What are you cooking now?

[french frank]

I have a slight case of convert’s zeal, but keeping it under wraps as much as I can !!

Hasn’t made me run faster though

One helpful(?) idea is that it's not about cutting out anything: it's about adding to. Without a proper cooker atm I'm really existing 90% on fresh fruit and veg, with (artisan) bread, brown rice and whole grains. So some sodium matched by some potassium is a 'balance', for instance. Zoe lives!

[french frank]

Well, that was non-classic even by my standards. I intended to cook two lots of gratin champenois, one for now, one for the freezer. Half way through cooking the onions/ham I realised I would be short of potatoes. Looking in the fridge I saw what my brother had alleged were two beetroot. In good faith and because they looked like beetroot I had roasted them. But the first one was white inside and I chucked it, chopped, into a stirfry. They told me, Heraclitus, they told me it might be something weird my nephew had grown on his allotment, and because it was a white root vegetable I thought I would slice it and make it the lower layer of the gratin. But when I sliced it, it was ... a beetroot. Undeterred, I made it, in all its beetroot redness, the bottom layer of the second gratin and I shall discover in the months to come what it was like.

Meanwhile, I served the slightly more classic version with a dressed salad of sliced pak choi, garlic and tomatoes. I mopped up the gratin juice with baguette and poured the residue into my empty wine glass - because you can do this when you dine alone . Kiwi fruit (no cheese because chaource on main dish), black coffee. Not bad, all told.

Muscadet Sèvre et Maine sur Lie 2022 to cook onions and drink afterwards.
Weinberg, Violin concerto, Ilya Grubert, Russian Phil, Dmitry Yablonsky, on the gramophone.

[HighlandDougie]

Stuffing ... maybe that should be "filling" ... canelloni shells (not enough hours in the day to make them from scratch today) and then making a béchamel sauce. Ragù for a change as filling rather than the usual ricotta/spinach/lemon zest/pine nuts/nutmeg mixture. Perfect musical accompaniment - Bruckner 8 (Leipzig GO/Andris Nelsons). Cheap plonk go-with (Crémant de Bourgogne with a large slug of Crème de Fraise - a terrible habit, I know).

[french frank]

My experiment today was bamya - or okra stew. I bought a bag of okra from the Egyptian greengrocer round the corner and asked him how to cook it. Bamia: okra, garlic, onion, tomatoes - and meat. I skipped the meat and added cubed tofu. As I had a couple of pieces of sweet potato I added that too. I soaked the chopped okra in red wine vinegar for 30 mins to take out any sliminess (tip from internet), sauteed everything except the okra and tomatoes in olive oil for a bit (6 large cloves of garlic), then added the okra and vinegar, added some dried Mediterranean herbs and a tin of chopped tomatoes. No jalapenos (is that red chilli?), so I added a teaspoonful of Erős Pista, all simmered for about 30 minutes. Also cooked some brown rice.

When ready, add ground black pepper and I had a dollop of red pepper and garlic chutney which my brother gave me for Christmas last year and needed to be eaten. I'd eaten everything before I remembered I was going to put chopped basil on top. So I cut off a stalk and munched it afterwards. Malbec was the subject of recent posts on the wine thread. Coincidentally I had a glass of 2023 Pay d'Hérault Malbec with my bamya. I asked our local cave à manger for the cheapest French red and this was it: £11.60.

No cheese, as I had it for breakfast, just a banana before coffee. Bamya could become a regular recipe chez moi.

For those who follow Tim Spector’s 10-a-day régime, the bold ingredients (13) all count but some only count as a ¼ .