Store cupboard dinners are a must sometimes, especially as the holidays approach, budgets run low and hungry people seem to materialize on the doorstep. This one is so delicious that you’ll purposely forget to go shopping so you can make it.
Pinterest has supplied me with a couple of cracking recipes. It’s like looking through an online magazine and I love to be able to see what something looks like before I cook it, it’s part of the inspiration process. This one was a doozy though, I couldn’t believe me eyes. A one pot pasta dish? No separate sauce to make? Bring it to a boil and leave it? No way.
This Meatless Monday post is an amalgamation of the minted potatoes and fava beans from the first Piacere Farmer’s Market Challenge and a recipe from one of my newer Olive magazines. It’s so simple − it only has four ingredients and takes less than half an hour to make − but surprisingly satisfying and tasty.
While Pami, my wife and the brains behind this blog, is in California it has been left to me to fend for myself in the kitchen. This calls for quick, simple meals-for-one that can be made after work and won’t send me heading for the takeout menus.
My grandma got a leaflet with her most recent vegetable box from Farm Fresh which had a recipe for lentil salad. Now, I love lentils, but sometimes they can be a bit too earthy, taste a bit too…muddy. Not so with this salad. It is fresh and spring-like while still providing that lentil oomph that will make you full and keep you there. The roasted carrots and shallots add a lovely sweetness which balances with the deep, earthy flavor of the lentils and the zingy tartness of the lemon juice in the dressing. The fresh rosemary in the dressing enhances the lentils earthiness and helps amp up the freshness factor − I’m pretty sure dried rosemary wouldn’t have the same effect and since it grows all over the place, just wander around until you find some. I’m sure your neighbors won’t mind.
So my posts have been lacking, alright nonexistent, the last few weeks. For those of you who don’t know, my visa application has been refused and I’ve been asked to leave the UK, and my husband, while I reapply from California. So the past few weeks have been filled with uncertainty and obviously we have been eating, we’re not in starvation mode, but I haven’t been inspired to write anything and haven’t photographed anything either. Ok, so that’s where I’ve been. Boohoo. On to the food!
Break out the violins and get your hankies ready, this is the story of a dinner for one. I found myself on my own the other night and without any dinner. There were no suitable leftovers, actually no leftovers at all because it’s getting to that time of the month where we find ourselves using up frozen treasures and store cupboard staples. So there I was, alone and hungry with very few options beyond a handful of frozen corn and some canned tomatoes. All by myself, don’t wanna be…Ok, that’s going a bit far.
Further to my pork stew soliloquy on meat from the reduced section of the supermarket, I had some minute steaks lurking in the freezer, marred by the yellow ‘reduced’ sticker which adorns many meats in the icy purgatory of the deep freeze, waiting for the day when they would finally meet their fate. Now, we don’t have minute steaks in the US – or rather, we probably do, but they are called something else – but I assumed from the name that they are for quick cooking which suited my purposes fine and for £1 I would’ve bought pretty much anything.