Ahem

peers round the edge of the door and sneezes as dust floats everywhere....
Um. Hi!
waves and grins a bit sheepishly..
It's been a while, huh.

Lets not pontificate on how UTTERLY RUBBISH I've been at blogging as of late (like the last, erm, 9 months...No. I haven't been having a baby. I've just been crap.)
Lets just get on with a recipe shall we??

Joanna's Purple Sprouting (From my beloved Leon 2)

I got a big bag of lovely purple sprouting in my veg box and that can only mean one thing.. this delish sausagemeat, chilli, fennel and purple sprouting dish. I even bought sodding Weight Watchers sausages to do it with (more of that later I'm sure) but only because Asda didn't have any own brand reduced fat ones which I'd far rather have bought evil WW.. bad enough I'm paying them to keep an eye on what I eat.

Recipe itself is a doddle with only a few ingredients..

Heat oil in a large frying pan, fry off garlic, chilli flakes and fennel seeds.. Add the sausagemeat, smush it up into crumbly bits and leave it to go golden on one side then stir it about again. I have to admit, I like it when it sticks to the bottom as all those brown crispy bits scraped up and added to my dinner makes it for me. Add the chopped purple sprouting in and stir it about for a while. I don't like it quite as crunchy as this recipe makes it (not when it's lovely veg box stuff with real stalks as against the slightly bendy supermarket version) so I tend to start off by pushing the sausage to one side of the pan, frying the broccoli in the oil for a bit, then putting in a couple of splashes of water on the purple sprouting ONLY so that it steams a bit. You don't want to be steaming the sausage as well. Uck. Then mix it all back together and scrape up the extra sticky crispy bits you got from underneath the sausage.

Finish with lemon juice..

We had ours with roasted carrots and parsnips as I'm on this stoopid diet, however it's MUCH better with crusty bread!

Cheating a bit..

So this was work not home but it is the first wedding cake I've ever done and whilst not being entirely happy with it, I was a bit proud that I managed to do it whilst the boss was on hols.

Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Cake

http://smittenkitchen.com/2011/05/strawberry-summer-cake/

I made this a couple of weeks ago. It was lovely!!
This was my version:

Before

After

Oh Leon Leon, how I love you Leon!

This is the book that brought back the mojo. I've cooked and cooked and cooked and loved eating from this.

I love it. It's fresh, simple food, fast. I am totally inspired..

Sadly I didn't take photos of last night's dinner which was Chicken with preserved lemons and olives and Sunshine Salad.

Papas Con Bravas, Italian Broad Beans, Courgette Ceviche

Fried courgettes with green sauce, roasted cauliflower with turmeric, 30th b'day salad

Cooking tonight's dinner (after all the chopping!)

Lots of stirring pans all at once :)

Spicy fried fish, 30th b'day salad, roasted cauliflower, broccoli with cashews, garlic and chilli.

Love it.. so many more things to try.

Hot dogs for tea

Somehow I feel far more justified in giving the kids a couple of hot dogs for tea (and not a lot else) if I serve them up in freshly home-baked rolls.. 
There. I did it. I blogged again. BAD blogger.
Must play catchup.

Sticky Lemon Pork and Brown Rice Pilaff

Nom.
In a word.
I made this for tea tonight. YUM! I stuck it in the intellichef and it was really really good.
I was a bit stuck as to what to stick with it but fell back on an old fave that I discovered in my original weight watchers days.. not because it's that healthy as it stands, but it's really tasty.. Find it here

Then quite lamely I stuck peas with it at the last minute as I needed something vaguely green in there and only had broccoli in the fridge (that was green) which I wanted for the weekend.. can't win them all. Didn't distract from the loveliness that much ..

Fry off some onions gently in butter (oops - mushrooms sneaked in there again..), then stir in the rice, s&p and cinnamon

Add luverly slurpy homemade chicken stock full of goodness..

This is the pork thingy - Fry off pork which is coated in flour and paprika, add rosemary, garlic and bay, then wine. Boil for a minute, add lemon zest then simmer for an hour. Add lemon juice.

Rice - done. Baked in the oven for an hour till it's all delish.

Dinner. With peas. Ahem.

Oh blimey

Oh deary me. Nearly two whole months have passed again.
Here's the thing. I get (racks brains for who that I know has been allowed a link to this little bit of me..) pretty depressed from time to time.
I chose that word carefully because it's not about being fed up or sad or grumpy or cross. It's about being disfunctional and dragged down and stuck in a cloud of loathing and desperation and desolateness. There's a made up word for you..
Anyway. The relevance of that to this is that I know now that when I get like this, when everything is conspiring against the wobbly balance board that is my emotional wellbeing, I lose interest in food.
*gasps*
Who'd have thought!?
The really tragic part is that I don't lose interest in eating. I just get less picky about what I consume, so no magic diet  and skinny sized clothes either. Dammit.
Anyway. That's my excuse. It's been a bad couple of months for foodiness. I'm working on it. Given that foodiness is most of what I am and do nowadays I need to pull it back from somewhere..