I got a slow cooker for Christmas.

A few weeks before Christmas I decided that having a slow cooker would probably change my life. It was a bit of a whim, but I work shifts, and the thought of being able to shove a load of stuff in the slow cooker then go to bed really appealed to me. And I thought it might help break the endless stir fry/pasta/ risotto cycle that makes up weeknight meals.

So far, so good. Since I got the slow cooker on Christmas morning I have used it three times, and it’s brilliant. I made chicken stock, which is the tastiest stock I’ve ever made. Here are two other recipes that I made up, but that seemed to work reasonably well.

There are two things I have learned so far… 

1. Brown the meat first – it seems like an annoying step but will really add to the flavour and colour of the meal.
2. It doesn’t reduce or thicken the sauce in the same way as doing something on the hob/in the oven, so you will have to thicken it in some way. But you can’t abandon things on the hob for 7 hours while you go to sleep unless you want to wake up in a house fire, so it’s a small price to pay.

Beef Casserole

After working overnight on Hogmanay, I came home and browned off the beef, added lots of other stuff then went to bed. I finally celebrated the new year with a bottle of prosecco and this casserole that night. It was brilliant. 

Ingredients

-          1.5 lbs of beef shin, in reasonably big chunks

-          A dessertspoon of flour

-          An onion, chopped

-          A stick of celery, chopped

-          A couple of carrots, peeled and roughly chopped into big chunks

-          Two cloves of garlic, chopped

-          A load of mushrooms, halved

-          A third of a bottle of red wine

-          Some water

-          A bay leaf

-          Salt and pepper

-          A heaped teaspoon of cornflour to thicken

Put the flour and some salt and pepper in a bowl, then add the beef and give it all a good mix round until it’s thoroughly coated. In a big frying pan, heat up some oil or fat and add the beef a bit at a time. Do it in batches so you don’t overcrowd the pan. Leave it sitting and frying until it goes nicely brown, then turn it over to do the same on the other side. When it’s brown, shove it in the slow cooker. 

Once all the beef is done, add the red wine to the pan and whack up the heat to boil off some of the alcohol, scraping up any meaty bits off the pan with a wooden spoon.

Add all the veg, bay leaf etc. to the slow cooker, then the wine. Top up with some water until all the meat and veg is nearly covered. 

Put on low for about 8 hours. Go to bed and get some sleep. Go for a walk, whatever.

When it’s nearly ready, it’ll look quite different. 

Take a ladleful of the sauce and mix it with the cornflour, before adding it back to the casserole. Make some mash and some token green veg. 

If you were to do this in the oven, you could put it on at 150 degrees for about two and a half hours. You could probably skip the cornflour step, as it would reduce itself!

Chicken and Chorizo stew.

Ingredients

-          6 pieces of chicken – thighs and drumsticks

-          Two normal sausage sized cooking chorizo/half a chorizo ring (as much as you 

like really)cut into chunks

-          An onion, peeled and sliced

-          A pepper, sliced

-          Two cloves of garlic, chopped

-          A courgette, sliced

-          Some leftover white wine

-          A tin of tomatoes

-          Salt and pepper

Season, then brown the chicken in a big frying pan in a little bit of oil. Put it in the slow cooker. Put the chorizo in the pan so it releases some of its lovely oil and starts to go a bit crispy. Chuck that in the slow cooker (oil and all) along with all the veg and tinned tomatoes. 

Put the wine in the pan and let it bubble for a few minutes, before adding it to the slow cooker. 

Add a little drop of water if you think it needs some more liquid. Put it on high for 4 hours (a long afternoon nap) then serve with rice. I think I added some spinach towards the end of cooking. (We also added a dollop of sour cream, because our chorizo was quite spicy)

I didn’t thicken this one, Joe had a big bowl of the sauce as a chorizo-y soup. It made him very happy.

Are you sensing the theme? Brown things, chuck them in, go to bed, sorted. Today before my night shift I’m making a sausage and bean casserole. 

Any other suggestions for recipes I can do? Particularly veggie ones – they’ve all been a bit meaty so far.

A new kitchen and Moroccan-ish chicken

I'd like to make the case against the shared kitchen-living room. They're rubbish. We've just spent a year and a half with one, and it has really affected how adventurous I've been with my cooking, how often we have people round, and how often this gets updated. The TV was always on, there wasn't enough space, the dining table was shoved in a corner, and it just doesn't work for someone who loves cooking.

Thankfully, now we have moved. Now we have a slightly dark, small kitchen, but it has a GAS HOB, a door I can close to have my own space, and a radio with 6music constantly on. It's bloody brilliant. I have already spent lots of time in there pottering away, while Joe has the other room to himself to watch films/play his playstation and we're both happy. Sad isn't it?

So, on to the food. We had some friends round last night for some eating, drinking, and catching up. I wanted to make something that wouldn't be too much faff, wouldn't have me stuck in the kitchen while they were here and was a little bit different. So I decided to make up a recipe for Moroccan chicken, and make some houmous and baba ganoush to go with it. It was a success – I'd bought about four extra pieces of chicken thinking it might be nice in a sandwich the next day and it was all eaten.

I apologise for the terrible photos. Frankly, I'd been drinking.

As usual, I'm not one for writing up other peoples recipes, so here are a couple of links for the houmous and baba ganoush recipes I used. I made these in the morning before my friends arrived.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2029/homemade-houmous – I'd use slightly less tahini than this recipe suggests

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/sep/25/how-to-make-perfect-baba-ganoush (by the way, this column is brilliant, you should read it)

Making baba ganoush also means I got to do this: (which is fun)

Moroccan-ish Chicken:

(serves four very hungry/greedy people)

Ingredients:

12 chicken drumsticks and thighs, ideally on the bone and with skin, but 

we had a bit of a mixture

1 x preserved lemon (or two, if they're little)

2 big tablespoons harissa

2 tablespoons honey

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

a good slug of olive oil

teaspoon of cumin

salt and pepper

- To prepare the preserved lemon, scoop out the flesh from inside into a big bowl (big enough for all your chicken). Slice the rind and add that too.

- Mix everything else except the chicken together, adding enough oil to make sure it's not too thick – it should be the consistency of double cream

- Put the chicken in and mix well. Cover it in cling film and leave it in the fridge for a few hours.

- When you're ready to cook, preheat your oven to 180 degrees, and lay the chicken pieces out in one layer. I needed two trays. Pour over any remaining marinade. Cook for 30 – 40 minutes until the skin has blackened a bit and it's cooked through.

For something So easy, this was really tasty. Definitely worth doing. I think the marinade would probably work really well with a whole roast chicken too.

I served it with a load of olives, some steamed green beans, cous cous mixed with pomegranate seeds, and toasted pitta breads.

We then had brownies with raspberries and ice cream, so here's a picture of that too:

Chicken, bacon, leeks.

This post is a complete cheat. There are no photos, and it's not a special meal. I'm currently on nightshifts, which means Joe is making my dinner quite a lot of the time. We had a leek to use up, and some chicken legs in the freezer, so I said I'd cobble together a recipe and send it to him. He's not into cooking, so I kept it pretty simple. I've been so lax on the blog lately I thought I might as well upload it too.

This is a sort of roast, made with chicken, leeks and pancetta or bacon. Serves two.

Ingredients:

- two chicken legs

- two cloves of garlic
- some pancetta / chopped smoked bacon

- a leek

- a glass of white wine

Roughly chop and wash the leek - it can be quite chunky.
Smash up a couple of cloves of garlic and peel them (don't have to be finely chopped)
Season the chicken legs with salt and pepper
Put the oven on to preheat at 180 degrees

In a big frying pan, fry the pancetta on a high-ish heat in a little vegetable oil until it browns and goes a little bit crispy (five minutes).

Then add the seasoned chicken to brown. Put it skin side down and leave it for a few minutes, then flip it. You're not looking for it to cook, just start crisping up.

Take the chicken out and put it to one side then stir in the leeks and garlic. Cook for two minutes, then tip it into the roasting dish.

Put the pan back on the heat and add a glass of white wine. Stir and scrape to get any crispy bits off the bottom. Let it bubble for a minute or two, then add to the roasting dish.

Put the chicken on top, then put in the oven for 30 - 40 minutes, while you sort spuds and veg. Check the chicken after twenty minutes and make sure it's not drying out in the pan. Add a splash of water if it is.

Serve with mash and the veg of your choice. Use the pan juices as a slightly thin, but very tasty gravy. If you wanted to make it a bit fancier, you could stir in a splash of cream to make more of a sauce.

In which I follow a recipe and don't write about it, and write two other recipes instead

Happy New Year! Hope you've had a fantastic Christmas/New year. I thoroughly enjoyed my Christmas, which contained lots of food, booze, a backing track of Peppa Pig (thanks to my two year old nephew) and a lot of trips up and down the M62. My Hogmanay was spent on a night shift at work but never mind. We celebrated in the office with cheese and party snacks.

After all the excitement of the festive season, I am now in the process of using up a load of leave. That means some time at home, cooking, cleaning, relaxing, and recovering from all the excesses of the last month. I should probably do some exercise too.

I didn't get as much cooking related stuff for Christmas this year as my tiny kitchen is already full to overflowing. I did get Nigel Slater's book Real Food, so in a rare break from tradition I'm going to follow a recipe. I think Nigel Slater's style of cooking is amazing, and I love his food writing. One of my greatest charity shop finds of last year was a very very old copy of Real Fast Food for about two quid, which I proceeded to read from cover to cover without actually cooking anything from it. Anyway, this time I toyed with the idea of coq au Riesling but decided it was a bit excessive for a Thursday night and made Roast Chicken with Basil and Lemon instead. I'm not one for typing out someone else's recipes – buy his book if you want it. But it was very good! It looked like this: 

So what's the point of this post? Well yesterday I inadvertently opened a tin of cannellini beans when I thought they were chickpeas (middle-class woes). I had to think of something to do with them today, and I thought I'd try out a cannellini bean mash to go with this chicken and a massive pile of green stuff. Plus, when I was writing it, I found a recipe on my hard drive for chicken soup which I'd never posted... so I'm putting it up as a bonus recipe. (Yes, I have random recipes kicking around on my hard drive. What of it? I even had a picture of it on my phone. I know, I should get out more)

Cannellini Bean Mash

Ingredients:

a leek, rinsed and finely chopped

a clove of garlic, finely chopped

a tin of cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

a load of olive oil

a dollop of crème fraiche

salt and pepper

lemon juice (optional – I didn't bother this time because of the lemon-y chicken)

On a medium/low heat fry the leek and garlic in about three tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of salt. Stir it regularly until it all gets very soft – probably about ten minutes. You don't want it to take on any colour.

Add the cannellini beans and heat through for five – ten minutes.

Add a big dollop of half fat crème fraiche and stir through, then season with some pepper. Start mashing.

Add more extra virgin olive oil to get the consistency you want. Because of the leek it won't go completely smooth anyway, I added another three or four tablespoons. Taste it, and add more salt and pepper if required. Serve with whatever you like.

I really enjoyed this as an alternative to potatoes. We've had a LOT of potatoes over the last few weeks... 

Now the bonus recipe:

Chicken soup

This is my rough recipe for chicken soup which I made up after three days of coughing, sneezing and generally being very dopey. It's not authentic Jewish-penicillin-chicken-soup, not least because I'm not Jewish. Maybe lapsed Catholic penicillin?

It's in two stages - first the stock then the soup itself. This probably made enough for three/four portions? You can add whatever veg you have to hand.

Ingredients:

one chicken carcass (or some chicken pieces, three to four bits? wings/drumsticks or whatever)

an onion, peeled and quartered

two carrots, one roughly chopped and one peeled and finely chopped

a leek, take the top leafy bit off and roughly chop then rinse it, finely chop and rinse the rest

3 or 4 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed a wee bit

a quarter of a head of celery, take the spindly middle bits out and roughly chop, then finely chop a couple of substantial sticks of celery

a couple of big handfuls of pearly barley, rinsed (could use a couple of peeled, diced potatoes or some pasta. Some sort of starch anyway)

about a centimetre of ginger, roughly chopped into chunks

seasoning - a sprig or two of thyme, two or three bay leaves, 6/7 peppercorns, two cloves and a good pinch of sea salt

For the stock put all the reject bits of the vegetables (onion, roughly chopped carrot, leafy bit of leek, the garlic, spindly bits of celery and the ginger) and the chicken carcass in a pan with a lid, along with the all the seasoning. Cover with cold water, then bring up to the boil. Skim away any scum, turn the heat right down, cover it and leave it to simmer for about two hours.

When it's done, pour the stock through a sieve and put it back in the pan. Add the pearl barley and bring it back up to the boil before turning it down and simmering for twenty minutes. Then add all the other vegetables – ie. The nicely chopped stuff. Now simmer until everything's cooked. If you did chicken pieces in the stock you can pull off the meat and add it to the soup too.

Then it's done. Eat whilst under a duvet, then go back to bed.

 

Herby roast chicken with aubergine parmigiana.

How many times can you put roast chicken on a blog? It's my ultimate comfort food. After a hectic couple of weeks and a traumatic trip to the Trafford Centre I needed it. (Honestly, I hate shopping malls, but I needed clothes and it's just up the road.)

In the last couple of weeks I have had the most horrendous diet... shift work + travelling + wedding buffet + takeaway chips for tea on the way to the pub. As usual, for me, that means craving vegetables.

All of this means that on my first normal day at home I made roast chicken with aubergine parmigiana. The aubergine parmigiana is an amazing veggie meal if you're that way inclined.

First the chicken:

Herby Roast Chicken ingredients

-  A decent chicken. I've mentioned this before, but try and get one that hasn't had a hideous life. I'm prepared to pay a little extra and get a free range one from the butcher. Buy as big as you can afford, chicken leftovers can ALWAYS be used.
-  About 50grammes of butter, at room temperature makes it easier to use
-  Some herbs – I used rosemary and thyme as that's what I have
-  a couple of cloves of garlic
-  a lemon
-  salt and pepper

For all chicken timings (and roast times in general) you can't beat Delia. http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/meat/roasting-times.html Ignore the other instructions about bacon etc. but follow her temperatures and timings.

1. Finely chop your garlic and herbs together (taking the leaves of the rosemary and thyme and discarding the stalks) then mash it into the butter with some salt and pepper using a fork.
2. Using your hands separate the skin from the breast meat. It sounds gross, but get your finger underneath the skin at the gap above the breast and move it around to make a little pocket of space. Put half of the herby butter in that pocket.
3. Smear the rest of the butter over the rest of the chicken, and make sure there's a good blob in the joins between the legs and the body.
4. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the top, and put the squeezed out lemon inside the bird.
5. A bit more salt and pepper over the top, then cook according to Delia's timings, basting regularly. Don't forget to leave it to rest for a bit after.

Aubergine Parmigiana

This might all seem a bit faffy, but it's really nice. It works as a vegetarian dish if you serve it with crusty bread and salad. (and use veggie friendly cheese)

You can do all this while the chicken is in the oven.

Ingredients:

-  an aubergine
-  a couple of cloves of garlic
-  an onion, finely chopped (I'd run out and made it without, so it's not completely necessary)
-  a tin of tomatoes
-  a teaspoon of red wine vinegar (or balsamic)
-  a small handful of fresh oregano (or a teaspoon of dried)
-  a small handful of basil leaves
-  fresh parmesan (or alternative Italian hard cheese, parmesan will taste best) Finely grated.

First you have to make a sauce. This would work equally well as a pasta sauce/pizza topping if you wanted.

1. If using onion, fry gently for a couple of minutes until it softens. Finely chop together your garlic and oregano then fry (with the onion) on a low heat for a few minutes to help it release all the lovely flavours.
2. Add the tin of tomatoes, red wine vinegar and some salt and pepper. Leave it to bubble away and break down the tomatoes for a while. Fifteen minutes ought to do it.

 The aubergine:

1. Slice into centimetre thick slices.
2. Fry on a dry pan for a few minutes on each side to soften it and brown it a little. You'll probably need to do it in batches.
3. Erm, that's it.

Then build it up in layers: sauce, parmesan, aubergine, sauce, parmesan, aubergine etc. Finish it with sauce and plenty of parmesan. You could add mozarella if you wanted too, particularly if you were doing it as a veggie main course.

Shove in the oven for half an hour.

We had this with some roasted spuds and some steamed broccoli. And it was good. 

The rest of the chicken will be a curry/stir fry/sandwiches.

Chicken tagine

I have issues with sweet things in hot savoury food. I don't like apple sauce with my pork and I definitely don't like pineapple on a pizza, it's just wrong. I think tagines are the exception to the rule, I've had some amazing lamb tagines with prunes and lovely ones with chicken and dried apricots. However, if I'm making my own I am still more likely to make one stuffed full of olives instead.

So this is a distinctly savoury chicken tagine, full of spices and lemon and the only bit of sweetness comes from a dollop of honey. Pretty much tailored exactly to my tastes.

This was made to serve four, or as we're having a friend over, three, and a couple of night shift break times next week. I'm sure it's totally normal to eat tagine at 2.30 am.

Ingredients (it looks a lot, but it's really easy):

Four chicken legs separated into thighs and drumsticks
a tablespoon of flour (seasoned with half a teaspoon of paprika and some salt and pepper)
Spices: a teaspoon of ground cumin, ½ teaspoon of turmeric, 4 cardamom pods (cracked with the back of a knife) a cinnamon stick
four cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
about three centimetres of fresh ginger,  peeled and grated
two onions, sliced
ten green pitted olives
a tin of chickpeas
a squidge of honey
a lemon
an aubergine chopped, quartered and sliced

First, put your seasoned flour in a freezer bag with your chicken pieces and give them a good shake. Heat up some oil in a pan, then brown it thoroughly all over in a very big pan, before putting it to one side.

Fry your onions for five minutes on a medium heat until they start to colour a little, then add your spices, garlic and ginger and fry for another few minutes before adding your aubergine, chickpeas and olives.

 Add the juice of the lemon and the zest...

A note on the lemon: all the recipes I read called for preserved lemons. I think that's a bit of a niche ingredient. I have a small kitchen, and don't have the space to keep lots of things like that. Instead, I used a potato peeler to take the zest off a normal unwaxed lemon in a couple of really big chunks then halved it and juiced it. It might not be authentic, but it worked for me.

Put your chicken back in the pan and add water... probably about three quarters of a pint. Cover it, turn the heat right down and leave to simmer for a good hour. It's very forgiving, you can leave it until you've had a gin and tonic and a bit of a catch up with a friend and it'll be grand. 

I served it with cous cous. Cook it according to the packet instructions. I then stirred through some toasted pine nuts and a big a slosh of extra virgin olive oil. More authentic would be toasted almonds. But I didn't have any.

We followed up with strawberries and cream, with a bit of dark chocolate grated over the top. Scottish strawberries. Awesome.

(A few things about the blog: I finally have a fancy new smartphone so have taken the pictures for this one using Instagram. What do you think? Everyone uses instagram these days, so I'm not sure if it's actually become a bit boring... still the food looks nice. Also, I've decided to write this one in a more conventional recipe type format than my usual ramblings. Feedback welcome.)

Easiest. Dinner. Ever

Gosh, hasn’t it been a while? My apologies for the lack of recipes lately. August was crazily busy and (mostly) very good fun. Lots of good eating – but none of the cooking was done by me. Fabulous wedding in Ireland with a seven course meal (I think, I lost count), a beautiful tapas meal cooked for my birthday, and a late birthday lasagne and enormous cake. All lovely.

But now it’s time for me to start contributing again. This is a bit of a cheat. Anyone can do this recipe, or variations of it, but the fact is it’s really really nice. And if you don’t already have a version of this in your repertoire, you should, because it tastes much better than you’d expect from just a bit of chopping.

So here’s my recipe for roasted chicken legs with Mediterranean vegetables, and a lemon and pine nut cous cous.

To tart up this dinner I made foccacia earlier today, according to this recipe:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/rosemary_and_sea_salt_12392

But added my own toppings. I made a couple, one with olives and rosemary, another with chopped garlic and basil and some lemon juice. It was all good fun! But I’m not one for typing out someone else’s recipes so click on the link above.

Stick your oven on to preheat at around 190 degrees.

For this you will need a bucketload of Mediterranean type veg. I had a courgette, an aubergine, a pepper, a couple of small onions, a handful of cherry tomatoes and a few cloves of garlic. Chop everything up into big chunks and put it in a roasting tin. Chop the garlic roughly and scatter it over the top, then if you’ve got any basil tuck half a dozen basil leaves in amongst it too. (Rosemary works well with this; the first time I had a variation of this meal at a friend’s house it was made with rosemary and the smells were brilliant).

Now slosh over a good load of olive oil (erm, maybe 6 tablespoons? I have no idea) and about half as much balsamic vinegar.

Now put a couple of chicken legs on the top of it and season liberally – the salt will help the chicken skin to go crispy, but the meat will stay moist because of all the steam from the vegetables. I’m a big fan of chicken legs (or any meat on the bone really) as it is so much tastier than chicken breasts, which go dry very easily.

Shove in the oven for about forty minutes. I lifted the chicken and gave the vegetables a good stir around half way through.

It also helps to baste the chicken with some of the lovely juices from the bottom of the pan – but you only need to do this once. 

You don’t have to have this with cous cous – it’s nice with roasted new potatoes or just steamed new potatoes. But this time we were having easy dinner.

Toast some pine nuts in a dry frying pan (keep an eye on them, they burn easily) and chop some parsley. You’ll be able to tell if the chicken is nearly ready because the juices will run clear when you poke it with a skewer or sharp knife. At this point, cook some cous cous according to the instructions on the packet, then stir through the pine nuts, parsley, the juice of half a lemon, another slosh of olive oil and some salt and pepper. 

A bonus from this recipe is that you will have chuffing LOADS of roasted veg leftover. This makes a lovely pasta sauce for another day. Just cook some pasta, warm the roasted veg, add a dollop of crème fraiche and stir the whole lot together. Again, you wouldn't expect it to be so good, but it’s awesome.

Three curry feast

We were supposed to go out for a curry on Friday night to Arti’s, our local cheap, cheerful (and very tasty) curry house. Unfortunately, I’d been working overnight at the election on Thursday night, had very little sleep, and hit a wall. I ate a massive Chinese takeaway instead, then fell asleep.

We still wanted a curry though, so tonight was a home made curry night.  With this I work on the same basic principles as with a roast: you can make the meaty bit go a lot further if you have a couple of really good veggie dishes.

Joe’s input was needed for this one too. He got the Madhur Jaffrey Curry Easy book for Christmas, and has cooked two meals from it, both of which were absolutely amazing.  I’m not going to retype someone else’s recipe, but Joe’s side dish was South Indian Potato Curry, and it looked like this: (yum)

I made a lentil dahl.  First I toasted some cumin and coriander seeds and the insides of cardamom pods. Then crushed these in the pestle and mortar.  As I’m making two curries I did a couple of teaspoons of each.

I then fried some onion and plenty of garlic, and added half the spices back in, along with some turmeric. It'll go very yellow!

 Add some lentils and some water and let bubble till the lentils are nearly cooked. Then add a couple of tomatoes (from a tin is fine) and some green beans (I keep these in the freezer)

The lentil dahl takes about half an hour to cook, be careful it doesn’t dry out. Add some finely chopped fresh coriander at the end.

I also made chicken and spinach curry. First, brown off some chicken pieces. I prefer to use chicken on the bone, such as thighs and drumsticks, as they’re much tastier. Then put them to one side, and fry sliced onions with blitzed up garlic, ginger and chilli. Then add the remainder of the spices from earlier, and a good pinch of curry powder (bit of a cheat), some turmeric and some garam masala. 

(It is the easiest way to deal with chilli and garlic etc.)

Put the chicken back in, and give it a good stir around. Add the remainder of the tinned tomatoes that you used for the dahl.  I would normally at this point add coconut milk, but I got in a strop with my local supermarket yesterday for only having branded, organic coconut milk which cost more than £1.80 a tin.  Ridiculous, I know, but the non-branded stuff is less than a pound, and I needed a few of them! Instead I bought coconut cream, which is much cheaper.

Add some water (to cover) and let it bubble away. That’s just about done. Five minutes before serving, add at least half a bag of spinach, it’ll wilt quickly, then stir it in.

Just about done. Whilst that’s bubbling away get some rice on, and make some raita. This would normally be made with mint, but I’ve been growing fresh coriander and have a lot of it. Mix natural yoghurt with chopped coriander, chopped cucumber and salt and pepper. 

All done! This is going to last us a couple of nights. Presentation might leave a little to be desired... but it was ace.

I’ve made quite a few changes to the blog: let me know what you think of the redesign. I think everyone should be able to comment on the posts regardless of whether you’re signed up to google or not.

This weeks soup: Mushroom, made with the stock from last week’s chicken. I made some rosemary bread the other day when I was bored too, so going to have some tasty lunches at work this week!