Spicy Italian Sausage Fusilli

A Jamie Oliver pasta dish here - one which he describes as being for “proper blokes” for some reason. I’m not one for being discriminatory with food, although he does go on to say that girls “tend to like it as well”. So that’s OK then. There isn’t really a sauce to speak of but the gutsy flavours from the sausage meat and herbs coat the pasta, aided by a few spoonfuls of the starchy cooking liquid....

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Zhajiang Mian (Noodles with Pork & Yellow Soybean Paste)

OK, well I’ll say straight off that this wasn’t the greatest of successes. It was though something that I’d been wanting to try for some time - an adaptation of Zhajiang mian, which can kind of be described as a Chinese spaghetti bolognese. This is, in part, based on Ken Hom’s “bean sauce noodles” recipe which can be found here. I had, or so I thought, a glut of packets of yellow bean sauce, brought...

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Chicken with Tomatoes, Peas and Garam Masala

The inspiration for this particular recipe came from a piece in a Saturday Guardian (or maybe The Observer, not sure) by Nigel Slater, on cooking with garam masala (the original can be seen here). I've  tinkered with it somewhat though, in particular adding extra spices as well as extra veg in the form of peas. A bit of googling shows that chicken garam masala is in fact quite a common...

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Spicy Chicken & Vegetable Noodle Soup

It’s ages ago now that I actually cooked this - a good couple of weeks anyway - so I can’t really recall if there was a particular reason for it. Probably I just felt like something healthy and had spring greens & mooli to use up. And of course I do love a good Asia inspired broth or soup! I scribbled this down while cooking at the time but it very much looks like a mix of two previous soups...

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Chickpea, Potato & Spring Greens Curry

So this is the second of the Nigel Slater pulse recipes taken from the Guardian website, as mentioned recently.  I pretty much followed this to the letter, with the exception of swapping out kale, as in the original for spring greens. I think this may have been an error on my part - I usually tweak recipes, often quite heavily, with regard to spice and herb quantities but on this reason for...

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Tuna, Lemon & Herb Fettucine

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have an inordinate amount of stored pages from food magazine and supplements as well as recipe cards. This recipe was originally from one such Waitrose instore recipe card but when thinking of it (with all my cards in storage) I was luckily able to find it on the Waitrose site. I have made here some adjustments to quantities, there was far too much lemon...

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