Guest Post #2 by Master Baker Andy! Apologies first for the terrible title. But as I am currently back at my parents living on Merseyside temporarily. I've had to get used to seeing references to the Beatles everywhere... but you may have realised that I cunningly concealed the subject of today's bread making post in that title? Have you guessed what it is yet? Yup, the humble naan bread. Like fish comes with chips (er, not if you're a vegetarian...), ok then, like sosmix bangers and mash, for me the naan is as much of a part of a curry as the actual curry dish itself. When I was in India a few years ago, myself and my travelling companion John would have a naan bread with every meal. The only difference was that he ate "butter naans" with each meal whereas I would have a plain one. There was a bit of an increase in his weight during those 3 weeks in India. (For those who don't know I was John's best man at his wedding last week so I feel I am still in speech mode... and crucifying his personality... I'll stop now!).. Anyway naan bread. I'd never really thought too ...

Blimey I've been eating a lot of pumpkin! Since the Hallowe'en party last week which left me with about 10kg of pumpkin to use I've made it a bit of a mission to try use the pumpkin in as many different ways as possible and have come up with this list of ten things to do with your Hallowe'en pumpkin. I've tried to make them all quite different, so there should be something to suit everyone so you'll have no excuse to throw your pumpkin away to rot. If you got a bit giddy like I did and bought the biggest pumpkin you could find you should have enough to make all these things. You'd also probably need to be a little bit insane to want to make them all, well at least all within the space of a week, so you might want to freeze some. You can just peel and chop the pumpkin as normal and then bag the bits and pop them in the freezer. I did this last year and they were fine to chuck into soups and things. No reason they shouldn't be good for anything else too. I can't quite believe how much we managed to ...

It's been a busy week for cooking. In an attempt to not have to cook all the time Andy and I have been... erm... cooking all the time. We've spent a couple of nights making loads and loads of food, all in all I think we've made about 30 portions of various things, so now the freezer is full of nice food to take to work or have on nights when want quick meals. Hurrah! It's kind of like having a freezer full of ready meals, but without the freaky ingredients, and costing probably a quarter of the price. This weeks cooking frenzy consisted of Laska, Dhal, Swede Turnip and Parsnip Soup, Leek and Potato Soup, Pumpkin Risotto and an Olive Pasta. Yum. Couple of them are new things I've not tried before, and probably the best was the Dhal. Dhal I'd doubled the original recipe, which said it served 4 thinking we'd then have loads left over, but found this made enough for 4 main meals (erm maybe we eat too much? Oops). It probably would do more if you have things like Naan with it, but we just had it with a bit of rice. Also made ...

My house mate Laura says she can't cook (this is not true, I've seen her make lots of lovely things but anyway...), but she can play piano. I definitely can't play piano, but can cook, or at least manage to put together nice meals without setting fire to things/poisoning people. We decided to try and sort out this unbalance of skills and swap cooking lessons for piano lessons. Woopeeee! The first lesson a few months ago was a combination of about 8 different dishes to make a middle eastern style banquet, tabouleh, tzatziki, hummous, fateh, grilled houloumi and a few other things. It was chaos. The food turned out lovely, however the kitchen was a big muddle of plates, peelings, pans, spoons, stuff everywhere and a slightly confused, manic Laura and Leanne in the middle trying to pull everything together before our 6 guests arrived. Oops. I was told to rein it in a little for the next one, "Good idea" I said. "Something like Curry" "Cool! We'll make vegetable samosas, a couple of different curries, pilau rice, a side dish and these lovely little..." "Calm down!" So we made a nice simple potato and bean coconutty curry and some onion bhajis. The onion ...