His Rt. Hon. Kale

Some kale was impulse bought yesterday. It was being talked up over the weekend and I’m a curious sort of cat so, as so often happens, I was moseying with little intent around the covered market and the urge to buy this really rather extraordinary green leaf just sprang on me. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling, gentle reader. No?

I head back to the homestead tomorrow and today has a feeling of last-day-of-school about it. With a moderately productive half-day under my belt, interspersed with the odd Google recipe search for things with kale in, I headed off to the kitchen with a post-it scrawled with the recipe for ‘kale, chorizo and potato hash’. Praises be, I actually had all of the ingredients; quite a feat considering I’ve been trying to Finish Things Up before I head off – the fridge does look very forlorn but upshot is END of soya mince bolog, END of carrot and celery soup, No More Sad Cheddar stuck at the back and an entirely used up pot of baking powder (not that that will go off, but it’s gone nonetheless).

To the making of this hash then. I’ve really been trying to Do Recipes properly recently. Quite possibly this is because of the almighty and depressing messes that needing to finish things off seems to necessitate in my case. Anyway, I went all out and even timed things. First thing to do was begin heating up two pans of water – curses on this crap slow-heating electric cooker – while I quick peeled a potato and cut it into 2cm dice (I did not use a ruler). Now, for reasons unknown to man, child or beast, I had envisaged the drawing out of the kale from its plastic bag as a magisterial moment amidst the bustle of my cooking  – it’s just so expansive and its stems so sure of themselves –  a moment that in fact was slightly disastrous as the fronds, still wet from the market stall, flicked cold water everywhere and into my eye. Eyes recovered, the huge stalky Kale was definitely worth a moment of contemplation. Deeply Green and with an aura of health about it, and yet surprisingly tasty. Most certainly a vegetable that commands respect, without there even being a reason why. I felt humbled yet encouraged by its strength.

Post-reverie, kale branches got cut off and squashed into the now boiling water to be blanched for but one minute. Meanwhile, olive oil was being heated, chorizo chopped, chorizo plopped (into oil) and the electric orange ooze of paprika beginning to spread itself around the frying pan. Out of the pan comes the kale, quietly and powerfully steaming, and it is duly drained. Recipe required it be ‘refreshed in cold water’, like some Roman nobleman moving from hot baths to the frigidarium for an invigorating cold rub down by his manservant Grumio.

A subordinate smirk on my face, Refreshed it was and left to drain again. Chorizo by this point was crisping pleasantly. Post-it called for it to be removed from the pan with a slotted spoon but I, slotted spoon-less, did the old tip the pan towards you and flick the stuff you don’t want covered in oil into a bowl the other side, type method. I find this not only works but also adds a hint of jeopardy to the proceedings; in my opinion, just the right amount of jeopardy when it comes to hot oil. Hot pan then hosts the onion and three squashed garlic cloves (the end of the garlic was beginning to sprout, but this meant it was so very easy to peel – hoorah for squidgy garlic!), softened up, then add boiled potato cubes and chunks of crispy chorizo. The final task was squeezing water out of the refreshed kale (surprisingly not at all soggy) and chopping finely. Into the pan, mixy mixy, et bon. We have a Hash.

Quite a large plate of hash too…. On tasting I found lemon juice liberally swizzled over the lot did wonders. I’m definitely making this one again. In the spirit of the sort of calm that comes before the holidays, so my lunch-making process was gloriously hassle free. Plus, my saucepans got to be introduced to something that’s basically vegetable royalty – Kale. Long Live the Kale!

It might look wrong, but it's oh so right

 [WARNING. This Blog Post Contains Beans. If you are a Bean-o-phobe, step away from the computer. Dial for your local IT specialist and go out to buy a nice hot chocolate or serving of mashed potato. The beans will not follow you.]

Tonight’s dinner was Totally Siiiiick. Sick like ‘yeaah sic blud init whaaaa. F’real’, not sick like ‘Well That's Not Very Tasty’.

For some time now, I’ve been planning to have beans on toast. Any number of reasons for making such a plan, but in particular I thought it good to revisit that most archetypal of student foods, the humble bean. It has, as it happens, bean a long time since I’d opted the Big Bz n Tz. It hadn’t really tickled my fancy. I like to think it's because I'm more interested in seeking out meals that are easy but do require going that extra mile in their creation, just to make it all worth looking at, eating, thinking about pre and post the cooking event itself and, occasionally, writing about…

Ok then, I’ll admit it. I have bean a Baked Bean Snob. Time was I had beans on toast on the regular – it was a straightforward solution to lunch. Let it be(an) known, if you’ll grant me a digression, that I HATE lunch. It’s so awkward. Just when you’ve got into the swing of the day, along comes the social compulsion to luncheon, forcing you to stop, slave to our stomachs that we are, seek out, consume and in due course, turn away from the memory of something edible. It’s just rubbish – it can’t be too complicated to make nor be too heavy lest post-prandial somnolence ensue, thereby ending hope of all productivity for at least three hours. I resent the lunch hour as much as the lunch. You don’t have a chance to properly settle into the planning of lunch, nor enjoy the sinking satisfying feeling after its duly bean consumed, perhaps nursing a glass of something refreshing and stretching out one’s legs knowing there’s not really much else to be done with the day, as is the case with dinner (oh glorious dinner, second only to the indulgent breakfast/brunch of a workless weekend).

Ah yes. Dinner! It was, like, totes sick. I found myself getting more and more excited as it was be(an)ing cooked. These ideas started coming to me – like shooting stars from heaven - “No! Not just beans on toast. Beans, BACON and toast!”. The Devil is always in the detail. “Ha HA!” I thought “Butter AND marmite on the toast, phwooooarr”.

Beans, beans, how could I ever have doubted you? Your flavour is profound, your texture light, your appearance…. rather jolly. As a final crown to this sumptuous feast - cheese. But wait! Could I…? Might I…? Should I….?

Yes I did. I grated the cheese on top and then put the whole lot under the grill. Toasted cheese on top of baked beans, bacon and toast. This Is a Righteous Dinner.

 (Your mum is one of my five a day)

On Vegetables

It would be a lie to say that I tried to eat healthily. An attempt to do something requires at least a vague idea of what the task at hand might involve. To pluck an entirely random example from the ether, trying not to buy any more clothes before the New Year is just one such known entity; to me at any rate. The mornings peering into an evermore depressing wardrobe; the slightly nauseous, sweaty feeling whenever I get too close to the high street and temptation; the obscenely gratifying stolen moments with retailers’ websites (I know I’m safe there. Paying online is so much faff – I mean how many digits am I meant to type in? Thank goodness I’m incapable of memorising 16 digit sequences). Yes, the attempt to stave off end-of-year self-regulatory financial supernovae is, in my case, a well-known and well-trudged one.

But this here ‘healthy eating’ is somink else. Calorie counting, Regular exercise, and avoiding sugar, cream, fat, butter, joy, Carbs, Processed Things, Refined Things, Fast Food – these are the concerns, I believe, that do a healthy eater make. Always one to (over?)analyse, my questions about healthy eating all start with ‘yes, but…’. Yes, but what about Carbs before 6pm? What about one’s calcium intake? What about the poor cows that’ll go out of business if I stop buying cream for my coffee?

One of my bigger concerns is regarding vegetables. They are a Good Thing, verily. But when does a vegetable stop being a vegetable? You hear terrifying things about vegetables losing most of their vitamins within FIVE MINUTES of them leaving the safety of the vine/stem/root/earth/home. Then if you take off the skin, well then, you might as well buy yourself a bacon double cheesburger for all the good that be-picked, be-skinned ex-healthy article will do you. Add to that the inevitable loss of Good Things in the Good Vegetable that happens when you reheat or coat in a Bad substance like tomato passata that has some sugar in it or, no, please no, some salt (god forbid). I find myself at an impasse – often holding a packet of Maldon Sea Salt in one hand and five 100g packets of 85% chocolate in the other – stuck in aporia and thinking ‘Well What Is the Bloody Point?’.

This all came to a head, as is so often the case, as I was contemplating some carrot and celery soup.

Lots of carrots (skin on), lots of celery (most mud washed off), three or four onions, garlic and stock – surely this should be a Very Healthy Thing? Yet I can’t help feeling doubt. Is this bowl of soup one of The Five? Really?? And even then, aside from the health making properties inherent in a carrot-with-skin-on in a soup, it is a sad fact that said soup inevitably comes with hot buttered toast. Buttered toast probably cancels out whatever one of The Five there was in the skins of the carrots I so earnestly safeguarded in the soup-making. My brow was furrowed. I needed more evidence.

After a truly wicked evening with a Dominos Pizza, I approached the task of the following day’s dinner like a sinner after Confession, filled with the desire to lead a spotless and healthy culinary life henceforth. Stir-fry with All The Vegetables In The World.

But then, what with the soy sauce (it has so much SALT in it and SALT is BAD), oil (OIL IS BAD), and the excessive cooking in a wok (it was a stir-fry ended up being rather too big for a single wok and so dividing of the stir-fry had to occur – the necessary faff led to many a squidgy carrot and over-cooked French bean), surely all those lovely vitamins must have run away to join the Circus or something. 

 Foiled again.

More vegetables featured in this evening’s supper. I could swear the courgette with its back to us is giving me a reproachful look ("I mean WHITE Rice – what on earth was I Thinking??"), its soggy seeded interior collapsing in on itself in defeat as all the Good Things evaporate away.

With the Christmas season upon us and the weight of society telling me that binges on chocolate by the advent calendar is ‘just what happens this time of year’, what is to stop a poor unfortunate and uneducated soul like myself leaping from this veggie-ledge and plunging into chocolate-soaked, butter infused depravity?

I could ask for an appointment with a nutritionist for Christmas, I suppose. But I’ve heard they make it all up anyway.

A Day of Crapulence

 

It all crystallized in a moment of morose acceptance - my lunchtime soup (‘lunchtime’ being seven minutes to three in the afternoon) would not have that perfect dollop of yoghurt in it because said yoghurt had been polished off at third breakfast (or second elevenses if we’re being antipodean about it). This is when I realized, my day has, and in all likelihood will continue to be, a day of crapulence. Not one to do things by halves, I have now embraced the mission for today. Eat. Everything.

Defrosting soup that’s been in the freezer for at least four months, toast, more toast, tea til there’s no more tea bags, teaspoons full of honey, raisins, an attempt at eating porridge oats straight from the box, yoghurt and bran flakes, pudding from last week… A day of grazing is what it all adds up to, and in the light of my very heavy-eating week last week, grazing is not quite what the food doctor ordered. Enslaved by my own weakness and exuding apathy and sloth from every pore, I shuffle around the kitchen in pyjamas overlayed with other people’s clothes (it’s too far to go up two floors to get any of my clothes), taking care to tuck my pyjama bottoms into my (sorry, not my) socks for that final flourish of mad-lady chic. I start plotting an article I shall write for Vogue titled ‘The Allure of the Pyjama Pant - a study of a British woman’s obsession’.

The day started out so full of potential. Brisk alarm at seven am, porridge and coffee as any weekday would have it. Carefully steered away from ensconcement in distracting activities like the paper or the news by conversation with brother, I was ready for a day of mind-expansion at the library. And yet somewhere between leaving my porridge bowl on the upstairs landing and watching five episodes of ‘Rev’ on iPlayer before 10.30am, the day all went horribly wrong.

So here I sit, the remnants of past eaten meals strewn around me. It could almost look like I had a great Friday night party and just haven’t got round to tidying it up yet. But no. It’s just me, eating, on my own, for seven hours straight.

As I was desperately trying to spur myself to action and going through the list of productive things I could do with my day, cooking did come up: easily achievable goals; a product to call one’s own at the end… But this only prompted a philosophical thought train of how cooking could be some kind of therapy for recovering addicts or people with PTSD. Meanwhile I turn to the larder, deep in thought about converting the Twelve Steps into twelve levels of cooking and drafting my letter to Jamie Oliver asking if he’ll spearhead the whole operation, to open yet another mini pack of Korean biscuits. It should be worrying that I actually have started to enjoy looking ever more fetid as the crumbs collect on this somewhat bobbly jumper I’m now wearing. It should be.

So there you have it. Validation of this Lazy Student Cook’s mission statement if ever there was one. I haven’t even cooked. No, no wait – I added nutmeg to my porridge. And that’ll have to do.

A Tale of Two Pots

The past 24 hours have seen me embracing the ‘stick it all in a pot’ method of cooking. I must hold up my hands and say this is something I have castigated my brother for doing (“heating up things in a saucepan does NOT make a meal”). I mean, I have Standards. I have Cooking Ethics. I Cook Meals. A dinner plate must be pretty, or at the very least have identifiable food-stuffs on it. Elsewise it must needs represent a lack of self-respect - nay, self-worth (if I’m feeling particularly pontificatory).

But OH HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN.

Last night was an excusable and utterly righteous ‘stick-it-all-in-a-pot’ occasion. In the first place it wasn’t really a pot, it was a pyrex bowl. Second, I was making trifle. (*********resisting all trifle-related puns/wordplays here*******ow this physically hurts*******). Making trifle is now one of my top favourite things to do. For some reason I have bad memories of trifle in my younger years. It may be that I never actually ate any and I still have a residual three-year-old resistance to Things That Are New. Anyway, now, it’s the best. I began to construct a Fort of Cake inside the pyrex bowl. First the foundations, well cemented with sherry; then the walls of Cake Fortress; more sherry; an incredibly satisfying round of crushing amaretto biscuits (I like to think this was akin to some kind of grouting for The Great Cake Castle) over the top. More sherry. By this point I'm not calling it 'sherry' any more but 'shereeeeeeeeeeeeee'. Just in case it's escaped anyone, yes I do talk to my cooking ingredients.

Drunk on the power of being able to crush amaretto biscuits with the mere flexing of my fingers*, and certainly not drunk from the fumes of the shereeeeeeeeeee, I deviated from the internet recipe and decided, since its Christmas, to add in some cheeky cranberries. 

*As a general note, I can recommend the crushing of amaretto biscuits for anyone who feels the odd twinge of self-doubt – one feels like some great potentate in whose palms lie the fates of all, ready to be duly crushed. Yes. Yes this is a healthy chain of thoughts to have repeatedly.

Raspberries atop them, more crushing (DIE BISCUITS, BEHOLD YOUR MASTER AND TREMBLE), rest of cranberries and some flaked almonds. By now Cake Castle Of Doom looked a bit like this.

To make this an extra healthy pudding, add a pint of custard, one and a half pots of double cream syllabub-ed with more sherry and obscene amounts of sugar, grated chocolate, more almonds and orange zest (healthy to the last, you see).

A truly magnificent pudding in a pot. Hurrah!

But tonight. Oh tonight. I sunk low. I didn’t even decorate my dinner with a provocative and tender sprig of some herb. It was boiled carrots, to which got added the soya mince bolog (it has mellowed in the freezer and has stopped tasting offensively processed), to which got added the washed up has-beens of the cherry tomatoes, to which got added freezer peas. 

Dinner in a pot. 

May the pantheon of cooks-on-high forgive me.  

Pon de replay

 The wonderful things about being an obsessive, which I only have a mild claim to be, is eating the same pudding for four, five, maybe even six days straight, is not something of a hardship. Now, it would definitely be more fun to spend oodles of time cooking lots of different things, having them consumed by a table-ful of hearty farmers (n.b. could be male or female farmers) come in from a day's work, kicking mud off their boots at the door and smelling of the nice parts of the countryside (elderflower hedges, blue sky and lark's breath - that sort of thing), smacking their chops and slapping their bellies as all recline post-chomp-fest in their reclining kitchen chairs (someone seriously needs to invent those). Perhaps someone would pick up a folksy instrument and begin playing a song of ye olden times. We would hum and remember Old Betsy, Harrowing Dan and Bob the fishman, gone on to a better place. Whole days could be spent planning these idyllic e'entime dinners - huge pies, majesterial roasts, gigantic tarts (singger) and all with LASHINGS of Double Cream. There would also be an aga. I would have rolled up sleeves and a permanent streak of flour on my face, just to show that I too was a hearty member of the scene.

But, alas, this is not my life. But if anything were to be a consolation, it would be this chocolate cake. A fairly standard flourless affair but containing some of the top things in the World. Chocolate, Butter and, when I serve it, Extra-Thick Double Cream (heart-attack, I hear you say? I have a method for off-setting, like carbon emissions offsetting. It's about as logical as offsetting anyway). 10 seconds in the microwave and a scattering of pomegranate seeds and Ooh, heaven is a place on earth.

In other news - success on Soya Mince Bolognese number II!

Amazing what can be done with coriander. I used to hate it so much and then - Lo! - the light, the truth, the glory and all things in the world manifestly well-ordered. Granted it may have been its strong flavour that made soya mince rise up from the depressence of cardboard-tasting death and masked the STILL persistent taste of pot noodle. But it done good, and esp with the fresh chopped up cherry tomatoes (evidence of my own megalomania, I've started believing what I wrote about cherry tomatoes below, and now can't quite look at them in the same way. I'm pretty sure it was guilt I was feeling when I was chopping them up. Or maybe that was just memories of bygone festival antics triggered by the EVER PResent smell of bastard pot noodle...).

Did a lack of parmesan this time make all the difference? I think perhaps so. I wonder if anyone else regards parmesan as a social nicety rather than very much the Requirement for all pasta-type dishes?

(soya mince is improved)

Why, that's a very large salad. . .

My lunch. The last of the bulgar wheat, more of the feta, the scraplets of the waffer-thin ham. But why such a large bowl? Why is that necessary? You want to know why? Because of lettuce.

Lettuce, lettuce, obnoxious lettuce.

Now the sins of lettuce, as you are all only too aware, number in the thousands. Here I confine myself to the top three transgressions of this most uppity of salad-stuffs.

One.

It has no right taking up so much space in a bowl. It has nothing nutritious to offer besides a bit of water and some smugness of having 1 of The Five. The Five is a tyranny that shall be addressed at a later time, when lettuce has been utterly Denounced. As it stands, lettuce is party to this tyranny, and therefore must be eliminated as an enemy of Freedom.

Two.

It simply refuses to be cut down to size. No matter how one shreds or tears - or indeed pummels - there will always be a frond here or there, its ludicrous self-belief refusing to be contained by any hapless consumer’s contorted or sucking maw, forcing one to flail facially in order to tame the bastard. Put them high if you hear me people – TESTIFY.

Three.

Everyone with the most basic knowledge of alliances among vegetables acknowledges that lettuce has a long-standing arrangement with the cherry tomato, both plotting night and day to enslave the eater of salad via a process of attrition and humiliation. Lettuce, I can now reveal, is, in fact, the pimp of the cherry tomato. Brutalised by life in the greenhouse, a cherry tomato on-the-vine (a bargain at Farmers’ market for £1.50) appears from its brown paper carrier, its pendulous fruits quivering with ripeness, only then to be shamelessly used as a ‘fluffer’, distracting from the lettuce’s own inadequacies.

So there we have it. Why salad is the devil.

That being said, it did make a very tasty lunch, and there was even some left for a tasty side tomorrow. Turns out characterising the ingredients of one’s salad can make for a jolly and, in my case, indulgently self-righteous lunch hour. 

 (lettuce is tamed)

Phat Beetz*

Ah, writing about beetroot. In the words of giant pop band of the 90s Lighthouse Family - What Could Be Better?

I didn't grow up with beetroot. Just not part of the rotation in our household. Very occasionally when we got taken out to Garfunkels (for the £2 kids meals - such glorious days), Dad would get beetroot from the salad bar, along with everything else. But I never liked the cut of its jib. Oozing a dark unguent. Most suspicious, my five-year-old-self thought. I didn't ever appreciate that it is the pinkest food in the world (and as a five-year-old girl obvs I just lurrrrrved PINK). Digression verging on gender stereotyping rant? Myes.

So at the delightful farmers' market of wednesday last I bought a big bowl of beetroot for £1.50 - what a bargain! The scottish ancestors within me cackled with delight and cracked their knuckles at the thought of such sparing of expense. Satisfied with them and myself, I duly consulted cookbooks, sure there would be absolutely tons of stuff to do with roots from beets.

But here is the trouble with being lazy. No matter what dear Yotam Ottolenghi, Leon, Nigel Slater, or indeed Delia say, you just peel it all and put it in a roasting pan with oil, salt, pepper and the only type of vinegar you have in the cupboard - balsamic. Now the beetroot is Everywhere. In fact, I lied. I didn't put it all in the roasting pan. It didn't fit.

It certainly is jolly having it around. I mean, it is so PINK. And a cool fluorescent pink at that, not wishy washy 'I-could-give-you-salmonella' pink. Not, 'I'm-a-salmon-hear-me-roar(-weakly)' pink. PINK PINK. Cutting up beetroot with pinking shears would be a sheer delight. Also, although it is part of that category of vegetables that Do Funny Things To You That We're Not Meant To Talk About, it's not as objectionable as what happens after consuming Jerusalem artichokes (wikipedia it) or asparagus. Thus for the past two days, in which I have eaten roughly 1.5kg of beetroot, I have caught myself staring at some hapless fellow sufferer/student in the library thinking 'heeeheeeeeeee I have a secret'. If you don't know what I mean, you Clearly have not eaten enough of this delightful, subtle and obnoxiously psychedelic veg.

Being lazy, I also cooked up a big pot of bulgar wheat with onion and garlic and a completely half-arsed amount of cumin in it ("oh, it'll be like spiced yoghurt, only spiced bulgar wheat"). So that's all I've been eating really. Bulgar wheat, beetroot and roasted carrot (the carrot got lavished with a tablespoon and a half of honey. Treat your carrots right, and they'll treat you. To nothing. But they might taste nice independent of their well or ill wishings towards you).

 At first, it was exciting. Just look at them colours! It's JUST like I'm in MOROCCO!

And then, OOH but feta makes it better. With lemon juice, pomegranate seeds, more spinach and black pepper, it was verging on taste-tastic.

And then.... exactly the same thing for lunch!

The best part about doing salad in a box has to be the Required dance-around-the-kitchen-shakin-the-box-up-yeaaah which Dave definitely did not walk in on. Lucky Dave. He always wears great socks.

Now, for the uncooked beets that lie dormant and in wait for me in the cupboard. What the hell am I going to do with them?

*Title pun kindly donated by Oliver James Westerby Cox (2011). Damn him for making it first.

Intro to Me

I like my food. I like tasty things. If you see me sitting in the library, typing with a serious face on, or staring intently at a screen, it is likely I'm thinking about food. Specifically, I am perpetually perplexed and obsessed with the question - "What would be The Best thing to eat right now". I'm also a graduate student at a posh-ish university. This means whilst I have the general mindset of 'I Am Poor. Put It Down', I have a whiff of bourgeois about me and like looking wistfully over and around cheese counters in the covered market. I have Googled 'gurnard'.

So what's all this about? I've decided to have a bash at doing something semi-regularly - writing about the food I cook in my student kitchen (sparse, electric cooker, strip lighting, bleak and Le Creuset-less).

And here we go. Tonight's Lazy Creation? Soya Mince Bolog!

"WHY BUY SOYA MINCE??" I hear you cry! Well, it's cheap. And new (to me). I have a friend who likes cooking healthy things and she mentioned it to me. Feeling puckish in Tesco I bought some and Tonight is the Night when Mince Gets Rehydrated (to be sung - with difficulty - to Spice Girls 'Two become One').

Le packet says to rehydrate mince before cooking but I, devil-may-care, cad-around-town that I am disregard. Two smallish onions chopped, four cloves of garlic (it is soya mince after all - it'll need some punch), three smallish carrots cut up small all into some olive oil in a big pan. Soften them bad boys up and then IN with the MINCE! 200g of dried mince plus 750ml of hot veg stock = something resembling very gross things. Help is at hand in the form of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper and a daring grating of nutmeg. The mince begins to expand and I am not very encouraged by the smell of pot noodle emanating from my cheery red large saucepan. The contents are far from red or cheery.

TO THE TOMATOES. A carton of tesco passata, what feels like a quarter of a tube of tomato paste, a fork-ful of marmite (I ent got no Bovril), thumb-and-fingerful of maldon sea salt (I took the intro to Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries very much to heart), scrobbling of black pepper, vigorous stir, and finally, the last third of bottle of red wine that's been sitting near the cooker for the past four weeks. I really hope it is mine. I have assumed. The flatmates and I don't really talk extensively. I begin fantasising about what anyone would do if they walked in and I was sitting on the floor surrounded by everyone's food and stickily licking out yoghurt pots and smoothie cartons. May or may not attempt this if things get really lonely.

And Lo! We have a bubbling pot full of something that may resemble bolog! I have no spag so it'll be conchiglie bolognese this eve. Amid the fantasy of gorging self on the leftover pizza on fridge shelf below mine, I have managed to turn on the nasty electric hob thing so its heated up in time for the boiling of water for pasta - and in that goes.

I have a lovely sister (one of three) who is fantastically conscientious about vegetables and so, remembering that my health is dependent on veg, I try a new method of preparing spinach. Post washing authentic-looking mud of the leaves I put it in a bowl with a wee bit o water in the bottom and microwave for 2mins. Brilliante! So overjoyed with success of this new cooking method, I don't use a sieve and attempt pouring the water out of the bowl without, resulting in spinach falling out of bowl into sink, as it is wont to do when tilted in such a way. I've just done the washing up - I'm sure the sink is clean. The spinach bowl is now to be the serving dish for dinner. It is larger than a cereal bowl and heavier too, but not in the realms of mixing bowl. It is characteristic of the student kitchen - odd and ugly.

Slurp of olive oil onto now cooked pasta, swirly swirly in the pan (a conchigli makes a bid for freedom - I hope it enjoys its life on the kitchen floor) and onto the spinich. A final tast of the soya mince bolog prompts more tomato paste, salt, pepper and a bolder grating of nutmeg, with the result it doesn't taste like pot noodle.

Lashings of parmesan and boom. We have a saturday night supper.

Final word from this lazy student cook: soya mince - don't buy it unless you have to... I have a whole pan-full of the stuff now to freeze and eat. Remember me comrades....

If you have had success with soya mince, or if you are a lazy student cook, let me know. We can vibe.