What to do with a beetroot

So, a little bit of a cheat this week.  I know, already!  Not even a month in and already I'm bending the rules.  This week's Experimental Thursday is more of an Experimental Sunday Afternoon.  I knew I had a mad-busy day planned today and that the last thing I would want to do at the end of it was cook.  So, rather than whirling about a hot kitchen, tonight I'm cuddled up at the PC with a cup of tea and a slice of something interesting.

You see, I was rather glad to have the excuse to explore a side of cooking more suited to a Sunday afternoon than a Thursday night, and more suited to large gatherings than to meals for one to two and a half: cake!

Baking a cake in an evening is an increasingly common occurrence for me, as I don't often get the chance to concentrate for long enough during the day, but I think trying to pass cake off as dinner is a stretch too far.  Even if the cake in question did afford the opportunity to use up a significant component of this week's veg box.

Hang on a minute?  The title is all about beetroot and yet she's clearly made carrot cake you are all thinking.  Au contraire.  The title is correct.  Tonight's post is all about what you can do with a beetroot, without reaching for the vinegar and a large glass jar.  Not that there is anything wrong with pickled beetroot.  In fact there is quite a lot right with it, but it hardly counts as experimental.  Especially when you could do this with your beetroot instead:

Yes, that lovely, fluffy slice of cake is Beetroot and Seed Cake, again taken from the wonderful Tender Volume I by Nigel Slater.  I absolutely promise to make something from a different book next week, as I am aware the last three recipes have all come from here and I must be sounding like a broken record.  But seriously.  How can you not love a book with a recipe for beetroot cake?

My only mistake was not photographing the mixture for you.  It was the most divinely ridiculous purple colour of any cake mix I have ever seen, and yet not a bottle of food colouring in sight.  I will confess to being a shade disappointed when I removed the cake from the oven to discover all that lovely purple had cooked away to a much more normal shade of brown, but this does have the advantage of enabling you to simply refer to it as "cake" and not reveal its root vegetable oddness to your tea party until they are happily tucking in to their second or third slice.

And I truly believe that they will do.  This cake is fantastic.  Rather like carrot cake, it doesn't taste obviously of its base ingredient.  Beetroot cake has an earthy, rich and almost malty flavour, reminiscent of tea-loaf or gingercake.  The texture manages to be both dense and light all at the same time.  I can't quite explain that properly, but the cake has definite substance, and yet, thanks I think to the beaten egg-whites that you fold in at the end, it is soft and fluffy in your mouth.  You sort of inhale your first slice because the texture is so surprisingly light for such a dense looking cake, and then the flavour, all smooth, mellow, autumnal warmth, lures you back for another.  The lemony icing cuts through this with a toothsome tang.  It really is marvellous with a hot cup of tea and a good catch-up with some friends.

Our assembled party was two of my good friends, plus our five children.  All, except the one who insists she doesn't like cake, partook and all enjoyed it.  Baby Bird loved it and has got excited every time she has seen the cake tin since, so a ringing endorsement from her.  It also received a major thumbs up from Hubby and two of our best mates, who joined us later in the evening.  Hubby went so far as to compare it with the Nigella Lawson banana bread recipe that I use (taken from Off Duty), which has been a family favourite for about five years now.  As I am generally asked to make banana bread at every potential cake opportunity (including a standing request for it at the work charity coffee mornings), I'm taking this as the highest form of praise.

So, if you don't fancy pickling the beetroot in your veg box this autumn, why not bake it into a cake?  Or better yet, buy a large bunch and do both.

A shallow tart of chard and cheese

Spurred on by Nigel's lovely recipes and with half a bag of rainbow chard still to use up, this seemed like the perfect choice.  Now that I am at home, I am constantly on the lookout for something to pep up lunch, and to break up the monotony of an endless procession of sandwiches.  I often opt for soup and I did nearly plump for the lentil and chard soup, but I wasn't sure that herbs and good stock alone would overcome the "undertones of frugality, poverty even" that Nigel avoids with the addition of bacon.  As the sun was at least trying to shine, it felt worth persevering with salad for a little while longer and so I opted for the shallow tart of chard and cheese on p232.  I thought that, as well as giving me a break from the sandwich routine, it would also make a good addition to Hubby's packed lunches.

Now, I do have a confession.  I don't like quiche.  This surprises me, since I generally love egg but the texture leaves me cold.  It is flubbery, flabby and turns my stomach.  The problem is, I like the idea of quiche.  The pastry, the tasty filling, the side salad, the feeling of healthy yet toothsome eating that is wrapped up in the concept of a quiche - it is light, has a comparatively low carb/high protein ratio, all that good stuff.  So periodically I find myself eating (and sometimes even making) yet another quiche and hating it just that little bit more each time I do so.  Tarts, on the other hand, tend to be more my cup of tea.  It is probably the replacement of egg with cream (and, generally, lashings of cheese), that makes them so appealing.  Looking at the recipe, eggs were in evidence but so, and in far greater quantities, was cream.  My waistline wouldn't thank me for trying this one but, hopefully my stomach would.

This was a LOT of fun to make.  However, that was mostly because it turns out that, if you are an almost one year old, watching Mummy make pastry is the absolute most belly-laugh inducing fun this side of a raspberry to the belly or being tipped upside-down.  Seriously.  I put Baby Bird in her chair so that she could eat her breakfast while sitting at the table and watching what I was up to - I had worked out that, if I got the pastry done first thing, it could chill in the fridge while I got her dressed and settled her down for her morning nap and then I could do the more complicated and fiddly parts (blind baking and preparing the filling) while she was sleeping.  I weighed out the butter and flour and began rubbing them together.  She dissolved into giggles.  I picked up handfuls, letting it run through my fingers, and every time I did, she laughed some more.  This was the funniest thing Mummy had done since I made her toy dolphin turn somersaults in the bath!  Not one to miss a chance to make my daughter laugh, I became more expansive and elaborate in my gestures and soon we were both giggling at how much fun making pastry is.  While I rolled out the pastry, I gave her a small portion to roll around and squish, figuring she couldn't come to much harm even if she did try to eat it.  I let her have a go with the rolling pin.  She loved it!  If this keeps up, there will be a lot of biscuits and baking in our future.

Later in the morning, with the little one happily snoozing upstairs, I dug out the baking beans, blind-baked the pastry and put together the fillings. This was where I came a little unstuck: I'm still, after two years, haven't entirely got the measure of my oven.  I'm fine with cooking stuff.  Roasts, casseroles, that sort of stuff tends come be fine.  Baking, on the other hand, it a bit more hit and miss.  It seems there is a bit of a hotspot on the one side of my oven, so things always come out slightly more cooked on one side than the other - the variation in the pie-crust in the first pic is not due to flash, but to uneven baking - but I always forget to turn them part way through.  It is also some form of convection oven that I don't quite understand and so I never quite seem to adjust the cooking time and/or temperature quite enough to compensate for the fact that it cooks faster than a regular oven.  I really should sit down and read the instructions properly.  Or maybe just bake more until I get the hang of it.  Either way, half of the pie-crust looked a little bit overdone after the blind-baking, while the other half looked rather anaemic.  Bum.


I pressed on, undeterred, adding liberal amounts of cheese to the egg and cream mixture and hoping against hope that this would indeed be more tart, less quiche.

A short while later, I removed a very tasty looking tart from the oven, gently pressed it out of the flan tin, once again grateful that I had bought a loose-bottomed tin, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when it came out whole.  I was looking forward to lunch.






And here it is - a slice of chard and cheese tart, accompanied by a colourful and simply dressed salad (just a little olive oil and a crack of salt and pepper) and a dollop of raita, left over from the previous day's lamb koftas and falafel.  When I sat down to lunch yesterday, I was excited.  I was hopeful.  It looked great.  I gave Baby Bird a small wedge alongside her avocado and cream cheese sandwich and picked up my knife and fork...

It was... quiche.

I sank a little inside.  I girded myself to finish the plate and make "mmm, tasty" faces at Baby Bird - I have a rule that we don't describe food as yucky or make gagging faces in front of her if we can possibly help it, so that she doesn't get swayed in her assessment of what is before her (or learn bad habits).  I smiled.  I "mmm"'d.  Baby Bird ate some and seemed to like it.  I ate the whole lot and will admit that I didn't hate it, but I can't say I didn't wish I'd had the salad on its own.  It was appetising, far more appetising than I usually find quiche, and the chard adds a certain refinement to the cheddar and parmesan, making this a sophisticated slice to add to a buffet or to offer to a gathering of ladies who lunch.  I will almost certainly make it again when I have company and, Hubby (who, being a real man, likes quiche) gobbled down a slice for his evening meal just now and pronounced it the best quiche I have made and the nicest one he has had for a while.  He doesn't give out praise easily, so I know this was good.  But, despite its promise of being a tart, for me it was too eggy and the texture was slightly off.  Well, I say that.  For quiche the texture was very nice - light, airy, slightly moist in the middle.  For me, it was not quite dense and creamy enough.  I may yet have a play around with it, and see if I can adjust it more to my liking, but in the meantime, I will be heading back to my fail-safe mushroom tart recipe from Ursula Ferrigno's Real Fast Vegetarian Food, which I have been since university (yes, I was probably not your typical student).  No hint of eggy quiche there.

Still, it was well worth the experiment, and was far more interesting to make than a chard gratin or some other side-dish.  Hubby has already requested more homemade quiche for his lunchboxes, so some good has come of it.

Potato cakes with chard and ... umm... Gubbeen

This recipe is taken from Nigel Slater's Tender Volume I (p.230) and, as Nigel says in his introduction, it is a smartened up variation on the theme of bubble and squeak.  Bubble and squeak has been a favourite of mine for many years and it instantly makes me think of Boxing Day lunch with my folks.  Every year, Mum will fry up all the leftover veg from Christmas Dinner with some gravy and it all gets served  with chips (yes, that is carb overload, but that is partly the point and certainly one of the reasons I enjoy it so much), pickled onions and cold turkey (for those who partake of such things).  This is usually wolfed down before heading off to the Boxing Day football match (or to find a radio to listen to the commentary if we are playing away).  Consequently, any meal involving bubble and squeak, or its cousin, the potato cake, is always going to appeal to me.  I also thought it would make good baby-fare, being soft, malleable, capable of being made in small hand-sized portions, yet suitable for mashing up and spoon-feeding if that proved more interesting.  Baby Bird isn't massively keen on spoon-feeding (she prefers to self-feed or to have Mummy load the spoon and let her get on with it), but sometimes she seems to decide a particular foodstuff is spoon-food and not finger food, even if I had expected it to work the other way round.  I try to just follow her lead.

I digress...

So, potato cakes.  Yes.  As I said yesterday, Brent, the very helpful chap in the deli suggested we try Gubbeen in place of the Taleggio called for in the recipe, a new cheese to me but I was ready to give it a go.    I will concede this dish involved quite a lot of prep for what it is, but I suspect that could be overcome with practice and with not trying to entertain a small baby at the same time as cooking.  However, I enjoyed the end result, and was pleased to find they looked somewhat similar to the picture in the book (although I over-steamed the chard for going on top and mine looked a lot greener).  In particular, I would definitely recommend bothering with the polenta crust and, while the basil oil felt like a faff at the time, the flavour pop was worth it and you can always use the leftovers in other things (simple pasta or salad dressing, pepping up a tomato sauce, base for a pizza, the list goes on).



These slight hiccups did not mar the flavour.  The potatoes were smooth and mellow, the chard has a surprisingly refined taste, less robust than spinach but with a pleasant peppery undertone and the stems remained crunchy (despite over-steaming), as well as delightfully colourful on the plate.  Next time, I should plan a bit more, and make sure I have both red and yellow stems put by for the top.  I do think that Taleggio would have been better here, as I think it may have held its shape slightly more, giving more discrete unctuous blobs of cheese amid the floury mash, whereas the Gubbeen melted a little more and so spread a little more.  However, the texture of the Gubbeen was relatively good and there were definite pools of deliciously pungent cheese to contrast with the mellow potatoes and the fresh pop of the chard and parsley. Overall, the adult contingent of the Experimental Thursday data pool was really rather happy with their dinner.  Baby Bird, on the other hand (and in fairness, not altogether unsurprisingly), was not entirely sure about the whole thing.  However, she did gamely try a few mouthfuls before deciding that Mummy was frankly bonkers and no amount of cheesy sauce was going to sway her into eating any more of this stuff.  So we moved on to yoghurt and chalked it up to experience.  I will make it again though, and I will let her try it again, as I am a big believer in introducing her to all family experiences from the outset and hope that the more variety I introduce her to now, the more she will grow up enjoying food.  Thankfully, she seems to tolerate her Mummy's crazy ideas well, and does at least humour me by trying things.

Cheese, chard and the lovely Nigel Slater

The veg box has proved a fantastic hit.  The carrot and ginger soup barely lasted 2 days, as I ate a bowlful for my lunch and then my lovely friends who babysat the next night polished off the rest.  The tomato soup made a tasty family lunch on Saturday (I bulked up Baby Bird's portion with a little Organix 4 Grain Cereal so that it was easier for Miss Independent to handle the spoon herself) and there are a couple more pots in the freezer.  The fruit has rapidly disappeared, particularly the kiwi fruit.

So I began pondering the more unusual offerings in the box.  What to do with the rainbow chard?  I pulled down from the cookery shelf my favourite veg book, Tender Volume 1.   I love Nigel Slater's food writing in any event.  I could sit and read his books for hours and return to them again and again, particularly his Kitchen Diaries, but Tender is probably my favourite.  It is simply fantastic. It runs through pretty much every vegetable you could wish for and discusses growing, cooking and eating them.  It appeals to the aspirational part of me, which has been mentally designing a veg patch for the last three years, but hasn't quite managed to do anything about it, and also to the hungry vegetarian in me, which often gets a little overlooked now that I eat fish and want meals that appeal to the Carnivorous Hubbo as well as to me.  (I would also go on about the wonderful look and feel of the book, the comfort of a big, weighty hardback, with beautiful creamy pages, but then you'd never shut me up and get me on to the recipes).

I knew I could do plenty with chard as a side dish, but I really wanted something that would showcase its ability to be the main event; to prove that the humble vegetable can be the point of a meal, not just the background.  Making the vegetable the main event is something Nigel's book does really well, without all the overtones and preachiness that so often accompanies (and spoils) vegetarian cookbooks - if only all meat-eaters could admit that veg can be tasty in the way Nigel does.

Two recipes caught my eye, and, after weighing my bag of chard, I discovered I had enough to make both.  I also had most of the other ingredients knocking about the house, making it easier to stick to the weekly food budget (a perennial problem for me).  Win!  So, this week's Experimental Thursday is going to be a two-for-one: potato cakes with chard and Taleggio... sort of... and a shallow tart of chard and cheese.

The tart will make a great lunch with a salad and will be easy to portion up and send in Hubby's lunch-box.  The potato cakes will make a tasty dinner for Baby Bird and I this evening - mine will be topped with wilted chard as in the recipe, and I will probably add a little cheese sauce to Baby Bird's, to make it more enticing for her.  Potato cakes should be a good food for her - I can cut them into handleable pieces and can also mash them up.  The only thing I was missing for the recipe was the taleggio cheese.  Hmm, the perfect opportunity to try out that new deli down the road... So, I bundled up the Bird, and off we trotted this morning.

It turned out that they didn't have any taleggio, but the lovely Brent, who owns the deli, was very helpful, recommending and allowing me to try a selection of possible alternatives.  He also said he could happily order some taleggio in for me (but that would have made Experimental Thursday a little tricky...)  We discussed the need for the cheese to melt but not too much, the need for it to be fairly pungent to counteract the soft fluffy potato, the general wonder of cheese...  Cheddar Deli is great, and they deserve to do well.  They are having their grand opening on 24 September - if you are in and around Ealing, do pop along.  I will certainly be making a special effort to pop back there to sample their Stinking Bishop (a favourite of mine) and the Baby Wigmore, which was a contender for replacing the taleggio.  

What we settled on in the end was some Gubbeen.  This is an Irish semi-soft cheese.  Smooth and creamy in texture, it smells just the right side of "feet".  Brent conceded that he didn't know how it cooked, so this will be a bit of an experiment (which is surely the point), but he thought the flavour would make a good sub.  So, I'm all set.  My only problem now is resisting the desire to eat it all with some crusty bread for lunch!

Scallops with spaghetti and pea pesto

I decided to keep my first attempt at cooking scallops really simple.  They are delicious in their own right, and could I afford more of them, I would have devoured a plate of them alone.  But that would be extravagant, and I can't afford it.  So the eight plump little scallops and their corals require a little padding to make a proper supper.

The obvious answer was peas.  So sweet and tasty, complementing the sweet, juicy scallops, and allowing me to have another of my favourite foods on the same plate.  What plate of scallops isn't enhanced by a smear or swirl of pea purée?  We would still need a little something more though to take it out of the realms of appetiser and into "proper supper" though.  What to do?

Then I remembered a recipe I saw not so long ago on the Smitten Kitchen blog.  I love Smitten Kitchen.  I only discovered it recently, but Deb makes me laugh, her food is delicious and her photographs have me salivating on my keyboard while I read.  I can only dream of taking photos that great.  Do take a look.  You won't be disappointed.

Anyway, I remembered a recipe from June for linguine with pea pesto.  I had been meaning to try it but hadn't quite been brave enough to try and convince Hubby that a meal comprising almost exclusively pasta and peas was worth coming home for.  Memories of the disappointed sigh he gave me 7 years ago, shortly after we had first moved in together, when I proudly informed him that dinner was pea & mint soup, and his subsequent confession that he had told his co-workers after he put the phone down that he may as well work late since dinner sounded awful, flooded back.  I tried to reason with myself.  After all, Hubby had come home, had eaten dinner, and had confessed this miserable tale in order to tell me how wrong he had been.  Home-made pea and mint soup has been a staple in our home ever since, not least because it only takes 15 minutes to make.  Surely, if he could handle pea and mint soup, he could handle pea pesto?

I couldn't shake the feeling that it would need a little something extra to lift it into the realms of "meal worth racing home for".  The scallops provided the perfect opportunity.

Deb's original recipe is fab.  I need to add a little more mint next time, to really make it zing, but that error is mine not hers.  I also used frozen peas, which she does suggest, though she prefers fresh.  I quite agree that fresh peas can be magnificent and I have many happy childhood memories of eating them straight out of the pods while picking them for Sunday lunch.  Maybe the peas last better in New York, but I never get that same feeling of euphoria from pods picked up in the shops, no matter how enticing they are in theory.  Even the ones at the farmers' market can taste a little lacklustre.  The magic of fresh peas vanishes within hours of picking them, so if you can't get them straight from your garden or allotment, I would stick with frozen - all that goodness and taste is captured, albeit in the slightly less romantic form of a plastic bag.  The other slight modification I made was using spaghetti as I couldn't justify buying linguine when we already had a ton of spaghetti in the pantry.  I think linguine would definitely be an improvement, since it would hold the pesto better.  Next time (and there will most definitely be a next time for this recipe), I will go a little more cautiously with the water as I made it a little too loose.  That said, we both loved it.

The scallops were pan-fried in a little groundnut oil with the corals, seasoned with pepper and then, just before finishing, I added a quarter cup of the white wine we were drinking with dinner to the pan, to flavour the scallops and soak up the cooking juices.  I reduced this down until the scallops were opaque but still firm in the centre and drizzled the remaining liquor over the meal once I had finished assembling it.  The meat eaters out there may wish to cook the scallops with a little pancetta or bacon, or maybe even the ubiquitous black pudding, but Hubbo assures me it is not necessary (although he would never knock the additions).  As a confirmed carnivore, I trust his judgement on this.

For a first foray into cooking scallops, I was pretty pleased.  I feared I would overcook them, turning them hard and dry, but they were moist, tender and lovely.  Everything I could have hoped for.  My only problem is reminding myself that they can only be a once in a blue moon treat, even on special offer.

Veg Boxes, and the other things you can sneak into them when the husband isn't looking

I've been deliberating about getting a veg box for a while now.  We've been receiving fliers through the door from a number of companies, offering varying combinations of organic and/or local produce, with varying degrees of commitment to those ideals and I have been sorely tempted.  I always hesitated before, wondering about whether we actually eat enough veg to justify it.  But now, we have a Baby Bird eager to try new foods, and I'm home with the time and inclination to get her started on the right foot with food, and to improve the way Hubbo and I eat.  We also don't really go out very much, so it is nice to take a little more time with dinner every now and then, turning an evening meal into a date, or making Sunday lunch feel like a proper family occasion.  That and the fact that it feels as if I have spent the last couple of months doing nothing but buying veg every day, and even in today's food-obsessed world, with a couple of decent supermarkets within walking distance and a farmer's market nearby, it can be tricky getting variety in the organic veg that is readily available.  We are all starting to get a little sick of broccoli and sweet potatoes.

So, I finally took the plunge, ordering a medium fruit and veg box from Abel & Cole.  I have been excitedly awaiting its arrival for almost a week as, typically, I did this on a Wednesday and they deliver in our area on a Tuesday.  Still, good things come to those who wait, and this morning, the very lovely Garth arrived with my very first veg box:

This week's offerings were: bananas, kiwi fruit and apples; mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, carrots, potatoes, beetroot and rainbow chard.  Just looking in the box made me feel hungry.

Inspired by all this lovely produce, and since Baby Bird has decided to take a nice long nap, I am pottering around the kitchen, making soup.  It all feels rather appropriate, as the rain is lashing down outside and it seems very clear that, much as I long for an Indian Summer, autumn is most definitely already upon us.  So, bubbling away while I type are two big pots: one, tomato (top); the other, carrot and ginger (bottom). 

Neither qualifies for Experimental Thursday status as I have been making them (or variations on their themes) for years.  In fact, the tomato soup is based on a recipe that I picked up 15 years ago from the Scottish grandma of a old boyfriend, and I am quite sure she had been making it for a good 40 years before I knew about it!  But, just because it is old and familiar, doesn't mean it isn't delicious and the kitchen smells fantastic right now.  The flavours in the soups will be bright and clear, made with lovely fresh organic veggies and herbs from my garden, and I am already looking forward to lunch (although how I will choose which one to have, I am not quite sure).

The thought of filling up the freezer with pots of leftovers, just waiting for more rainy day lunches is also hugely comforting.  It takes me back to this time last year, when we were awaiting Baby Bird's arrival and I insisted I wasn't nesting.  I hadn't had the (I thought obligatory) urge to clean the bathroom with a toothbrush or to tidy every cupboard in the house.  What was wrong with me?  Where was my maternal instinct?  Was I broken?  I blurted all these fears out loud to my husband one evening while fixing cheese on toast for dinner.  You see?  Clearly I was broken - I couldn't even be bothered to make us a proper meal?  How on earth would I feed a baby?  They would be eating turkey twizzlers before they were one!  Hubby took the knife I was enthusiastically waving around while saying all this, gently led me to the freezer, opened the door and pointed out that I had filled it with enough neatly labelled pots of soup, casseroles, pasta sauce and shepherd's pie to feed us for a month, and had baked more cheesy scones than we could possibly know what to do with.  I may not have a tidy nest, but those who visit it will always have full tummies...

So what is on the menu for Experimental Thursday?

While ordering my veg box, I had a browse around the other things Abel & Cole had to offer.  Meat, dairy produce, bread.  All looking delicious.  And then the page which got me really excited: fish and seafood.  I may not eat meat, but I do enjoy fish (that is why I no longer refer to myself as a vegetarian, although I was a proper one for 7 years).  There at the top of the page, labelled "Special" was something that caught my eye and got me very excited: scallops.

I adore scallops.  If they are on the menu when I go out, I am virtually incapable of refusing them.  I fully expect heaven to feature scallops for dinner every night.  There is something about those wonderful, round nuggets, so soft and tender on the outside, but with a hint of firmness in the centre that literally makes my knees go weak and my heart soar.  It shouldn't be possible for food to make a person feel like this, but scallops do for me.  Yet I have never cooked them.  They sit in that category of "posh restaurant foods" that only real chefs should attempt.  They are too expensive to justify buying on anything other than a special occasion, and cooking something new is too risky a proposition for a special occasion.  What if they burnt?

But there they were, on special offer.  Still expensive, but not prohibitively so, and they were calling to me.  Begging, in fact.  My mouse hovered over the "Buy" button.  I couldn't, could I?  I shouldn't... I did.

And now they are sat in my fridge, plump and expectant, and I am sat at my kitchen table, hopefully a little less plump, but equally expectant, awaiting the return of my husband so that we can have scallops for supper on Experimental Thursday...

Easy Mung Lentil Curry

I'm slow getting the results of the first Experimental Thursday up as we had the grandparents visiting for the weekend.  Experimental Thursday #1 was a quiet affair as Hubby was working late (month end usually sees me eating alone), so it was dinner for one.   aIf it weren't for the fact that I really liked the neatness of starting a new endeavour on the first of the month, and I have always seen September as the time for starting new things (a hangover from school-days), I would probably have waited until Hubbo was home so that we could all be involved in the experiment.  As she is showing a fondness for strong flavours and spice and loves lentils, I could have cooked this earlier in the day and eaten it with Baby Bird (she may as well start as we mean to go on), but I didn't want to be trying to cook something new while keeping an eye on her.  Baby Bird doesn't really see why Mummy messes around with all this cooking when we could be playing games and mistakenly thought I would be better able to concentrate after she had gone to bed.

So, with my smallest family member snuggled up asleep, at 7:45 I embarked on making the Easy Mung Lentil Curry.  Thankfully, this lived up to its name, as I did my best to stuff it up by not reading the recipe properly!  Hmm... better able to concentrate without the baby being awake?  Apparently not...  Expecting the lentils to need cooking first and spotting the anticipated reference to simmering for 30-40 minutes, I missed the part about adding the chilli, ginger, turmeric and tomato at the start as well.  Noticed almost halfway through cooking.  Oops!  So, lesson #1: always read the recipe thoroughly before you begin.  However, while the flavours would no doubt be more fully developed, my attempt did not appear to have seriously suffered for this oversight.

As I was eating alone, I opted to go with 2 chillies rather than one, so this did have a pleasant kick (enhanced I suspect by the shorter cooking time for the chillies due to my error), but it would be just as delicious with one.  I intend to try it again that way, probably at the weekend so that Hubby and Baby Bird can try it out (she is showing a fondness for strong flavours and spice, even before her first birthday and loves lentils).  The recipe suggests that it serves 2-3.  I would say you need starters as well if serving 3, but it would definitely feed our 2 and a half comfortably, with some boiled rice or a naan.  The texture is smooth and the fried garlic, curry leaves and cumin stirred in at the last minute bring the whole dish to life.  I really enjoyed this, and am smiling just thinking about the second portion now stashed in the freezer waiting for a night in when I can't be bothered to cook.

If you have time, I would make this in advance and then reheat it to serve.  That way the lentils will plump and absorb the flavours fully, everything will mellow out and it will thicken slightly.  But that is being picky; if you want an easy and filling evening meal, that involves minimal preparation and can be accomplished while reading a book, doing the laundry, watching TV or whatever else you need to do at the end of the day, then this is a good bet.  It would also be perfect if you are hosting a vegetarian at an otherwise meat-based curry party. It shows you care without requiring extravagant effort and, if you gloss over the "mung lentil" part of the title (Hubbo commented that it sounded crusty even by my standards!), there is absolutely no reason why the meat-eaters should find it a tasty addition to their plates.

So, an enjoyable start.  I wonder what next week will bring.

And so it begins...

I love a good curry.  It doesn't have to be hot, although I have been known to enjoy a nice hot bhuna at my local curry house.  Heat should not be confused with spice, in my opinion, and a good curry may be spicy without being overly hot.  In fact, too much heat can prevent you from tasting the subtler flavours in the dish.  I like my curries to have depth of flavour, so a mild but thoughtfully prepared korma can please me far more than an apparently more daring, blow-your-head-off curry.  As a non-meat eater, Indian food also carries the appeal of offering a wide array of dishes traditionally intended to be vegetarian, rather than the token gestures and strange combinations that so often appear in that section of the menu.  Lentils in their many different colours, mung beans, chickpeas, cauliflower, aubergine, paneer, okra... all can be made to feel quite at home in a lovely, spicy curry, mopped up with bread or a bowlful of rice.  I'm salivating just typing this.

Now I'm the first to admit, I don't know very much about authentic Indian cuisine.  I haven't had the pleasure of visiting India and my Indian friends always seem far keener on producing Western cuisine when we visit than on educating their white friends on the food their mothers and grandmothers prepared.  And who can blame them - it probably gets rather boring being expected to trot out the same dishes you have always eaten simply because they seem exotic to your guests.  I had a perception that Indian food was complicated to cook, requiring inside knowledge and a vast store cupboard of spices that I may only use once but could only be purchased in industrial-sized bags in the International section of the supermarket.  Consequently I've always shied away from cooking Indian food.  It was great for a night out, but beyond the realms of my kitchen.

My particular part of West London is blessed with a vast number of very good Indian restaurants, covering a variety of regions.  If you can't be bothered to leave your house, many of them deliver to your door and I hadn't really seen the need to overcome my nervousness of cooking a curry for myself.  Until last year, when I fell pregnant.  I had always been partial to a curry but, my pregnant self positively adored them.  I didn't notice at first, and would tell people that I wasn't really having any cravings, until Hubbo pointed out that I had been dragging him to our favourite curry house every weekend for the past 16 weeks and it was really getting rather expensive.  Takeaway was not much cheaper, and with my enthusiasm for spicy food showing no sign of abating, and the prospect of our reduced income looming ever closer, I wondered whether it was time to poke a toe in the curry cooking water (only metaphorically, of course: that would be gross!).  I experimented with various jars and pastes, hoping for an easy solution.  The results were so-so and, with the addition of some chutneys and shop-bought starters and breads, a convivial evening could be had, but it wasn't a patch on our nights out at the curry house.

But once you have a baby, nights out become a rare treat and, having decided not to return to work, even a takeaway is a bit of a luxury.  So I have been hunting for a cookbook that offers an easy introduction into this cuisine and I think I have found it:  Anjum's New Indian by Anjum Anand.  This book is a tie-in with the BBC series 'Indian Food Made Easy', which, once I saw the book, I could vaguely remember having watched with Hubby and made "ooh, maybe we could do that" noises about before getting distracted witha ll the many other things there are to do in life.  As I stood in the bookshop (yes, I'm that old-fashioned - I still think getting your hands on the actual book is the best way to work out if you want to buy and/or read it), I read the introduction, I read the tips about getting started, I leafed through a few of the recipes.  It didn't seem to involve as much planning, nor as many ingredients, as I had thought.  In fact, many of the ingredients were things I already kept in the house.  Perhaps I could do this after all.

I started with Tarka Dal (p176), a wonderful, buttery lentil curry which was a dream to make.  It made the house smell delicious, it froze well (a boon in the early post-baby days) and the most complicated part about making it was hunting down Bengal gram, and even that turned out to be quite easy once I braved the local Indian supermarket (who were incredibly welcoming and helpful).  I could put it together during the day whenever I got a few spare moments while the baby napped and then reheat it when we were ready to eat - leaving it to sit only added to the flavour and texture - plop a spoonful of ghee in just before serving to waken everything back up.  Yum.  The only problem was, Tarka Dal was so good, and proved so popular with both Hubby and I, that I have been making a batch of it each month for almost a year but have never quite got around to trying anything else from the book...  Oops!

So tonight, I'm flipping forward a page (There, you see, it isn't that hard and you don't even have to go very far from your favourite recipes to try something new if you don't want to!) and trying out the Easy Mung Lentil Curry.  The clue is hopefully in the name.  Anjum says "[t]his is a simple but utterly delicious lentil curry that is often served in the homes of Sindhis, a group of people who hail from the northern region of Sindh, which is now part of Pakistan.  However, this wholesome, homely dish could almost hail from any community.  It is easy to make and appeals to all.  It is a loose curry, so serve it with some plain basmati rice on the side."  So that is what I shall do...

The execution may have been off, but the mother-in-law was on to something

I have often laughed at Hubby's stories of "Experimental Thursday", the night of the week when, in his childhood home, you needed to be busy.  Not just "pottering round the house" busy, not just "back a bit late" busy, but "miles away, no possibility of getting back for dinner" busy.  Why?  Because on Experimental Thursday,  Hubby's mum would cook something "new and exciting" in a bid to broaden her family's diet.

Now, I have never eaten my mother-in-law's cooking.  In the eight and a half years I have known her, she has never set foot in the kitchen in my presence to produce anything more challenging than a cup of tea, and even that needs to be approached with caution.  I'm not saying she's a bad cook.  Really I'm not.  But Hubby does, his sister does, and even my mother-in-law's boyfriend does, so I can only imagine that the colourful and highly entertaining tales of the inedible meals resulting from Experimental Thursday contain more than a small grain of truth.  My husband always laughs nervously when Zoe Wanamaker cooks in "My Family": for him the weird and wonderful combinations she concocts are not the exaggerated fantasies of script-writers but flashbacks to those fateful Thursday nights. The suggestion that dinner is "Tuna Surprise" is enough to make his blood run cold.

But the fact remains, Experimental Thursday is a good idea.  A great idea, even.  We could all do with broadening our food horizons.  It is all too easy to get stuck in a rut, making the same meals week in, week out, with the same ingredients.  We all know that the key to a healthy diet is variety, but it seems to take too much time and planning to actually achieve that.  We wander the supermarket on auto-pilot in whatever spare time we can find between work, kids and life in general, dropping the same things into the basket to be turned into the same old standbys each week.  We may not be quite as bad as our grandparents' generation, with each day of the week having its designated meal (fish on Fridays anyone?), but I am sure we would all concede that there is a pattern to our eating.

There is nothing wrong with patterns, with repetition. They are the rhythm of life. They create a feeling of home, safety and belonging. They also make life undeniably easier. In fact, sometimes they are the only way you can hold things together.  There is something truly wonderful about cooking a recipe that you know by heart and can be confident will be gobbled up with gratitude by your hungry brood.  But let's not do that every night of the week.  Let's be brave.  Let's take down the cookbooks from the shelves and, just one night a week, push the boat out and try something new.  It doesn't have to be wacky.  It doesn't have to be complicated or time consuming.  The only rule is that on Thursday nights, we will cook and eat something we have never made before. And with that spirit of adventure, Experimental Thursday was resurrected...