Mostly 24/04/2016

So we’re covering a few days here.  Way back on Friday we made “speedy sweet potato quesadilla” from “a modern way to eat”.  Which I was sure I’d written about before, but I can’t find a single mention.

I’m a little worried I’m dreaming blog posts now.

These are lovely vegan delights, especially now I’ve got the spice right.  Last time I substituted a tsp of chipotle paste for a tsp of chipotle powder and very nearly blew my own sock off.  This time I went for the more sensible 0.5 tsp of powder.  Much for pleasant for me and no complaints from Dan.

The recipe is still available on Anna Jones’ website http://annajones.co.uk/recipe/sweet-potato-quesadillas and they are a lovely spiced sweet potato and bean mash encased in corn tortilla and served with mashed avocado.

We then spent the weekend in sunny/rainy/hailing Norwich.  The weather really needs to pick a theme and stick with it.  There was a lot of diving into cafes, galleries and bars in order to escape the latest batch of precipitation.  Fortunately Norwich suffers from an excess of both art and gin.

We did not buy any art.  Unless you count gin as an art form.  Which we do.

Once we got home, we quickly whipped up a batch of the roasted squash with meguez chickpeas, which we have covered before in a post back in January.  This is always a wonderful way to use up squash and also helps clear out the last few runts of the onion crop.  The ones far too small to count as proper onions and not quite sweet enough to substitute for shallots.

I mean, you can use them where there is a defined weight of onions, but there aren’t many recipes that do that.  Usually it’s “one large onion” or “one small onion” and there isn’t a standard measure for an onion.

Well, there probably is, somewhere, in agricultural law, but I cannot be faffed with that.

For dinner we tried a new gnocchi recipe.  To be perfectly honest we are often quite boring with gnocchi.  It’s either the roast butternut squash and goat’s cheese gnocchi, or, sometimes, over summer, we make our own gnocchi with home grown new potatoes…and serve it with shop bought pesto.

There appears to be a requirement hardwired into us that we will buy something readymade when eating gnocchi.

We still used shop bought gnocchi for this recipe, and goats cheese, but mostly in a sauce rather than just chucked on top at the end.

For this gnocchi recipe we gently fried a small mirepoix (that’s finely chopped onion, carrots and celery for you at the back.  We did cover this in a previous lecture post) until tender.

Then we heated about 2 tbsp of milk and let about 100g of goat’s cheese melt into it.  Once that was smooth we added an awful lot of black pepper, all the softened veg, the cooked gnocchi, some chopped chives and about 2 tbsp of parmesan.

This was then garnished with yet more goat’s cheese and chives.  So okay a little get chucked on the top.

Finally we made some “Grapefruit and Campari Sorbet”, which contains grapefruit zest, grapefruit juice, Campari and not a lot of sugar.  It is intense.  It made my face implode.

Dan appears to like it, which I guess is the important thing.  Although next time he wants to make the zest a little finer.