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 ...

When I was living in Manchester I wrote a series of posts called  Laura's Lesson's about cooking lessons I was giving to my housemate in exchange for piano lessons. It seems they have had some success, we went to visit Laura last weekend, and she cooked us a lovely meal, very tasty vegetable stew, with sweet potatoes and lots of coriander, yummy. I did take photos to show off my former student's achievements, but our camera has broken (sob!) and the photo is no more. One worrying thing Laura mentioned, apparently she was scared to cook for us! It seems we (well Andy) has got himself a reputation for rating meals, and she was worried her her meal would be judged. Hope this isn't putting other people off cooking for us! I promise we're not like some evil restaurant critics, coming round on the pretense of wanting to see much missed friends, then harshly judging your hospitality. Besides Andy gave the meal 8 out of 10, so you had nothing to worry about... erm. Anyway, given the clear success of the lessons I'm feeling more confident with my new student, who I like to call Erm (still can't quite bring myself to ...

Here's a lovely recipe for a quinoa salad I got from Scrumptious a random food blog I stumbled across while wondering what to do with the jar of quinoa that's been sitting in the cupboard for well over a year. I've been a bit scared of these small grains ever since I saw them, not sure what to do with them, how to cook them, what they would taste like blah blah blah, but it turns out they're pretty easy going little chaps and they assisted in making this very tasty, hearty but fresh tasting salad. Apparently it's very good for you too. A 'Super Grain' no less. Wooo. I wonder if that's a bit like Super Gran. There's only one letter in it, must be. Maybe super grains turn you into Super Grans?! Now, I said I got the recipe from a blog, but what actually happened was I'd seen it and decided I was going to make it after I'd been to the shops, then got part way through and realised I was missing several of the key ingredients, so I would say this was influenced by rather than a direct cover of the original. I'd also intended to ...

I realised it's been a while since I actually wrote a recipe on here, and that being one of the main reasons for the blog I thought it was time I did. So here's a run down of what we had for dinner last night, using the things bought from the market that morning which I'd written about yesterday and also a few eggs from the chickens in the yard. Thank you chickens. On the menu last night was: Pan con Tomate Tortilla Blue Cheese Stuffed Mushrooms with Roasted Garlic Beetroot and Broad Bean Salad Pan con Tomate Really simple, just relies on good quality ingredients. Get some really nice thinly sliced bread, ciabatta, or a baguette type thing is good, ours was homemade (woo, get you). Toast the slices of bread. As you eat them rub the surface all over with a raw garlic clove, then drizzle with virgin olive oil, then rub with really ripe juicy tomato. Then eat it. This is one of my favourite things to do with a meal like this. We'd tried it in Spain (surprise) last year and have been hooked since. Tortilla This takes a while, maybe even allow about an hour or more altogether. Since I have nothing to ...