Carrot, coriander and sun dried tomato sausages

I've been catching up with the lovely photos and recipes at Mangocheek's (don't you love the name?!) Allotment to Kitchen blog. She's an ace veggie gardener and also posts some great photos of her trips around the Glasgow area. A few recipes caught my eye when I was reading about her latest kitchen adventures recently, but there was one I just wanted to go and make immediately - some vegan roasted veggie sun dried tomato and olive sausages. We make burgers fairly often but not sausages and I was really taken with the idea.


I couldn't use this recipe exactly though - lovely though it sounded - as it contained several anti-Scientist ingredients. Namely, the olives and the oats which formed part of the filler and also the coating. I also wanted to use up the carrots from our vegbox, but I loved the idea of using lentils and sun dried tomato, and also of roasting the veggies. So I tinkered a bit and was really pleased with the results. The flavours shone through, and the sausages weren't too heavy, as potato-based things can sometimes be. Olives would have been a great addition, but hey, what can you do. The Scientist liked them too - he did say that they could have been less carroty (I pointed out helpfully that they were carrot sausages), and suggested adding some sweet potato another time. I think that would be really good too. I roughly halved mangocheeks' recipe and made five sausages which was just right for us. I served them with some baked potato wedges, dusted with paprika, and also some steamed spring greens, all from the veg box.

Guest photograph: The Scientist took this great impromptu shot of our matching pair of pooks just as the sun was starting to go down last night. I didn't even know he knew how to work my camera :)

Carrot, coriander and sun dried tomato sausages - adapted from Mangocheeks
4 carrots, washed and cut into chunks
2 garlic cloves, left whole
1/4 cup red lentils
150ml stock
handful of fresh coriander, chopped
2 sundried tomatoes, soaked in hot water
flaxseed meal and chickpea flour, for thickening and coating - I used about 1 Tbsp of flaxseed meal and about 1/4 cup of chickpea flour.

Roast the carrots and garlic at 200C for about half an hour - until soft

Cook lentils in the stock until soft

Put veggies and lentils in a food processor, with the coriander, chopped sun dried tomatoes. coriander and seasoning, to taste. Blend until well combined.

Add the flaxseed meal and enough chickpea flour that you can mould it - it will still be soft and quite damp.

Form into sausages and roll in some more chickpea flour.

Cook gently in a frying pan sprayed with some oil spray, turning every so often.

Cooking Italian

A couple of weekends ago Munchkin Granny and I did an Italian vegetarian cookery course at the Vegetarian Society's Cordon Vert Cookery School. I used to see adverts for this school in the back of the old vegetarian cooking magazines which disappeared years ago, and always thought that you must have to be terribly well-off and serious about cooking to go on one. Well, roll forwards fifteen years, and there were MG and I, aprons on, hair tied back, sitting round a shiny metal table in the pro kitchen at the Cordon Vert (and for the record, we're neither terribly well-off nor serious cooks). We'd picked an Italian day, partly because the date worked out well, but partly because we both really like Italian food. We had an introductory talk from the tutor, and then between the group of about 9, cooked a three-course meal which we all shared, family style, at the end of the day. We all made pasta, which I've made before at home, but never so successfully, and divided the other dishes up between us. MG made a lemon risotto cake, and I did a tomato sauce for the pasta, and a Mediterranean chickpea salad. Other dishes included stuffed peppers, baked fennel in cream, focaccia. spicy courgettes, and for dessert, a really yummy marinated boozy orange dish with chocolate vegan ice cream and biscotti. The whole meal was really lovely and we all left weighed down with the amount of food we'd eaten, and full of enthusiasm to get back to our own kitchens.


I haven't tried making pasta again since then, but I was tempted to revisit the chickpea salad. On the day of the course I had made it exactly as the recipe stated, but at home I fiddled around a little. My first substitution was to replace celery with red pepper (neither of us likes celery), and the second was to reduce the oil in the dressing from 4 tablespoons to 1. To be honest, I think that the best would be somewhere between 2 and 4. The 4 Tbsp version did coat the salad more satisfyingly than the reduced oil one, although you still got the zingy flavours of capers, lemon and garlic which are sauted in it in my version. I suppose in my one the dressing was more like a garnish, but either way, the flavours in the dressing are what make the main salad ingredients really come together and stand out. I made it for lunch when Scientist Sister and family popped by and it was a hit with everyone. I had to serve the olives on the side to appease The Scientist's palate, but a little self-assembly never hurt anyone.


I'm sending this Italian salad to Jacqueline and Lisa for this month's round of No Croutons Required, which has 'Mediterranean' as its theme.


Italian Chickpea Salad (adapted from the Cordon Vert School's Italian workshop)
Serves 4

1 Tbsp olive oil (or more)
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 Tbsp capers, drained and chopped
1 Tbsp parsley, finely chopped
1/2 Tbsp dried red chilli flakes
1 lemon, grated rind and juice
1 can chickpeas, drained
6 sundried tomatoes, rehydrated (or from a jar)
half a pepper, chopped small
sliced green olives, to taste
1 bag mixed salad leaves, including rocket

1. Heat the oil in a small pan, adding the garlic, capers, parsley, chillies and grated lemon rind. Saute for 2 minutes.

2. Place the chickpeas, sundried tomatoes, pepper and olives in a bowl. Pour the garlic mixture and 1 Tbsp lemon juice over them.

3. Arrange the salad leaves in a serving bowl and add the chickpea salad.

Wholewheat pizza night!

First of all, may I direct your attention to the cats' lovely new photos in the sidebar? I have the Norse Goddess to thank for them - she snapped the cats in lots of languid poses while she was here, and I now feel quite guilty for neglecting to capture their cuteness so much myself. Piggle is snapped stretched out in 'I am a lady-cat of leisure and I invite you to stroke me - while putting myself in an almost impossible to reach place' pose, under the spare bed. And Pooky is looking like a man about town at the top of the stairs, from where he likes to keep an eye on the catflap. This is just in case any other cat than piggle pops in, which would be tough given that our cats have magnets on their collars to ensure that only they can get in. Luckily none of the other neighbourhood cats seems to have the same system - probably because we're the only ones uncouth enough to put a catflap in our front door, and thus ruin the look of the terrace.

Man-handled roast tomato, basil and buffalo mozzarella

Today's post is our fun Sunday-night dinner from last night. We make pizza periodically, but this time I was moved to try a wholewheat base. I was inspired by the fact that The Scientist enjoyed one at Zeffirelli's restaurant in Ambleside. I used my usual dough recipe, torn from an old copy of Good Food Magazine, but substituted half of the white bread flour for wholemeal bread flour. I also added a generous shake of wheat germ, to up its healthy credentials even more. I was pleased with how soft the dough was as I kneaded it, and it made really tasty pizzas. They were certainly more wholefoody than your average pizza, but then home-made is never the same as you buy in the shops anyway (much better, naturally!). We both liked the extra wholesomeyness - and if that's not a word, it should be.

Potato, smoked garlic, goat's cheese and rosemary

I made several small pizzas this time, partly for variety, and partly because we've found that they don't always cook all the way to the centre if you make big ones. Besides, it makes for more fun variety in the toppings. I always make the dough, and The Scientist usually whips up the tomato sauce, while we both manhandle them onto the baking sheets. I had to do that part on my own this time as he was playing in an online poker tournament and was at a critical point when they needed to go into the oven. That explains why one of them is a little 'lacy' around the edges. I was about to make a joke about that being a professional pizza-maker's term when I remembered that actually I did work as a pizza chef in a restaurant in my university holidays. The fact that I had forgotten tells you something about how memorable the pizzas were there. Not so our dinner pizzas: we made one with slow roasted tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella and one with home-grown potatoes (sliced thin and boiled beforehand), rosemary and goat's cheese to share. I did one with shaved courgette and sweetcorn for me, and The Scientist put some cured meat and mozzarella on his.

Courgette, sweetcorn, roasted tomato and mozzarella

And how does all this cheese square with my dairy-reducing aims? Well it's particularly cow's dairy which I'm avoiding, as it has by far the biggest impact on carbon outputs. My main concerns when it comes to diet and ethics are animal welfare and environmental impact. The conventional dairy farming industry has poor conditions for milk cows, which are milked in pens made when dairy cows were much smaller, demands enormous yields per animal, and is very intensive in terms of land use. Organic is obviously better on all of these counts (although ultimately unsustainable for the whole population) and I do eat some organic cow's yogurt. Sheep and goats are farmed a lot less intensively both in terms of welfare conditions and land use, so when I do fancy some cheese, I seek out varieties using their milk - or in this case, buffalo mozzarella. When I first heard about the latter I thought I was falling for some sort of joke, but it really is made from the milk of water buffaloes. There's even a farm in Warwickshire (and you can get their cheese from Hill Top Farm Shop). And I've discovered that Mozzarella style vegan cheezly does a pretty good job of melting on toast and pizza too. But on the whole I just try to find other things to eat than cheese and I don't very often miss it.

Wholemeal Pizza - adapted from an ancient Good Food Magazine
Serves 4 (makes 2 pizzas - I made five smallish ones but I think that feeding four is a bit optimistic - it would probably feed or four mes, but possibly only two normal hungry people)

150g strong wholemeal bread flour
150g strong bread flour
1 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp olive oil
200 ml warm water

Put the flour into a large bowl, then stir in the yeast and salt. Make a well, pour in the warm water and the olive oil and bring together with a wooden spoon until you have a soft, fairly wet dough. Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 5 minutes until smooth. Cover with a tea towel and set aside. You can leave the dough to rise if you like, but it's not essential for a thin crust [I don't bother usually as it makes for such a quick and easy supper]

Preheat the oven to 240C/Fan 220C/Gas 8, and move the shelves up to high. Put two baking trays into the oven to heat up (or use a pizza stone which I am always tempted by but haven't given in to buying yet).

Roll out the dough. If you've let the dough rise, give it a quick knead, then split into two balls. On a floured surface, roll out the dough into rounds or squares, using a rolling pin. The dough needs to be very thin as it will rise in the oven.

Top as you prefer. Our quickest and easiest tomato is topping is just some watered tomato paste with some seasonings, but otherwise we make up a nice herbed sauce using tinned tomatoes and fresh herbs if we have them.

Remove the baking sheets from the oven and scatter with cornmeal. Slide, peel or tear the pizza dough off whatever you've left it on and onto the baking sheets. Bake 8-10 minutes, alternating the oven positions half way.

Does giving your cat drugs make you a bad person?

Just look at her eyes!

I'm glad to report that she calmed down soon afterwards and wandered off to find some munchies :)

A veggie break

No, not a break from being a veggie (that will NEVER happen, and you can quote me on that), but a break in veggie heaven. We've been in the Lake District on holiday, and I have discovered that not only is it the most beautiful place I've ever been, but it is an absolute paradise for us herbivores. Never since living near Brighton have I been so well fed. Never since our last holiday in Devon have I marvelled so extensively at the beauty of the English countryside. Never since their last stay at the cattery have the cats been so unimpressed at being stuffed in a carrying box. We're all back now, and while the cats are appreciating their usual freedom and The Scientist is banging a nail into the wall for our newly acquired picture as I type, I am mournfully contemplating the prospect of having to cook my own dinner.


Just in case anyone else is looking for veggie tips for the Lakes, here are my recommendations:

Cote How Organic B&B near Rydal does veggie and vegan breakfasts, and is super eco-minded as well (plus the rooms are very luxurious, it's in the middle of beautiful nowhere, and you can walk to Grasmere from their door)


Zeferelli's restaurant in Ambleside is an amazing veggie place - wholemeal crust pizzas, chillis, stews, pastas, and all delicious enough to keep even the most suspicious omnivore happy. We ate there three times and every time it was brilliant. You can eat in the downstairs restaurant or upstairs in the jazz bar, and there's also a cinema. It's worth booking though we managed to sneak in even on a Friday night without.

The Lakeland Pedlar cafe in Keswick - great sandwiches, smoothies and general cafe fare. We both had the falafel wraps which came with proper top quality salad on the side.

The cafe at Brantwood, John Ruskin's home on Coniston Water, is good for veggies though we only ate sandwiches there. The sandwiches aren't very vegan friendly (cheese and egg) but the cooked options looked more varied.


That's just the ones we went to - there are several more around too, and all in a small part of the country without any particular pretensions to hippydom. Next time I have my eye on a couple of veggie B&Bs, but I think I'll have to go without The Scientist!

By the way, while I never intend to stray from the green and animal-friendly path again, I did have one lapse with a tuna mayonnaise sandwich when I was 16 and recovering from glandular fever - which is what the poor little Munchkin has been in hospital with this week! He's home now but we're very sorry that he and his parents have had such a nasty time, and while I couldn't condone the eating of tuna sandwiches now, I do prescribe large quantities of angel delight and ice cream (and I'm a doctor, you know).

I think he's pleased to be home :)

A tasty daal - and a narrow escape

We all know that cats like kooky corners and unlikely hidyholes, but sometimes they don't think of their own self-preservation. Scooty is generally too bright white and alarmed to get himself caught, but I am always worried about shutting small, stealthy and tabby-brown Mausel in the wardrobe. She has already proved her capacity for initiative beyond all laws of physics and leverage - she can somehow through extreme doggedness (surely cattedness?) get the sliding door of the wardrobe open no matter how carefully I close it, but I still worry. Last night both my fears and the strength of my emotional bond with my little lap-cat were demonstrated. I opened the airing cupboard door on my way to bed, and she hopped in. I dithered about, went to bed, read, turned the light off, started drifting off to sleep. Then I awoke to a strange, brief banging noise. It was unusual enough to make me alert, but certainly not feline-sounding. I suddenly had a flash of intuition that I had absent-mindedly closed the airing cupboard door again on my way upstairs, and couldn't rest until I'd checked. I'm so glad I did, as I had shut the poor little thing in, though she seemed perfectly happy and purry to see me when I opened the door. I dread to think of how hot it would have got in there when the hot water tank came on in the morning. I'm sure she wouldn't have been the first cat to get caught in a nice warm cupboard - in fact I know that Vet Mum and Dad's cat has spent at least one night in theirs - and has also accidentally leapt from an upstairs window and survived, but still. She is stretched out on my lap as I type so she has evidently put it behind her entirely.


All this is entirely unconnected with the tasty daal I made last week. I have become completely converted to the food columns in the Saturday Guardian recently. I particularly like Dan Lepard's How to Bake column and really enjoy reading Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's even if the recipes are often a bit meaty for me (though not always - you can rely on Hugh to pick a good topic regardless of food type). I really want to like Ottolenghi's column as the restaurant and cookbook are both super-trendy, and it's all about vegetarian food. But I all too often find the recipes overly complicated and sometimes not too healthy and move on. Last weekend though I knew immediately the recipe was a winner - spiced lentils with cucumber yogurt. We both love a good daal - it's tasty, healthy and satisfying, and what's more, yogurty dips are the only way The Scientist will eat cucumber. We even had some fresh coriander lying around after making sweet potato falafel. I made it that very night, and it was very good indeed - tangy, tasty, filling, comforting - I could go on. I used curry powder instead of curry leaves, and missed out the optional asfeotida and fenugreek as we didn't have any, but I did the rest exactly as stated. The Scientist ate his with sausages, and I had mine with wild and basmati rice. The next night I had it atop a grilled portabello mushroom it was yum like that too. I think that it would make great soup too, with a bit more liquid added. I opened this weekend's Guardian with new hopes - and have cut out the noodle salad recipe to ponder some more. I may yet be a convert.


Spiced rice with cucumber yogurt, by Ottolenghi: recipe here

Chocolate spice gingerbread - or, my ongoing obsession with the word treacle

I really seem to be unable to resist the idea of ginger and treacle in baked goods at the moment. I think I've said before that gingerbread didn't particularly play a part in our childhood traditions - we liked a bit of Jamaican ginger cake all right, but we didn't have it often. So I really can't explain where this yearning comes from - but if it gives me an excuse to say 'treacle' more often then I'm not going to try to fight it. This particular cake won me over by combining treacle and ginger with chocolate - and fairtrade Green and Black's chocolate at that. The recipe was from a Green and Black's book I bought second-hand after flicking through it in a shop and lusting after all the photos (it was the picture of the pear and chocolate spread which particularly won me over though I haven't made that yet). I came back to this recipe as I wanted to take a cake to the Ecos for dinner on Friday night (thank you for a lovely evening, and especially that amazing Moroccan soup, which, I have just realised, I dreamt about last night!). Eco Sis likes gingerbread too, and this one was advertised as being 'wonderfully moist'. The moistness must particularly come from adding chopped prunes, I think. I wonder if chestnut puree might have a similar effect though it might change the flavour of the cake. It also has buttermilk in it, and since I rarely buy buttermilk I used milk with added vinegar which seemed to work fine (please note that this is an accepted way to make buttermilk, Eco Sis - I didn't just randomly take liberties with your cake!).

Yummy cake; poor lighting :(

I will make this cake again. It contains fair trade orangey chocolate, it contains treacle and ginger, it contains prunes (which I love), it is dense and moist and dark brown in colour, it wrapped and travelled well, it got a rapturous response from Eco Sis: what's not to like? Interestingly, Eco Sis didn't pick up on the ginger immediately but it was because she was intrigued to guess what the moist little flecks she could see were (the prunes). Once I told her what it was she said she could definitely taste both ginger and chocolate. It was harder for me to assess fairly since I knew what was in it but I thought the combination of ginger and chocolate worked really well, especially with the added richness of the prunes.

Clearly not chocolate ginger cake, but so cute as to be almost edible, and sort of chocolatey coloured. She's wedged herself in a very small space between me and The Scientist on the sofa, and is lying on one of our legs each!

Although this wasn't previously a family favourite this cake went down so well with the Ecos that I am sending to Not Quite Nigella for her Ultimate Chocolate Cake Challenge.

Chocolate Spice Gingerbread (from the Green and Black's Chocolate Recipes cookbook)
125 g unsalted butter
50g Maya Gold or other good-quality dark orange chocolate, broken into pieces
50g dark chocolate, minimum 60% cocoa solids, broken into pieces
75g dark muscovado sugar
4 tbsp treacle
150ml buttermilk
125g ready-to-eat prunes
175g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 level tsp ground ginger
1 level tsp cinnamon
1 large egg, lightly beaten

Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas 3. Line an 18cm square cake tin (I used a standard loaf pan) with greaseproof paper or baking parchment

Cut the butter into cubes and place in a heavy saucepan along with the chocolate, sugar, treacle and buttermilk. Heat gently until the ingredients have melted, then set aside to cool.

Snip the prunes into small pieces with the kitchen scissors. Sift the flour into a large bowl along with the bicarb of soda and spices. Pour the chocolate mixture into the bowl and beat thoroughly with a wooden spoon, then add the beaten egg and beat again. Fold in the prunes.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and level off the surface using a palette knife. Bake for about 50 mins. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for about 10 mins. Turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool completely. Wrap in greaseproof paper and store in an airtight container.

The cake will keep for a week in an airtight container. It is best eaten the day after it is made.

It's a tough life

I sometimes wish I could be one of our cats. They don't have a hard life. The whole house is basically a series of beds as far as they're concerned; they get cuddles more or less on tap given how often at least one of us is working at home; and there are lots of nice fences and gardens to frolic in and sharpen their claws on when they decide to venture outside.

No deadlines, cleaning or worries about the global financial situation when you're a cat.


Just a little light sleeping (preferably on something which contrasts with your fur colour for maximum impact), some scary-wide-mouth-yawning, the odd potter to the food bowl, and frequent displays of cuteness to keep the strokes coming. Bliss.

All mouth and no housework

Cats. They make promises and they just don't deliver. Pooky loves nothing better than to relax next to housework, but does he ever darn well do any? Does he heck. And he hasn't done the catfood run for ages either.

But he is just too cute to hold it against him!

A burst of moral indignation

I've become quite proud of my little array of fruits and vegetables growing in pots on our deck. One of my particular joys is a little blueberry plant (that's it in the corner), which is actually producing some fruit. It had a whole cluster of beautiful purple orbs last time I looked which were getting very close to being harvestable. My first home-grown blueberries! I was so excited! Imagine my horror then when I went out into the garden today to find that they had all gone! Some evil amoral thieving so and so had eaten the lot! What snivelling life form would stoop so low? I was bewildered, hurt and outraged. I am thinking of setting up a feline watch, but am worried that our cats aren't very task-oriented. Pooky can focus when the whim takes him, but it's mainly on sleeping. This picture pretty much sums up his laid-back attitude (his other state is extreme alarm, which probably doesn't bode well for his catching any blueberry thieves):


Mausel, on the other hand, is extremely on the ball when occasion arises. These occasions generally involve some poor little critter she has brought in from outside. This is her keeping watch outside the wardrobe, where she had accidentally lost a bird she brought in a week or two ago. She brought it into my study to show me (what a sweetheart) but it got away and flew straight into the open wardrobe. Luckily it got itself jammed between the sliding doors and I was able to release it while Mausel was frantically searching inside the cupboard itself. It flew straight out of the window, thank heaven, but Mausel wasn't to know that, and stayed on watch for hours. I always feel very bad when she does that, but she knows the rule - if she brings it in, it gets taken away (with lots of stroking and praise of course). If only I could harness the predator in her to watch over my blueberry plants I would have my culprit within hours. Sadly she doesn't care for blueberries and wandered off while I was trying to explain the situation to her. I may have to resort to netting.

Falafel - the skinny version (and a get well soon)

I’m a sucker for fancy breads, I freely admit it. When I was a child I would only eat what Israel Grandma called ‘flannel bread’ – ie, it looked and tasted like a wash-cloth. Munchkin Granny liked her grains and seeds and granary goodness, but for me, the less character my sandwich had, the better. Now I’m firmly in her camp, and flannel bread never darkens our bread bin. Take me to a bakery and I’ll make a beeline for the loaves with nary a glance at the cakes. So when Dogophile Vegan Super Nurse and I were in the fancy supermarket in Brighton last weekend it was inevitable we’d end up lingering in the bread section. There were several which took my fancy, but I was strict and only allowed myself one choice – some Turkish pitta breads. Now, what better to go in a pitta than their Middle Eastern friends, some falafel? By coincidence I’d been telling DVSN about my favourite recipe, so this was also a good opportunity to make sure I posted the recipe for her to try.

I have eaten falafel in Israel, and they are amazing. There’s something about the whole street food experience with the oily, spicy, beany falafel, the fine-chopped tomato and cucumber which make up all Israeli salads, the creamy houmous, and the optional extra relishes and chillis, all packaged in a neat white little envelope, which really appeals – and especially since it is all vegetarian. On a healthy eating level, however, it’s not so good, and so I use a skinnied down version when I make them at home. They’re not the same, of course – you need the oil from deep frying to get the authentic experience, but they’re really good in their own way. They are also ludicrously easy and store-cupboard-based – just whizz the ingredients up together, shape into balls, and either bake under the grill or fry in a very light coating of oil. Baking is perfectly acceptable, but experience has shown that frying them in even the teeniest bit of oil does give the burgers a slightly better taste. We served them up with the pittas, some salad, and some tomato relish, though houmous or a tahini dressing are, of course, the traditional toppings. The pittas were larger and floppier than the ones you get in supermarkets here (and falafel stalls in Israel), and so we rolled the little burgers up inside them like a tortilla instead of stuffing them inside. Needless to say, they tasted just as good.

Skinnied-up falafel, with pitta bread and couscous salad

Before I write out the recipe (which was copied from a book which belonged to my friend Vicki, so I can't credit it properly, unfortunately), here is a little cheer-up photo for Kiwi Sis, who is sick and in bed. She's only a few weeks off her due date, and Munchkin has been ill too, so they're not the happiest household at the moment. Kiwi Bro is playing nurse, and I think they're all looking forward to Munchkin Granny arriving in just 10 days. Here is the piggle cat having a Sunday chillout in my lap, which is a cute enough image to cheer anyone up anyway, but she is also showcasing a peek of my current quilt project (apologies, people I make quilts for. There is frankly no chance that it won't have been sat on by a cat before it was finished). Who can this one be for though? Let's just say it's got a long journey before it meets its new owner. Get well soon, Kiwi Sis - I hope the photo makes you smile.


My favourite falafel

Serves 4 (but halves easily)

2 cans chickpeas
1 small onion, in chunks
handful of parsley leaves
zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tsp each ground coriander and cumin
6 tbsp plain flour and extra for dusting
4 tbsp olive oil [I just use a spray when frying]

Put the first 6 ingredients into a food processor. Season, then pulse into a chunky paste [I used to use a mini blender but it's a bit small even for a half quantity to go in in one go.] Tip onto a floured surface and mould into burger shapes.

Dust with a little more flour. Heat the oil in a large non-stick frying pan and fry for two minutes on each side until crisp. OR, brush with a little oil and cook under a preheated grill for 8-10 minutes on each side until browned.

Luminous soup!

This soup wasn't quite as neon-coloured as this in reality. It must have been the bright sun at lunchtime (sorry Kiwi Sis - I know it's pretty chilly with you, but you were out in the paddling pool while we were huddled in our big jerseys). With a nice run of warm days recently, my mind has turned to chilled summer soups. Summer soups have to be adaptable in our house so that they can be cold for me and hot for The Scientist. This is one I've tended to make for solitary lunches, but it's very nice at both ends of the temperature scale. It's a good showcase for the seasonal wonder that is British asparagus, and is very healthy, too. I do often swirl some plain or Greek yogurt into it but today I added cottage cheese, which is surprisingly nice in soup. I got the recipe (reproduced below) from the Sunday Time Style supplement about a year or two ago, and make sure it comes out every spring. I have some other chilled (or not) soups planned for the next few weeks, so will keep this theme coming.


We bought some new garden furniture at the weekend in the hope that we could eat outside with Eco Sis and Bro - but of course it wasn't warm enough that particular evening. So we had our inaugural al fresco meal tonight, courtesy of The Scientist. He fried halloumi, toasted some pitta, and made a little lime vinaigrette (mix juice and zest of two limes, a dash of oil, and a crackle of pepper). We had lots of salads left over from the weekend and it all came together to a very nice little meal. The cats love it when we're in and out of the patio door (and we love it too, after living in a flat with no direct access to the very overlooked garden for four years). Pooky is a little worried about the new furniture, and tends to flee when he sees us coming out holding anything, but he soon settled down when he realised that dinner wasn't going to do anything bad to him. He played some excellent football with some biodegradable plant pots he found lying around, segueing briefly and effortlessly into volleyball, and then abruptly needed a lie down on the patio. The photo's not his best but he's not too sure about the camera either - most stuff makes Pook go wide eyed, poor little boy.


Asparagus Soup (from the Sunday Times)
Serves 4 (apparently, but the batch I made will only do two for main course sized portions)

1½ tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
500g (2 bunches) asparagus, trimmed
500ml good chicken stock [I use vegetable, of course]
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 tbsp low-fat crème fraîche [I don't normally bother, but sometimes use yogurt instead]
1 tbsp chives, finely chopped

Heat a saucepan over a medium-low flame. Once hot, add the oil, followed by the onion and garlic. Cover, reduce the heat to low and gently fry for 15 minutes or until the onion is meltingly soft and golden.

Meanwhile, wash the trimmed asparagus in a sink filled with cold water, then cut off the tips and set aside. Continue by finely slicing the asparagus stems; the pieces should be roughly the size of peas. As soon as the onions are soft, add the stock and bring up to a full rolling boil. Add the sliced asparagus stems and boil for about 10 minutes or until they are soft.

While the soup is cooking, drop the asparagus tips into a saucepan of salted boiling water. Cook for 3 minutes or until tender, then drain into a colander and cool under cold running water. Set aside. [I find that if you've made this in advance and are reheating it, you can just cook the asparagus tips in the soup rather than boil some water separately]

Purée the soup, season to taste and transfer to a clean pan or bowl — depending on whether you are serving it hot or cold. Add the asparagus tips. If you are serving it hot, gently reheat; if cold, cover and chill. In either case, when serving, add a swirl of crème fraîche to each portion of soup. Garnish with the chives.