddenly, in June, I could get it for $1.99 instead. My inner skinflint rejoiced, a friend mentioned that asparagus was delicous when roasted, and suddenly I had a new favourite veg. I began to pay attention. Watermelons and avocadoes were plentiful all year round because we were so far south, but other produce clearly had its moment in the sun (so to speak).

Nowadays I try to get as much of our greenstuff (and red, yellow, pink, orange, and purple stuff) as I can at the local farmers' market, which runs from late May to late November. This year, with extra inspiration from my new best friend Smitten Kitchen, I've been making an effort to cook seasonally. There was the asparagus and the strawberries, the rhubarb (oh happy day) and the corn, the blueberries (we picked our own) and peaches and zucchini (that's courgette) and summer squash.

Picking blueberries in July

This morning's market was bursting with all my favourite things: red peppers, big sweet onions, broccoli and cauliflower, curly kale, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, roma tomatoes, green, yellow, orange tomatoes; eggplant (that's aubergine) in purple and white, butternut squash, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, and big iconic pumpkins. I didn't buy one of everything, but I bought a bundle.

The last time I was at a farmers' market in Ireland (which was probably also the first time, as they're a bit of a newfangled invention over there), I was delighted - until I discovered that they were selling vegetables grown in Peru and Mexico, to name a couple of venues. It seemed to be more of an outdoor novelty supermarket than what I'd expected - an opportunity for local vendors to sell freshly harvested local produce straight to the customer, cutting out the middleman and passing on both quality and savings. Maybe that's just impossible in Dublin, unless you want a market full of little beyond carrots and spuds. (And great meat, excellent cheese, freshly caught fish... so many opportunities missed.)

So I'm appreciating what we've got here, and enjoying the colours, the flavours, the textures, and the chance to cook with the freshest food I can find. I'll leave the Peruvian asparagus in the supermarket for now.

Seasonal produce

I am here to tell you that if you didn't think you liked eggplant (or aubergine, because we're fancy like that in Ireland) it's because you were doing it wrong. Specifically, like me, you may have never bothered to salt and drain it, because who has time for that sort of thing? People who know how delicious it makes eggplant, that's who. I just recently bothered, for the first time, to take my eggplant out a bit ahead of time - an hour is good, in the morning is great - slice it thickly, and spread the slices out on some kitchen paper. Then I shake salt all over them, both sides, top with more kitchen paper (paper towels, whatever you call 'em), and weigh it all down with a few hefty cookbooks. I just did it now while my waffle popped out of the toaster, and the butter still melted by the time I was done.

Later on, when you put the eggplant into whatever you want - this, perhaps, or just ratatouille, or vegetarian lasagne, which is what I'm planning today - it will turn out to be both chewy and creamy, and a most wonderful vehicle for the garlic that I exhort you to use liberally. If I was Nigella Lawson, the word unctuous would be bursting forth right about now, but I'm not, so I won't go quite that far.

The other thing I've been doing lately is massaging my kale. (I told Facebook about it and got a few entertainingly salacious comments. My work there is done.) From being a person who never even thought about kale to one who decided she didn't like it, I have lately come down heavily in favour of the curly dark-green leaves. It started with this recipe for quinoa salad with kale and cranberries, which I ate for most of the summer. A little fiddly what with the roasting of the walnuts, but totally addictive. You can leave out the shallot (or even the onion) if that's too much trouble, and you won't miss it.

But then I got even lazier, and decided cooking the kale was too much trouble for a salad. And I remembered something a friend had said once, in my pre-kale-eating days (when I was offloading a bunch of donated kale onto her, actually, because I didn't think I'd use it) about massaging kale. How ridiculous, I thought. Maybe you and your kale are on those sort of terms, but I prefer to keep mine at fork's length, thank you. But about a week ago, I googled "massaged kale" and came up with all sorts of perfectly reasonable suggestions. Basically, you put your (washed and de-stemmed) leaves in a bowl with a shake of salt and a sprinkle of oil, and you work it with your hands until the fibres break down, turning this tough saute-only veg into a perfectly nice wilted salad leaf. (I have been told that you can also just leave it alone for an hour or so and the dressing will do the work on its own, but I like instant gratification.)

Then you can put a bit of what you fancy on top and call it salad. Some dried cranberries and a shake of roasted sunflower seeds with a drizzle of red wine vinegar or avocado and lemon juice are two versions I tried last week, but there are a ton of options. I think you need something a little sweet to counterbalance the leaves, but probably just a pinch of sugar or a drop of honey in your dressing would do the trick quite well.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to stop getting hungry again at 2pm when I've had a big bowl of kale salad for lunch at midday. When I find out, I'll let you know, because otherwise it seems like an ideal way to counteract the effects of the muffins.

A cooking sort of day

I was just congratulating myself on finally having children old enough to play nicely together while I whipped up a batch of olive-oil and lime muffins (this recipe, but we were too impatient to wait for a whole cake to bake, hence muffins; mini, even), when things in the next room degenerated into shrieks and I looked in to find the three-year-old naked and the six-year-old throwing small pieces of toys across the floor. Maybe another couple of years, then.

But still. Underpants may come and go, all the pieces will be picked up eventually, and now there's a bag of tangy muffins in the freezer. It was worth it.

Later on, while the children were eating their rudimentary offerings (don't judge me; my husband's away), I accidentally made myself a delicious dinner instead of just heating up the leftovers I'd intended to have. I got carried away and turned the plain broccoli I had been planning into these amazing broccoli fritters (from my favourite food blogger, of course). Mabel had some trees pre-battering, and I was the only person who profited from the fritters - but profit I did, because they were totally worth the extra washing up. I dipped them in Greek yogurt left over from making the muffins, thus making the day's baking and cooking mesh into one delightfully symbiotic relationship. Or whatever you're having yourself, as they say.

So now I am redolent of garlic, because I think a speck flew off when I splatted it in the garlic press, and I hope it's on my t-shirt, which I can take off, rather than my hair, which I was not planning to wash tomorrow. Does garlic brush out?

Speaking of brushing, Mabel let me put her hair in pigtails today for the first time in about two years. Maybe we have a summer of extra cuteness ahead. It might make up for the wanton nakedness and the post-four-pm general awfulness.

Thrifty

I really have to bake something, because I have a playdate coming over this afternoon and it is my God-given duty to provide my friend and her children with something unhealthy but not chocolate to reject/eat, and I spent the morning at the thrift store where I not only picked up some great clothes for Dash to wear some day when he fits size 7s and 8s - so in about five years, then, but I don't care because I got him a very nice Hilfiger shirt for five bucks - but also became a VIP member and started a rewards card, so I think we can say I'm really hardcore now. Now that Mabel's taking a nap, which will only be one hour and no more, I promise on my honour as a mother, I have blogging and baking to do both, at once and simultaneously together at the same time.

I seem to have decided, without actually noticing it happen, to start making all the recipes that I pinned to my Food board on Pinterest instead of just drooling over them, so suddenly I have roasted vegetable soup halfway made and am committed to making kale and quinoa salad with cranberries, of all things, for dinner, or lunch, or some meal when we will feel like eating healthy stuff and I'll be all smug and also boosted in necessary vitamins and minerals and protein and not meat. (I should also mention that I made these sweet-potato and bean burgers the other night and they were quite delicious and I highly recommend them, and who knows, even your children might eat them, not that mine gave them a second glance but I'm sure that's my own fault for doing something wrong at a very early stage in their vital development. Probably that time I dropped them on their heads. Stomachs. Whatever.)

The reason I went to the thrift store was because I had this wonderful idea. Like everyone else in the Western world who has children and lives within 500 miles of IKEA, we have a lot of colourful plasticware, and it's starting to bug me. It doesn't dry properly in the dishwasher, and the plates are getting all scratched from cutting crusts off sandwiches, and despite assuring you all that we had given up sippy cups about a year and a half ago, we haven't really, though technically we have because we mostly use straw cups instead, but it comes to the same thing.

When we're away from home and the kids have to use real crockery and proper glass glasses, nothing terrible happens except that I'm more careful about not letting them wander around with a drink in hand, which is probably a good thing. So I thought, inspired partly by my friend Mrs Quimby who once mentioned that she lets her girls use little thrift-store creamers (milk jugs, that is) to practice pouring, that I would acquire some cheap china and small chunky glasses, and let the kids use those instead of the plastic. They'll think it's exciting, I'll think they're getting civilized, it's a win/win.

So I did, and we will see how it goes. I just hope I can figure out how to get the permanent-marker prices off the tumblers before we start using them.

Thursday dinner: Freezer bounty and a story

I cooked all week, so last night it was time to mine the freezer and see what delights it would provide. In the event, it was the same thing we had from the freezer the last time I did this (though not from the same batch, I promise): red lentil coconut curry.

Microwave, basmati rice, yummy, if un-photogenic, dinner.

So I will tell you a story instead, so you don't feel swindled by today's post.

Mabel's school is a co-operative nursery school, which means it's run by the parents, and most families choose to help out in the classroom one or two days a month. This is a win/win, as far as I'm concerned, because, especially when it's your child's first regular out-of-the-home experience, you really want to stay connected, and informed about what they do all day. And two- and three-year-olds aren't the most reliable of reporters, so asking them what happened at school today does not always elicit factual statements. (Not that five-year-olds are any better. Dash's stock answer to how school was today - already - is a taciturn "Fine.") This way, you have the fun of seeing your child interact with others in a new environment, you help ensure that the child to adult ratio is nice and low (we usually have a ratio of less than four to one in Mabel's classroom), and you get a feel for what exactly they do all morning, as well as getting to know other parents and the staff better than you could any other way.

There are some disadvantages too, but this really wasn't meant to be a dissertation on the pros and cons of co-op schools. My point was that one day a few weeks ago, B was the co-opping parent and I enjoyed a leisurely morning at home. At midday, he and Mabel returned. Somewhat hassled, he plonked a few things on the sideboard before going back out to the car for Mabel, among them a baby doll that had been under his uxter. (That's his armpit, if you don't know.)
"I don't know why this was in the car," he commented.
"Neither do I," I said, taking a quick look at the doll, "considering that's one of the school's babies."

Mabel stoutly denied having smuggled a baby out of school, and B said he hadn't seen her with it. The mystery persisted.

That afternoon we had to go by the school anyway, so I brought the baby back, and one of the teachers enlightened me. "I saw your husband leaving with it under his arm. I did wonder what he was doing..."

Wednesday dinner: Squash and chickpeas with tahini

Finally, you will be excited to hear, I make something that comes from an actual recipe. I felt it had been a pretty meat-heavy week so far, so I picked up a butternut squash with the intention of making this dinner, because everything else in it was in the house already.

Everything else in my modified version of the recipe, that is. And I'd forgotten about the lemon, but luckily I had a half one in the fridge just waiting for its moment to shine.

This is the recipe as I found it. And this is my version.

I tossed the squash in some more of my fancy garlic olive oil before roasting it, because it was quicker than chopping garlic, and there was going to be garlic in the dressing anyway.

I made the dressing as directed, with tahini, lemon juice, olive oil, water, and garlic. (I always have tahini in the frige for sesame noodles, and it keeps forever.) It came together beautifully before maddeningly curdling. This happened the last time too, and I'm not sure what the problem is, unless I just overmixed it. I couldn't fix it, but it tasted fine. If you can think why it would happen, I'd love to hear your theories in the comments.

Tahini, lemon juice, olive oil; pre-mixing

I tossed the drained chickpeas on top of the squash for the last ten minutes or so of roasting, just to warm them up. I left out the red onion, because as we know, I had no onion in the house, and I don't like raw onion anyway. I also left out the parsley or cilantro, which I'm sure is a terrible travesty, but I turned the whole thing with some baby spinach leaves instead, and called it done. I hoped the spinach would wilt a little in the heat of the squash, but maybe I waited a minute or so too long for that to happen. Either way is good, though.

Because I'm Irish, perhaps, and raised according to the liturgy of spud, I think dinner always has to have a starch, even if it's half starch itself like the squash. Last time I made this I used brown rice, but yesterday I decided on quinoa, which made a nicely light but wholesome base for the salad.

The recipe says to serve immediately, but mine sat around for a good 15 minutes waiting for B to arrive - with both beer and wine, so all was forgiven - and it was still delicious. The second half, in the fridge, will also still be deliciously garlicky and is quite addictive, if perhaps a bit on the claggy side.

Tuesday dinner: vaguely Spanish leftovers

The great thing about blogging a week of dinners is that I don't have to think about what I might talk about today. I just upload the photos and get going. And I'm hopeful that by Friday I'll have tons of other interesting things to tell you.

Yesterday was a using-up-leftovers sort of day. I've said before that I hate leftovers, but that's because my mother's attitude to them was to put yesterday's dinner back on a plate and stick it in the microwave for three minutes. This is fine if yesterday's dinner was something gloopy like chilli or curry or stew, but when you've got half a pork chop and a rejected potato and some grey green beans looking back at you for the second time, well, you're not much more likely to eat it today than you were yesterday. I like leftovers if I can do something new with them.

The challenge: a sausage and a half, cooked; half a red pepper; about half a can of fire-roasted tomatoes, decanted; the tail end of a jar of pasta sauce before it went off.

The dilemma: no onion.

So I sweet-talked my friend into bringing an onion with her on a playdate, with tempting mentions of peanut-butter cookies and freshly baked bread. She arrived with two boys, an onion, and freshly baked bread of her own that put mine in the shade. (Which is kind of funny, because it was from a cookbook I had lent her.)

The playdate ended in some amount of chaos when the children broke into opposing factions and started sending raiding parties from one room to the other to purloin soft toys to be taken on either the Animal Train or sent in the Animal Truck (I think; we weren't sure what the difference was, but the Train proponent was adament that the animals were not going on a Truck, and there was some element of (Baby) Animal Hospital going on with the Truck) and there was a lot of shouting and then they went home but were gracious enough not to take the onion back with them.

So I sauteed it in olive oil, with the chopped red pepper and a clove of garlic, tossed in the tomatoes and the pasta sauce, added a drained and rinsed tin of cannellini beans from the storecupboard, sliced up the remaining sausage and stirred it in, seasoned with paprika and oregano, and called the whole thing Spanish.

I wasn't sure what carb to put with this - in Spain they might have had it in a bowl with some amazing bread, or on rice; but my rice is Basmati which didn't seem quite right so I decided to use cous cous for a change. And because it's quick. I sloshed in a glob of fancy garlic olive oil with the water, and it made all the difference.

There were leftovers to the leftovers, despite my best efforts, but in fact the garlic cous cous seemed like such a good idea that I've just polished that off for lunch.

Monday dinner: pizza party

So last night we had the pizza. I asked B if he'd like to write it up as a guest post, since he made it, but he was suddenly and unavoidably attacked by a flock of marauding pterodactyls, and decided not to. (Don't worry. He's fine. Just a flesh wound.)

Our pizza dough recipe is pretty basic, but it seems to work. I reproduce it here as I wrote it up for the cookbook I made for our own use back before I had children, when apparently I had nothing better to do than write my own cookbook:

Makes two medium pizzas:

2 cups flour
1 envelope yeast, either fast-acting or regular is fine (contains 1/4 ounce, 7 grams, or almost a tablespoonful)
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
As much tepid water as it takes to make a soft dough, with a shot of olive oil mixed in - say about 2/3 of a cup in all.

1. Mix the dry ingredients together and gingerly add the water and oil until it's a good consistency.
2. Knead like a maniac for ten minutes.*
3. Leave it in the bowl, covered with a damp teatowel or cling wrap or a plate, in a warmish place for as long as you can - at least an hour. It should double in size.
4. Knock the dough back (i.e. knead it pushing all the air out) and divide in half. You can freeze one half at this stage if you're not making two pizzas tonight. Leave the other half, or the whole lot, to grow some more - at least 20 minutes, but another hour would be fine.
5. Shape and top as desired.

*Here I will note that B likes to demonstrate his upper-body strength and exorcise his stress demons by kneading it by hand. When I make it, I like to demonstrate my mastery of kitchen appliances and my multitasking skills by using the wonderful doughhook on my wonderful stand mixer. Either approach is perfectly fine, but you don't need to let it go for ten minutes if you use the machine.

Ball of dough, defrosted

Usually, pizza is a weekend thing for us, but because I'd already bought the mozzarella, we made it on Monday. I had taken a ball of dough out of the freezer the night before, and out of the fridge at about 3pm, though sooner would have been better in hindsight. When B got home at 5.30, all he had to do was stretch it out a bit - he likes to use the rolling pin, though when I made pizza the previous week I went all artisan and just worked it and flapped it around with my hands instead.

Rollin', rollin', rollin' ...

We used pizza sauce from a jar this time, though often I just take some tinned crushed tomatoes and stir in a heaped teaspoon of pesto. Toppings were some caramelized onion that was sitting around in the fridge just waiting for a good use, fresh red pepper, and sliced ham. And the secret to most delicious homemade pizza, acquired from our friend Mark, is to splash out and use fresh mozzarella. B chops his into little cubes for better coverage - I like the look of large thin discs when I make it.

Observe: jar of sauce; cubes of mozz

That thing it's sitting on is a pizza peel. If you make your own pizza dough, which is a lot thinner and floppier than a pizza base you might buy ready made, you need something like this to slide it into the oven without making a huge mess and some very disappointed diners. If you sprinkle a little cornmeal on the peel before putting the dough onto it, it acts like tiny ball bearings and slides the whole thing beautifully into the oven and onto your pizza stone.

Sorry about the blinding lights

If you don't have a stone, you can use a baking tray / cookie sheet, but the stone works better. Just don't try to put it directly on the rack as if it's a frozen pizza. Our pizza stone lives on the floor of the oven when not in use, and if you can remember to put it up on a rack before you turn on the oven, that's a good thing. Set the oven to 450 F or as high as you can, for best results. It will be done in less than ten minutes, so don't go anywhere - just wait till the cheese is bubbling.

Best results, right here

One eager diner. The segment - if you can call it that with such an irregular (I mean, handcrafted) shape - with no toppings is for her. The yummier remainder was for us. Dash often partakes of the crust, so long as it's been carefully picked clean of all alien substances, but last night he decided not to.

All the more for us, we said.

Sunday dinner: sausages, mac, cheese

On Saturday, I went out to dinner. [Trumpets peal, victory march.] I got all dressed up in a skirt and boots that have not seen the light of day for several years because there's no way I can run after children in them - and cleavage and mascara and stuff, and I went out to dinner with my lesbian lovers. I mean, two friends. And left my poor husband at home with rice and meatballs from the freezer and two lovely children to put to bed. He managed admirably and when I rolled in at the ungodly hour of, um, 9pm (it was an early dinner) both children were asleep. [Clouds part, angels sing.]

On Sunday, I thought we were having pizza, because I had definitely seen B making pizza dough the day before. Belatedly, I realised that he had put it the freezer, not the fridge, so at 5.30 I was faced with an ever-enhungrierening family (it is so a word) and no plans. Fear not! Luckily, I had sent them swimming that afternoon while I took myself on an important mission to coughbuybootscough and had stopped by the organic food market on the way home, because they have the round crackers that the kids love because they taste like Ritz and I prefer because they don't have HFCS.

I've been increasingly ... dissatisfied, no, that's not it; disillusioned, hmm; icked out, let's say... by the meat department in my supermarket lately. When I first moved to the US the sheer volume of deep-red, styrofoam-trayed parts of dead animal in that corner of any supermarket overwhelmed me; now I'm used to it, but the more I try to avoid reading all those articles about mass-production of meat, the more I know that they're out there with horrible information in them just waiting to make an ethical consumer out of me. So while every now and then I just say "Feck it" and buy a package of minced beef or their so-called Organic chicken tenders, I'm also willing to spend a bit more less often and get meat I can feel good about. So I bought some happy sausages, because Mabel loves sausages and whenever I feel she's probably lacking some protein, I know she'll eat them.

I accidentally bought the pre-cooked type, because they looked just as anemic and undone as the regular sort, and I failed to adequately read the packet. In Ireland, the only sort of pre-cooked sausages we have are salami and its relations, so I'm still confused by the concept of pre-cooked sausages here, and tend to avoid them. Still, I decided to cook them in the oven just as I would the other sort, only for a shorter time, and they tasted pretty good. They went with some hastily conceived mac-n-cheese with that broccoli I didn't put in the carbonara I didn't make on Friday (are you still following this? Oh good), and thanks to my mistake it was all ready in 20 minutes.

So, without further ado, I will tell you how to make a cheese sauce. Mac 'n' cheese is such a staple of American childhoods that apparently it has to come out of a box, and many people - not you, obviously; all the other people - seem to be terrified of making their own sauce. It's easy, it takes five minutes, and you can use nice cheese. So do it.

Take about a tablespoon of butter and melt it in a saucepan. Stir a heaped tablespoon of plain flour into the liquid butter, season with salt and pepper, and let it cook, stirring all the time, for a minute or so. It will puff up and look weird.

That is not a scoop of vanilla icecream; it's the flour. I promise.

It's not weird; it's good. This is the gluten molecules popping, if I remember correctly, and this is what will thicken your sauce. Then put some milk in a jug, because it's easier to pour out of than from a gallon container - you'll need about, oh, I dunno, two cups, maybe. Then, still stirring with your favourite wooden spoon, start adding the milk to the pan, very gingerly, the merest splash at a time to start with. You'll think that it will never incorporate into your flour blobs, but it will.

Argh! Lumpy blobs of puff!

At some point, the whole thing will magically stop being puffy flour blobs and turn into a sauce. Now, keep adding as much milk as you want for the consistency you're looking for, remembering that the cheese will thicken it some more at the end.

Stir, stir as if your life depended on it.

This is where it's just starting to come together. See? You didn't think that was going to work, did you? Oh ye of little faith. Then you just add the cheese. I recently decided that life's too short to save money by buying crappy cheese, so I had to hand a block of Cabot Sharp Cheddar. My favourite is Kerrygold Dubliner, which was my basic go-to cheese in Ireland but sometimes I balk at the price here, so today we had the Cabot.

Cheese enters sauce. Sauce becomes delicious. My one other addition was a little blob of Dijon mustard, because Mrs Madden told me that mustard brings out the flavour of cheese. (It's supposed to be a pinch of mustard powder, but I don't have mustard powder.)

If I was baking this in the oven, I'd stir in my cooked pasta, probably top with slices of fresh tomato, sprinkle over a mixture of melted butter, breadcrumbs, and more cheese, and bake for 20 minutes or so until the top looked yummy; but as we were hungry I just stirred in the broccoli as well, and served up.

Mabel's looked like this. She ate about half the sausage, ignored the pasta (she eschews that particular shape), and bit some of the "leaves" off the "trees" and declared them yummy.

Mine looked like this. I ate it all and forcibly restrained myself from attacking the leftovers. Mostly.
Pizza tonight; pizza dough recipe (as if you needed another one) tomorrow.

Friday dinner: Cook like it's BBC 2

The children are being cowboys, complete with authentic cowboy accents. I don't know where they learned how cowboys talk, except perhaps from Woody and Jessie on Toy Story. "Ah'm a cowboah," says Dash. "Yowdee!"

On the plus side, they're mostly dressed, Mabel is wearing underpants, and both are safely entertaining themselves (ish), so I have no complaints.

Never mind that. Am returning, as promised, with Friday's dinner. I should probably reiterate what I said the last time I did this: I'm not pretending to be a great cook, or trying to steal any thunder from the illustrious foodie bloggers, or telling you what you should feed your family. I just think it's interesting to see what other people eat for dinner, especially when they're not trying to impress. So I propose to document what we have for dinner for seven nights, whatever it turns out to be. I admit that doing this does tend to influence me to plan a little more than usual - which is no bad thing - but I won't do anything special or out-of-the-ordinary just for the sake of blogging it.

The meals serve two adults unless otherwise stated. My children are barbarians who don't eat food.

On Friday the cupboard was mostly bare, and I was thinking we'd probably default to carbonara, but I feel bad about that because it's esentially a plate of pasta (delicious, delicious pasta, probably with lots of broccoli and a bit of ham in it the way I do it). Then I discovered a head of cauliflower in the fridge, two sad little potatoes, and a couple of pork chops in the freezer. Exhibit A:

It started to look like an episode of Ready Steady Cook, wherin two expert chefs were paired with two members of the public to create a delicious meal from random ingredients from a supermarket bag. Actually, I learned a lot from that show. Ah, Ainsley. Though for this to be more realistic, you'd need to add a jar of anchovy paste and a mango, probably, and some Cockney bloke saying "Well, I had no idear what it was, so I fought it would be interestink."

Anyway. I tossed the cauliflower with olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic, and roasted it. I boiled the potatoes and mashed them, and although it looked pathetic, they ended up being just the right amount for two people who never do anything good with leftover mash.

And I fried the chops with some steak seasoning and my trusty meat thermometer to tell me when they were done.

Not the most gourmet of meals, but a little more balanced than carbonara (maybe? depends how much broccoli I might have had, I suppose) and not bad for an off-the-cuff dinner.

The anchovy thing

Yesterday I made fabulous oatmeal cookies. I even pandered to my husband's desires a bit with them, by putting in raisins instead of chocolate chips. But then I added pecans as well, because I had some to use up, and I like nuts in cookies. This was perhaps cruel of me, because B does not, mostly, like nuts in cookies, but I thought it might be given a pass. (Apparently I feel I can't be too nice to the man, because that's giving in to The Man.)

My friend, who had brought over some fresh soda bread and dill butter to snack on with our tea, as well as the cookies, during the playdate that was really a thiny veiled baking-exchange eating-excuse, asked, "Why don't you just not tell him about the nuts and see if he notices?"

"Ah," I replied. "I can't do that. Because of the anchovy thing."

And then I had to explain the anchovy thing.

When we first met, B was not a fan of fish. He had once eaten a piece of salmon that was quite nice, but saw little reason to repeat the experiment. Since those far-off days, I have gently introduced some seafood into his diet, with simple mild tilapia, salmon in peach-habanero marinade, mussels with lots of garlic, things like that. But when we first moved in together, I still had much to learn about the ways of man, The Man, and this man.

I had just moved across the Atlantic and was looking for a job, watching lots of Food Network, and doing the shopping and the cooking, since he was an overworked grad student who had to adjust to being home for dinner and not getting to go to Wal Mart at 3am any more, and who had very patiently let me reorganise all his bookshelves when I arrived, because evidently my psyche needed to lay claim to the place. Rachael Ray, my new girl-crush, told me that if you sizzled some anchovies out of a jar with some garlic at the start of making a tomato sauce, it would taste fabulously savoury but not at all fishy. I couldn't wait to try it.

So I made the sauce, and didn't tell him what the mystery ingredient was. He liked dinner well enough. Then came the big reveal. He was appalled. Horrified. Betrayed. Not happy. As far as he was concerned, I had deceived him. What was next? If a girl starts by sneaking anchovies into a man's dinner, no doubt arsenic and belladonna will soon follow.

I was contrite, learned that I couldn't always anticipate his reactions, and haven't snuck in ingredients again. (Though, you know, he might be happy to find I'd been gradually building up his immunity to arsenic, or iocane powder, when a random Sicilian tries to poison him. Oh well. His loss.)

Last night we were reminiscing about the incident, now that we're so much older and wiser.

"I realise now," I said, "that it was as if I'd fed meat to a vegetarian and told them afterwards."
"Yes, it was. Well, vegetarians might have an ethical reason for not eating meat."
"Exactly. So that would be a reasonable reaction."
"Wait a minute. You mean, my reaction was like that? Not that what you did was like that?"
"Yes. No. Your reaction."
"Oh. Oh. I thought you were being a bit generous there for a minute."
"No, no. As if."


******

And of course, I did check with him this morning that he didn't mind my writing about it. I know now not to spring things, even delicious things, on him without full disclosure in advance. (And don't worry about the cookies. He liked them.)

Tofurkey or not tofurkey

I love the days when I have a legitimate reason to make B take the kids out for a couple of hours, turn on some music, and potter happily around the kitchen all afternoon. Even though I always say that Thanksgiving isn't our holiday, and so we feel no compulsion to celebrate with anything special, the general widespread culinary busy-ness always infects me and it turns into one of those days after all.

A few weeks ago, as I may have mentioned, I saw a recipe for carnitas on Smitten Kitchen, and decided that maybe we should have traditional Thansksgiving tacos, just as the pilgrims did.

On Tuesday I garnered the ingredients I needed, except for the meat, which I couldn't find in Safeway. Never mind, I thought. Fate will provide. Indeed, in spite of a day sandwiched by a dental appointment for one child in the morning and a doctor's appointment for the other in the afternoon, fate, in the shape of the local co-op supermarket did provide: there was a large pre-packaged piece of pork shoulder in the meat fridge, and when I asked at the counter they said that the butcher would happily let me have just the three pounds of it I needed, and even cube it for me as per the recipe.

Then there was the question of dessert. Dash has been pestering me lately to make caramel, ever since he tasted some caramel dip for apple slices at a halloween party. He didn't eat any of the apple, but he very much enjoyed licking off the caramel. I keep telling him that I've never made caramel, and it's very tricky, and I don't have any cream so I just can't; but evidently the notion took root because as I wandered around the co-op waiting for the butcher to do his thing, I vaguely remembered that there was a recipe somewhere for caramel apple cheesecake. That sounded nice, and I had ricotta in the fridge to use up. So I bought some apples.

When I got home I found the recipe, in Nigella's Feast, but it turned out to need apple schnapps and no actual apples at all. As well as cream and other things I still didn't have. So that idea was shelved. This morning I made chocolate ricotta muffins with the ricotta, which was only about a cupful and not nearly enough for cheesecake anyway. But I still had all those apples.

This afternoon I looked at the clock, asked B when he wanted to eat dinner, and then informed him that they'd better scarper quickish so I could put the meat on right now - carnitas take almost as long as a small turkey after all. Once the meat was aromatically braising in its margarita bath (as Deb calls it), I thought some more about dessert and vaguely searched the Smitten Kitchen website for "apples". Bingo. A last-minute tarte tatin.

I've never made tarte tatin before, and didn't realise that the apples were actually cooked in caramel before being pastried, but once that became apparent, it was the obvious solution. I ended up using the pastry from the first recipe I found and the apple/caramel method from the second, because Deb said it was more foolproof. And I used my stainless steel pan with a plastic handle for the caramel part, transferring to a glass pie dish for the baking. As the arrangement of my apples was more rustic, shall we say, than artistically exact, it didn't destroy anything. And the whole thing turned out most satisfactorily in the end.

The carnitas worked miraculously - one moment I was looking at all the brining liquid still in the pan and wondering whether I should cheat and take a scoopful out to help it reduce; then I did a spot of washing up to clear the decks and when I looked again, there was only a tiny puddle left in the bottom and the chunks of meat were starting to brown up amazingly and fall apart just as predicted. (So much so that I took a photo, even though Deb's is much more appetizing, just to show you that even mere mortals can achieve this.)

We* had our carnitas on warmed corn tortillas, with jicama slaw (about two-thirds of a jicama and one carrot, grated, with three finely sliced spring onions and this dressing), queso fresco, avocado, and fresh limes for squeezing. It was just like being back in southmost Texas in the hallowed booths of Mister Taco. (And believe me, for all I malign Texas, that's one of the things we miss.)

And now I'm just waiting, with an extra glass of wine, for B to put Dash to bed before we break out the vanilla icecream and dig in to the tarte. With great forethought, I didn't try too hard to give Mabel a nap this afternoon, so it's 7.15 and she's fast asleep. For now, at least.

*The children, lest I need to comment, did not have any. Dash has had his usual peanut butter sandwiches today, and Mabel, despite being presented with various other foodstuffs, has eaten half an apple for breakfast, three cheesesticks for lunch, and no dinner all all. Oh, and two chocolate ricotta muffins for snacks. Maybe that was an error.

** Mmmm. I have a mouthful of chewy sugary appley goodness as I type. I am a total tarte-tatin convert. A tart for tarte, if you like.  I don't think I'll ever make a plain old apple pie again.

Adventures in meal-planning

Remember the dinner that wasn't good enough to blog? Well, I'm blogging it now, because it turned into a new and entirely original dinner the next night.

It began as a interesting-sounding Turkish Lamb Pizza from Darina Allen's Easy Entertaining. (Yes, I do have cookbooks that are not by Nigella.) Darina Allen, if you're not familiar with her, is Ireland's answer to Martha Stewart, except just for cooking, not for home decor; and without the dodgy book-keeping. She's pretty much the grand-dame of the Irish culinary revival, or her mother-in-law Myrtle was before her, and she's passing the torch on to her daughter-in-law Rachel, who is also a successful TV chef and author.)

I had seen this recipe in leafing through the book over breakfast, so when I saw ground lamb at the supermarket, it all came together nicely. At least, then I had to check the recipe again and procure a lemon and some tomatoes and I left out the parsley, which maybe would have made all the difference, but that was all I needed. The base, made from just flour and yogurt, intrigued me.

Darina gives quantities for 8-10 portions, and there were only the two of us, so of course I had a lot of topping mixture left over. More about that later. But this is how mine went:

Topping:
1lb minced lamb (ground lamb, if you're American)
1 large onion
4 large tomatoes
2 tablespoons flat parsley, chopped
salt and pepper

Base:
2 cups white flour, plus more for dusting
About 1 cup plain yogurt

Lemon wedges to serve

You start these off in a heavy frying pan on the stovetop, then finish them under the grill/broiler. I'm sure you could cook them on the outdoor grill, but you might have to experiment with the method.

For the topping, chop the onion finely. Sautee it in olive oil or butter over a low heat until soft but not coloured.

 

Let it cool completely (or as much as you have time for - you could do this step way in advance, if you wanted). Dice the tomatoes. Then, using a fork, mix together the meat, onion, tomatoes, parsley, salt and pepper.

Next mix the flour and yogurt to make a soft dough. I only made enough for the two of us, so I had to eyeball the quantities, but I think I used about a cup of flour and half a cup or a bit more of yogurt to make each of the small pizza bases. (Sorry about the picture. I shouldn't have used a white bowl.)

With lots of flour on your surface, roll (or press) it out as thinly as you can. Mine were each about 8 inches across, and a few millimeters thick, and they probably should have been thinner, but I was afraid they'd stick to the surface.

When it's thin, spread a few spoonfuls of your meat mixture onto the round (ahem) of dough.

 

Turn on the grill/broiler to preheat, and put a baking sheet under it to get hot.

Have the heavy frying pan on the heat at this point. Fold the dough over in half and then into a quarter and transfer it to the pan, where you can open it out again.

(I thought all the topping would fall off, but it stuck quite well to the base. I don't see why you shouldn't put it in "naked" and then add the topping, but maybe the dough would stick to itself if you did it this way.)

After about 2 minutes, it should be golden on the bottom. Slide it carefully onto a hot baking tray and put it under the grill/broiler for another 2-3 minutes until the topping is done.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the meat really did cook in this short space of time. We ate them with lots of lemon squeezed over the top (this is really necessary to cut the fattiness of the meat) and they would probably have benefitted from the parsley I left out.

They were interesting, but not amazing. The dough was a little stodgy - I think it should have been thinner, or maybe I should have cooked them in the pan for longer.

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But there I was, with all that leftover mince mixture. The next night, I decided to turn it into Turkish meatballs.

To the mixture, I added an egg, some grated mozzarella, and a squeeze of cilantro (coriander leaf) from the squeezy coriander I had in the freezer. Fresh cilantro would of course have been even better. I used my small cookie portioner thingy (looks like a baby ice-cream scoop) to make evenly sized meatballs, and discovered that I needed to squeeze them out before rolling in flour, as the mixture was very wet. I put this down to the tomatoes - if making the meatballs from scratch, I would definitely squeeze the seeds and liquid out of the tomatoes before dicing them.

I baked the meatballs at 400 F for about 20 minutes, and we ate them with rice and broccoli, and they were quite delicious.

The next night, I said to hell with competing flavours and reheated them in half a jar of tomato-and-basil pasta sauce. They were still delicious (though you couldn't really tell it was lamb any more).

So: three different meals from one recipe. This is why I don't really bother to plan ahead. Sometimes it pays off nicely.