Crab & Asparagus Tagliatelle

This is based on one of Anthony Worral Thompson’s low GI recipes that I’ve made a few times over the years. Last week I’d been staring at the fish section in Waitrose (having already done the same in Morrison to no avail) as I’d wanted to get some mackerel fillets and somehow walked out with a little tub of crab meat. Fresh crab meat isn’t especially cheap but I’m sure canned crab meat would still...

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Monkfish & Onion Squash Tagine

Oh. My. God! This was so much better than I’d expected, for reasons I can’t even really explain. Considering that everything recently (pork belly, roast chicken, sautéed kale to name a few - modesty prevailing clearly) has been quite special, that is going some but this really is very good. I went to Morocco last year and gorged on tagines which are totally down with...

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Almond & Garlic Kale with Sauté Potatoes & Poached Egg

I’m liking kale at the moment (and as a bonus it’s ridiculously nutritious and healthy) and still having a fair quantity of it further to my last vegbox delivery I decided to try a kale based main rather than sidelining it to a mere accompaniment. If you want to have a meat based main however you could have this as a side and leave out the poached egg, and even...

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Braised Pork & Potato with Fermented Beancurd

Apart from my little slip-up on my birthday weekend, I’ve been doing really well with no-red-meat October. A shame then that it suddenly occurred to me over the weekend that with my impending move in less than a month I should get a bit of a move on with emptying the freezer. October has henceforth become then “Red-meat-only-once-a-week-preferably-on-a-Sunday October”....

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Sichuan Style Tofu with Aubergine

I had a bad cold at the end of last week and the weekend and when it first hit I wanted comfort food. Spicy comfort food at that.. very spicy. The sort of spicy that gives a cold a cuff round the ear then a hard kick up the arse before flinging it out the door. I decided, in the end, as I had an aubergine in the fridge, to go for a kind of meatless mapo doufu (tofu) crossed with fish-fragrant aubergine,...

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Broccoli & Mushroom Stirfry

Red meat free October went slightly awry last Saturday but it was my birthday after all and out for dinner with friends I just couldn’t resist the lamb rump with kidney that was on the menu. Very delicious it was too and I heartily recommend those readers in North London to try out Mosaica in Wood Green’s “cultural quarter” (don’t ask). Sunday I was back on track though and chose to rustle...

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Sambhar - Lentil Curry with Vegetables

Sambhar or sambar is a lentil- based based vegetable curry dish popular in the Southern states of India such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I don’t think what I’ve come up with here is particularly authentic in all honesty (for a start I didn’t use sambhar powder but instead a curry powder labelled “Kinot” in the cupboard - I’ve no idea what’s actually in it!) but what I made does contain what...

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Roast Chicken and Celeriac

I used to hate roast dinners, Sunday’s were never a good food day for me. I found them incredibly boring and bland and didn’t like a whole host of vegetables that I now do. Amazingly I didn’t even particularly care for roast potatoes. I know, WTF? My poor mum, she loves a good roast and must have found me a right pain in the arse. And she always cooked the best roast , by far, of anyone I knew,...

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Spiced salmon with roast cauliflower & garlic chilli greens

So I’m being a bit of a dinnerdiary.org plunderer this week and the following is also heavily influenced by a couple of things I have seen there. I’m doing well with my no-meat-October thing.. even if I do say so myself. To the extent that I went out for dinner at the weekend (I had too many martinis to take photos so I shall not, sadly, be posting a review) and steered clear of beef, lamb or...

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Chicken with mustard & herb lentils

In case you don’t know, October is “Vegetarian awareness month”, well certainly in America anyway. Now, I had a sort of health MOT type thing recently where I was told that my cholesterol was just outside what it should be. Of course they didn’t tell me if it was good or bad cholesterol (i.e. HDL or LDL - I won’t go into a science lesson) but it did make me think that maybe taking a month off of...

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