m. 41 lentils with tomatoes and gorgonzola

wow, wow, wow ... m opened our ottolenghi cookbook (which usually involves the common refrain: "ugh, we can't make that ... we can't make that" as we go page by page seeing if we have the ingredients, time, or just courage to really do justice to one of his recipes) and tackled his lentil salad with roasted tomatoes and gorgonzola, once the table was set it all looked like this:

  

e's little bits are there too, the thing about this recipe is that all the flavors go so perfectly together, it is almost as if you are driven to eat after you take your first bite, obviously this salad has been very popular online, the original ft recipe is here and then here are some other blogs on this goodness, it seems a lot of people are smitten with this one!

m. 40 fava bean red sauce with polenta

yesterday m threw this together:

it is a beautiful fava bean red sauce on polenta with caramelized onions, little baby e ate a lot of it!  we had made it once before although we couldn't remember where we found the recipe so we played by ear (or taste bud), its just a red sauce with favas added at the end, they add great texture to the dish ...

m. 39 arancini and an apricot flapjack

here is a photo of our light dinner tonight:

at first glance it may appear to be your run of the mill green salad, but at the top there is a little surprise: arancini!  last night we made mushroom risotto and tonight with no idea what to do for dinner we breaded the leftovers and made simple arancini, they were delicious and definitely something that we will have to experiment with! 

for desert, m whipped together what was supposed to be apricot and oat cookies, but turned out to be apricot and oat flapjacks, they were crazy good, although as m said this less than flattering picture makes them look like "something the cat threw up," nice.

intermezzo 4 we're back

it's been a long five months or so, and the longest part of it has been not just not being in our garden, but not really being able to cook at all, there have been some bright spots here and there, but now we are back for good and staying put for a while ...

but, the question is, without veggies from the garden what are we going to cook?  luckily we're not entirely without food, the rosemary plant in the allotment is massive, so in our first real meal back in the kitchen we made a rosemary red sauce (idea from the silver spoon of all places) and maria made a crumble on the fly with these blackberries that are just coming in bloom, it looks like there will be a massive amount this year, we get ours from just down the street in an abandoned lot in front of an electricity transformer, good times.

m. 38 bbq tofu and polenta chips

things have been very hectic here the last couple of weeks as little baby e has been unrelenting in her cuteness and things have become more complicated with my mom's illness, it has led to a bittersweet period, we have been cooking a lot but often i don't have the energy to blog about all things delicious or ill fated, our dinner last night however was an exception, bbq tofu and polenta chips!  a long time ago when we were in seattle, m learned a technique for flavoring tofu that did not require a marinade, but rather you fry the tofu in a skillet on one side and then addany kind of sauce when you flipped the tofu (once it's nicely browned on the bottom), you flip the tofu only once and the effect is this amazing flavor throughout the tofu, it does take a long time (maybe even 30 minutes or more) but it is worth it ... and then these polenta chips that we have made often since about a month ago when we really started experimenting with polenta, these are flavored with caramelized onions and thyme (ala deborah madison), my camera provides us with this utterly stale image:

m. 37 vegetable tagine and flatbread

i have been wanting to play with our tagine recently, it's been a long time, but usually we end up turning any meal we do in it into some massive project, not this time though, this time we did a quick search for a recipe for the sauce and then threw whatever we had in the tagine, it was wonderful, we used a charmoula sauce recipe from john torode of masterchef fame that was really nice, the whole thing turned out like this:

but now you are saying, my what nice looking flat bread! and this was the most exciting part of the meal, in fact, and really easy to do, we got the idea from maria elia's the modern vegetarian, which recently has been supplying many of our sides, a version of the recipe can be found here ... we did ours with onion seed and it was amazing!

m. 36 farro and puy lentil soup

a couple of days ago i asked m what we should do with the miniscule amount of farro that we had in the cupboard, her response instantly was "make farro and lentil soup!"  turns out that allegra mcEvedy had a piece in the guardian just this week on a soup that required just a little bit of lentils and just a little bit of farro (of which we had both), the soup turned out to be amazing, although as you can see i pureed it a little too much, evidence of which appears if you happen to actually go to the recipe and see how picturesque the soup is meant to look, please don't though ...

i give you my camera's lifeless version of this amazingly simple and delicious soup:

oh, and at the bottom was a tiny dill and garlic biscuit (or scone to remain true to the pan-atlantic style we've been cultivating here), we make these a lot, they are adapted from mark bittman's how to make everything vegetarian, yummy.