The Original Leon Superfood Salad from the Leon cookbook

Leon is probably the best place in London to find a healthy, inexpensive and outrageously scrumptious lunch that can be eaten on the hoof, in a nearby park or at your desk. For three months, whilst I was fashion editing on a magazine based near Leon's original Carnaby Street outlet, I ate the Original Superfood Salad at least three times a week. It's that good.

One of only two dishes to have been on the restaurant's menu since the beginning, it is packed full of nutritious deliciousness. Although it tastes green & summery, it feels especially good in the autumn and winter for warding off the lurgies.

Before the restaurant published its first cookbook, I messed about at home with approximations to it, but I always seemed to overcook the broccoli, forget an ingredient or two and I hadn't got the dressing proportions correct.

So, imagine my glee when chef Allegra McEvedy, one of the founders, put together the official Leon cookbook, sensibly dividing it into a front half dealing with the importance of ingredients, and the back half packed with wonderful, simple Leon & Leon-inspired recipes.

The Original Leon Superfood Salad (Serves two)

2 tbsp quinoa
Salt and pepper
2-3 broccoli spears, cut into bite-sized florets, stalks sliced
120g frozen peas
Quarter cucumber, peeled,cut into slim batons
100g good-quality feta cheese, crumbled
1 handful of alfalfa sprouts
2 tbsp toasted seeds such as pumpkin, sesame and sunflower
½ avocado, cut into pieces
1 small handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 small handful of mint, chopped
2 dsp lemon juice
4 dsp extra-virgin olive oil

Put the quinoa into a small pan. Cover with cold water to a couple of centimetres/one inch above the grain and let it gently simmer over a low heat until the water has evaporated — this takes about 15 minutes — then cool to room temperature.

Pour a couple of cms/one inch of hot water into another saucepan, add a pinch of salt. Bring it to the boil, drop in the broccoli & peas, cover and boil for 3 minutes. Drain and run under cold water to take all the heat out and keep the broccoli good and green.

Now build your salad in layers: broccoli, peas, cucumber, feta, alfalfa sprouts, seeds, avocado, quinoa and finally the herbs. Only dress it with the lemon juice, oil and seasoning just before you eat it.

I would add here that I don’t usually weigh out any of the ingredients for this salad, being a) too lazy and b) preferring not to have chunks of excess avocado going brown in the fridge. Although I have made it correctly so I know how it’s supposed to look & taste, for me the beauty of it is that so long as you keep the ingredients the same, the proportions of the individual quantities don’t seem to matter so much. Oh & I just toss it all together.



This is the bowlful of goodness I made for JK’s and my lunch today. I used an entire avocado as I knew I'd never get round to using the other half. Likewise, the cucumber: I had a small American ridge cucumber (about half the size of a European hothouse one), and peeled, de-seeded* and baton-ed it all. As we had missed breakfast, I doubled the quinoa content. Oh and I halved the dressing as we had run out of olive oil.

*the seeds are much bigger and quite bitter compared to UK cucumbers

Click here to buy Leon: Ingredients and Recipes

Purple asparagus

I spent a very pleasurable forty minutes in the food porn heaven that is Delicious Orchards this morning, prodding produce, concocting fantasy supper menus and throwing veg into my basket.

When I got home and unpacked my spoils it became obvious that I had bought many wonderful things but little that comprised an actual meal.

But when faced with purple asparagus, which I have never seen before, at just $2.99lb I was powerless to resist.



Likewise I also seem to have five different varieties of local & heirloom apples, Jersey sweetcorn, four types of brassicas, alfalfa, four types of chillies, and some local mushrooms. And a whole lot more besides.

I'm considering just steaming the corn and asparagus, melting a bucket of butter and having a dripping chin evening. (I'm home alone dogsitting for a few days.) Screw the regime minceur.

Independence Day cocktail: Watermelon & basil vodka martini

I called this a martini as it is nothing more than vodka with a splash of flavouring, but of course it would have a classically trained bartender raising an eyebrow at its presumption.

It's so simple, so fruity, so...thoroughly restorative that it seems perfect as a cooks pickmeup/reward for slaving over the barbecue(grill) on a sunshine-y day.

There are plenty of recipes kicking around for watermelon cocktails that require simple syrups (gomme) and various other ingredients, but this is so simple a child could make it. Not that I recommend that infants play with vodka but you get my point.

For two short glasses hack off a piece of watermelon about six inches long, chop it up, pick out the seeds, and squish it through a sieve, a juicer or any kind of press. (I found some random press in the kitchen whose usage remains obscure.)

Finely chop a handful of basil leaves, reserving a couple for decoration (maybe not the ones that look snail nibbled as in my glass above), and divide the leaves between the two glasses. Add three or four ice cubes & pour over a lovely big shot of frozen vodka (I used Grey Goose) and top with watermelon juice.

It's hardly a recipe but damn it tastes deeeeeelicious.

(If you wanted to get all fancy pants, you could macerate the basil leaves in the vodka overnight to really infuse the basil flavour, but I am waaaay too lazy.)

Fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta, mushrooms & thyme

When we went shopping at Delicious Orchards for all the ingredients for Y's birthday dinner we saw these courgette (squash) blossoms on our way to the till:

Y was looking longingly in their direction so, ignoring the $9.99 sign we picked out eight of them. Which ended up costing a breathtaking $1.50.

I'd dredged up a memory of seeing them stuffed with ricotta, then shallow fried. So I beat together ricotta with an egg, & salt & pepper and added some cooled down sautéed minced mushrooms with garlic and thyme to add a little bite.

Stuffing them with a teaspoon is messy, and I'll use an icing bag next time, but eventually I got the flowers filled (and the counter decorated with) the ricotta mixture. I made a simple tempura batter with a cup of cold water, a cup of flour & an egg, mixing it together so there were still some lumps in the mixture. Then, holding each flower by the stem, they (& my fingers) were coated in the batter and then fried three at a time in an inch of hot oil.

They worked out fine, light & cheesy & crispy, with a little bite of courgette at the stem end, but next time I will add some finely grated Parmesan and some soaked chopped porcini to the ricotta mixture for a more intense flavour.

Grilled cheese, salad, vinaigrette, courgette flowers - not one of my finer food pictures, but you get the idea...

Y's (French, dedicated carnivore) birthday supper menu

I had volunteered to cook everything, not just pudding, for Y's birthday, if he would tell me what he wanted to eat. Sitting on the sun-filled deck at lunchtime, eating bowls of my homemade leftover Thai curry, he came up with the following menu of things he loved and I added a few things too:

Discs of grilled New Jersey goats cheese with walnuts on sourdough toasts with a mustard vinaigrette, fried pancetta & frisée (endive) salad

Roast pork tenderloin, wrapped in smoked bacon (Which Y cooked to his special recipe)
Green beans, steamed & then tossed in melted butter, thyme & garlic
Mashed Idaho potatoes (cream, butter)
Cauliflower cheese, gratinéed (crispy crumb topping)
Homemade apple sauce

Instead of cake he opted for strawberry tart with creme patissiere & strawberry puree.

The whole menu took three hours from unpacking the shopping to putting on the table. For such a super simple menu, there was an awful lot of prep as we made everything from scratch from the fried breadcrumbs on the cauliflower cheese to the salad vinaigrette. (And I also added an extra element to the first course, dropping the walnuts and adding deep fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta & mushrooms.)

[I read on Obamafoodorama that the US pork industry has suffered badly from shoppers (erroneously) eschewing piggy products due to Swine Flu. Not in this household is all I can say. There were barbecued pork escalopes the night before, and sausages tonight.]

Tarte aux Fraises: Strawberry tart with strawberry puree

We celebrated Y's birthday yesterday with a supper for four of us, which I cooked as part of my present for him. The piece de resistance was pudding, a classic French fruit tart with a strawberry puree.

I made this! I'm beside myself with glee. My first ever fruit tart!

Whilst I've been making classic quiches for years with great success, I've always been a little scared of making a proper patisserie type tart before. They require two ingredients which are notorious for going wrong: pate brisée, an extremely short, buttery pastry (which can be a pig to work with as, if you get it too short, it has to be pressed into place rather than rolled) & creme patissiere, proper confectioner's custard (which splits if you so much as look at it the wrong way).

It doesn't help either that my mother makes extraordinarily good pastry, and thinks nothing of knocking up a tart at the last minute. Leave it to the experts I've always said, or do as the French and buy one from your local patisserie.

So, I've never made pate brisée or creme patissiere before. As I don't like hot eggy runny custard, I always presumed that I didn't like creme patissiere. How wrong was I? Last year I discovered that I loved it. After all what is there to dislike about a pastry filling that consists of eggs & sugar?

Anyway Y intimated that a tart would be extremely acceptable as a birthday cake, and I didn't like to admit that I'd never made one before. I consulted their rows & rows of cookbooks. Of course, the baking book, Gateaux de Mamie, would be in French, and there was no recipe for tarte aux fraises, or strawberry tart. Still nothing daunted, I found the separate recipes for pate brisée and creme patissiere & set to work.

And blimey, if they weren't the most ridiculously simple things to make. (If you ignore the fact that i had to keep converting the measurements to Imperial on my Blackberry.) Ignoring the instructions to make the pasty by hand, I just threw the pastry ingredients (flour, an egg yolk, icing sugar, a little salted water) into the Magimix, keeping an eagle eye on it so the pastry wasn't overworked. The moment it came together I dumped it onto a floured board, pushed it into a ball, wrapped it in clingfilm and popped it in the fridge to rest for an hour.

The custard was even easier. I had to wing it a bit as the recipe called for French soup spoon measurements & I had no idea if this equated to tablespoons, so I just guessed that it might. I heated 500ml of whole milk with a splash of Bourbon vanilla, meanwhile beating together four egg yolks with 6 tbsps of icing sugar and 4tbsps of cornflour. When the milk was simmering, I slowly dribbled the egg mixture onto it, whisking away. It immediately thickened into perfect creme patissiere. I scooped it into a dish & left it to cool. And that was it.

After the pastry rested I rolled it out to a disc an inch wider than the 26cm greased, nonstick, fluted,loose bottom. metal tart tin, (why on earth do people use china tart dishes? Makes for soggy pasty), flipped it into the tin, pressed it into shape and trimmed the top. No baking parchment or baking beans to weight the pastry as it cooked so it wldn't rise, so I improvised with tinfoil and rice. Baked it at 180C/350F for 25mins (the book said 15 but it was still soft then), and slid it off the tin base and onto a wire rack to cool.

I did slightly overcook it, but better browner & crisper than pallid & soggy I guess. When the pastry shell was cool I tipped in & spread out the custard, and spent a fun 5 minutes decorating with half inch slices of strawberries, blueberries & raspberries.

I had a punnet of just going over strawberries in the fridge, so I used my mother's technique of hulling them, cutting off the bad bits, & throwing them in the Magimix with some sugar and lemon juice. Whizzed into a puree, this is ambrosial.

Gratifyingly, the boys all had second helpings.

Recipe: Cauliflower & mushroom soup with fried Halloumi cheese

Whenever I have deadlines to meet I cook incessantly. Every meal becomes an exercise in flashy knife skills & obscure ingredients. Although the latter is as much to do with the fact that I won’t allow myself to leave the house until the copy is filed and so must cook with whatever is in the cupboards.

In London that didn’t really present much of a challenge as I had a superb kitchen bursting with supplies. Here in New York it’s like playing Ready Steady Cook. I have a third of a kitchen cupboard for dry ingredients and a very small fridge & icebox, and that usually means that I eat everything before going shopping again. I have no room for the standard essentials: no flour, no sugar, and certainly none of the esoterica with which I filled my London shelves. And I never really plan what to eat in advance: I just buy what looks good in the markets.

Last night all I had left were some distressed looking mushrooms, a small cube of Halloumi cheese, an onion & a small head of cauliflower. To be completely honest, I do live opposite the Westside Market, a very good food store, but it was raining, the apartment is a fifth floor walk-up and I hadn’t brushed my hair since the day before.

So, I scratched my (unbrushed)head for a while. I’d run out of starches, milk, tinned tomatoes and coconut milk, so there were no sauce ingredients to bring it all together, and nothing to bulk it out. Then I remembered a meal I had thrown together for my mother last month in England: a cauliflower soup with fried mushrooms and Halloumi,

Fortunatley for this post, I photographed all the food I cooked in England, so I can give you a proper recipe below. I had chopped coriander there, so that's added too. It works like this:

Chop up the onion & a clove of garlic if you have it. Find a big saucepan (big is good, you’ll see why in a minute), put in a splash of whatever oil you have kicking around, & a knob of butter if you have it, turn the heat to medium and, when the oil is hot, add a tsp of ground cumin, a tsp of haldi (turmeric) & a tsp of garam masala. Cook the spices in the oil for 30 secs, and then throw in the onions.

Keep the heat at low-medium – you want the onions to cook slowly, without browning. Push them around in a desultory way with a spatula from time to time to check that they aren’t sticking. In between prodding the onions, chop up the cauliflower into pretty small pieces (removing the stalk & outer leaves) and rip up the coriander and, when the onions are translucently soft, throw in the cauliflower rubble & the chopped coriander.

Then you need a about a litre/ 1.5 pints of hot liquid. (It's going to depend on the size of your cauliflowers - you need the liquid to come just over the pieces.) Stock is best (I like using Marigold Vegetable Bouillon - it doesn’t taste too processed), but water wld do in a pinch. Pour this over the cauliflower and cook till the cauliflower is super soft. This can take about 10 minutes.

Whilst the cauliflower is cooking, chop up the Halloumi into teeny cubes, heat up a frying pan on the stove, with a tsp of oil and when it looks hot, throw in the cheese. After 10 secs, push them about a bit. The aim to get them nicely browned. (You don’t need much oil for this). When they are done, tip them out onto kitchen paper and try to resist eating them all. Good luck with that.

You also need to chop up the mushrooms into small pieces, and fry these in butter (preferably), or else olive oil, with a pinch of salt, over a medium heat until they are cooked. (It's good to not boil away all the juices.)

The fun part. And the reason why you need a big saucepan. Get out your stick blender and whizz that cauliflower to a soup consistency. It won’t form a puree, what you will get is a thin-ish liquid with teeny tiny pieces of cauliflower in it. If it looks too thin, bubble it up on the stove to reduce the liquid; equally, if too thick, add some more stock/hot water.

Season generously to taste with lots of black pepper & Maldon (kosher) salt.

To serve, ignore the dog who will have retired to the sofa in high dudgeon upon realisation that there is no meat in tonight's supper:

and put the Halloumi in the bottom of the soup bowls:

Pour over the cauliflower soup, and then spoon over the fried mushrooms. More chopped coriander looks & tastes good sprinkled over the top. Flat leaf parsley wld work too.

Eat, enjoying the contrast between the salty, crispy, melty cheese, the delicate cauliflower and the earthy mushrooms. (I do appear to be obsessed with cheese & mushrooms right now.)

Mushrooms & mozzarella: LLG's guide to putting on weight rapidly

I am currently on a reducing regimen. Over the two weeks I spent at my mother's house in the country I was face down in the trough for at least 50% of the time, and put on 6lbs/3kg. In two bloody weeks!

The sheer, unadulterated bliss of having all the ingredients on hand to cook whatever I felt like, in my mother's wonderful, fully equipped kitchen with her as an enthusiastic participant to boot all added up to avoirdupois overload.

So, it's with this in mind, that I share one of my all-time favourite recipes, which I cooked, er, three times whilst I was there. Dreamed up by myself one day in London when all I had in the fridge were mushrooms and a ball of mozzarella di bufala (random, I know), it's deliciously addictive and takes maybe ten minutes from prep to mouth. Sure, you can practically feel the fat cells multiplying on your thighs, but, sod it, we all need comfort food now & again.

It can be eaten with any starch. Basmati is good, mashed potato is other-worldly but turns it into a bit of a performance so I don't bother unless I have leftovers (or shhh M&S cook-chill), and I'm mainly using quinoa right now as it cooks so quickly. If using rice, put it on to cook before you start the main dish.

To start the journey to food heaven/hell (you decide), you need a couple of handfuls of as fresh as possible white mushrooms. (Look for mushrooms with gills as pink as possible, rather than dark brown: you want that lovely just yielding texture they get when cooked, as opposed to the sloppiness of week old ones.)

Then a ball of fresh mozzarella. It doesn't have to be buffalo:

But it does taste magnificent. But, please, whatever you do, do not use a brick of mozzarella or grated mozzarella as it doesn't melt in the right way for this dish. Or, heaven forfend, 'domestic' or Danish mozzarella. That stuff is just plain wrong.

Add a tablespoon of butter to the frying pan. Once melted, add some chopped garlic, and tip your mushrooms and a generous scattering of Maldon Salt (or kosher salt). Turn the heat down a little to let them cook.

The point here is to get them to release all those lovely mushroom-y juices, so you need to avoid reducing the liquid comes off them. You can always cheat and pop a lid over the frying pan for a few minutes (but not for too long, as steamed mushrooms always taste a bit weird).

Then tear (do not chop) your ball of mozzarella into the frying pan. This was a very large ball (am pig), you could easily use half this amount for the mushrooms shown. Turn the heat to very, very low.


And put the lid on your frying pan for about 3-4 minutes, until the pan looks like this. DO NOT STIR. This breaks up the mozzarella and you end up with a pan of string. Whilst the cheese is melting, pour boiling water over some quinoa in a saucepan and place a lid over it so it cooks quickly.

Drain the quinoa and add to pretty soup bowl, check seasoning of mushrooms & cheese, add black pepper (you want freshly ground here for the texture and the same goes with the sea salt), spoon delectable mixture & cooking liquor over quinoa. Shovel into mouth.
How many does this feed? Well, one of the reasons I got so porky was that I ate all the above on my own. But less greedy piglets could probably make the amount of mushrooms shown above stretch between two if you made a simple lettuce salad to go with it.

Saturday night supper: Green salad, grilled salmon & courgettes

Saturday wasn’t ideal: we came home at lunchtime from our stay at The Halkin to a very bruised & battered Violet the whippet, and poor Rog, our long-suffering neighbour who had taken her to the vet, quite obviously needed some restorative feeding. I immediately made doorstop chicken, mayo, lettuce & plum tomato sandwiches on squishy white bread & insisted he return for supper.

After my gastronomic odyssey around California and the stunning six course tasting menu at David Thompson’s Nahm on Friday night, all I wanted was a salad. But you can’t feed hungry men just salad. So we poked around in the fridge, and put together a green salad, seared salmon with soy, Jersey Royals and griddled courgette (zucchini) with olive oil, sea salt & mint. Which took a scant 25 minutes to prepare & cook.

The salad was Webb’s (butter) lettuce with chunks of smooth ripe avocado with two handfuls of rapidly defrosted petit pois thrown over it. As this is a soft salad, & we were cooking yielding salmon & potatoes, I added some textural crunch to the salad with peeled cucumber dice, shards of chicory & chopped Little Gem.

I like soft lettuce & pea salads with creamy dressings rather than vinaigrette, in a bastardised homage to petit pois a la Francaise, so I made a quick dressing from fresh mayonnaise from a tub I found in the fridge, thinned with milk and whisked together with salt & pepper.

The Jersey Royals were simply boiled, and served with a slick of salted butter; we seared the salmon on a hot plate with soy sauce.

I brushed thick slices of courgette with olive oil

and griddled them on a very, very hot pan for just a few minutes so they still had some resistance. I finished them off with chopped fresh apple mint from the garden, Greek olive oil, crunchy Maldon salt & black pepper.

I don’t eat salmon, so I had some fresh mozzarella instead from this bag of heaven:

We had a very enthusiastic audience as we ate:

Cooking in the English countryside

I grew up in a kitchen: my mother is a truly exceptional cook, and all my earliest memories (from the 70s) revolve around food.

Muv making chicken liver patés in deep stoneware bowls to sell in the local deli, coming home from school on Wednesdays to discover the entire kitchen surface covered in cooling wire racks of cakes & biscuits from Delia Smith’s Book of Cakes, getting my first cookery set from my godmother when I was five and learning how to roll out my own pastry, the endless files of cutout newspaper recipes to thumb through by Marika Hanbury Tenison, Katie Stewart, Jane Grigson, Josceline Dimbleby Caroline Conran et al, playing with Arabella Boxer’s brilliant ringbound First Slice Your Cookbook, and packed lunches that had my schoolfriends speechless with shock: chunks of fresh mozzarella cheese, cold slices of gratins & homemade pizza, olives & halved kiwi fruits.

It’s not surprising that I equate food with happiness, and that feeding my friends & family is my favourite occupation. But it’s been a challenge in New York. I’d heard all the stories about Manhattan kitchens and their shoebox proportions but nothing really prepares you for a cooking space less than a metre wide – and that includes the storage. Especially when I’d designed & fitted my perfect London kitchen just a year before I moved to New York.

Cooking there was simple: my kitchen has two eight foot-long prep counters, lots of deep drawers full of esoteric equipment, my collections of serving dishes, pretty glass & piles of linen, electrical sockets everywhere and room for twelve people around the huge table for midweek suppers & long wine-fuelled Sunday lunches.

In Manhattan, I have nowhere to entertain, and counter space to plate for just two people. It’s not quite the same.

Now I am back in England until June, but my London flat is let and so I am staying with my mother in the Northamptonshire countryside for the next ten days. This makes me very, very happy.

There is this: And this:

And this:

And this: And that's not the half of it.

Imagine the joy of wanting to cook, well, anything, and having ALL the equipment and specific ingredients to hand, whether aesofetida or apples.

Cooking Indian food in Manhattan

I live in Manhattan, where single people neither cook, nor is there an expectation that they will do so. I find this strange as I cook a proper meal at least once if not twice a day in London. I brought my knives over with me, but discovered that the kitchens are so tiny here that it’s usually just simpler to eat out or order take out. (It’s not just Carrie Bradshaw who keeps her cashmere sweaters in the oven, in her (abnormally large) apartment)

Thing is, after several months here, I’m fed up with eating sub-standard takeaways (& they are generally extremely bad), or with spending most of my income in restaurants. (Originally I was excited at just how cheap it was to eat out here and it is, but do that every day and it soon mounts up.)

So, I girded my loins and decided it was time to cook for my friends, to bring a little bit of London to New York. As BA craves Indian food, like all English expats, and Americans J & F love spicy food, curry seemed good. I biked up to the Union Square Greenmarket, and nearly killed myself on the way home, wobbling down 2nd with my vegetable-filled calico shopping bags hanging off the handlebars.

I don’t use cookbooks, (they're for reading in bed), preferring to cook from memory, adapting recipes in my head to suit the season and the contents of my cupboards. I tied on an apron over my tailored black wool short shorts, kicked off my 4" patent Mary Janes, sharpened my Globals and set to work.

I poached mushrooms in fried onion-enriched coconut milk with coriander, made a chickpea curry, using mashed potato (it thickens the sauce) and tomato puree with garam masala paste, and composed my favourite spinach curry soup. thickening it with coconut cream to make it less soupy. Finally I stir fried chiffonaded curly kale in a very hot wok with chilli oil for a couple of seconds, melted butter to pour over warmed through naan breads and made raita.

Pudding was plum studded cupcakes (I made up the batter in the autumn & froze it), baked in the toaster oven, with vodka cocktails with mango or blueberry purees. (We were going dancing afterwards).

I'm glad I made the effort, as the girls arrived with Ketel One, pink & yellow roses and dressed to the nines. We lit tea lights, arranged the flowers, and ate the lot. Who says fashion girls don't eat?

Fashioni girl's Spinach, chick pea & paneer winter-warming soup

Part of the quid pro quo of bed hopping is that I do cooking for my hosts. Fortunately I have been dossing down in Highbury, where Miss P (a trained chef), has a kitchen full of the toys with which this cook loves to play. No blunt knives or bashed up saucepans here.

I had been itching to make a spinach-y, meal in a bowl soup, the kind of food that keeps you warm from the inside out. Cruising the aisles in my local independent supermarket on Queens Crescent for interesting ingredients, I hovered indecisively over the Bangladeshi, Somali, & Chinese sections before filling my basket with a bag of fresh cubed paneer (Indian cheese), frozen spinach (fine for soup), chick peas, naan, and fresh curry pastes, whilst the Halal corner shop furnished me with long, budded mild green garlic shoots,(known as suen sum or suantai in China).* What I came up with by trial & error was inspired partly by a random magazine recipe, and partly by, well, hunger. It's healthy, utterly delicious & very filling, with a kick of chili to aid the central heating effect. I'm not very good at exact proportions, but the soup goes something like this:

Sweat a chopped or sliced onion in oil for about ten minutes 'til translucent & golden. Add & fry off for a minute or so a couple of tablespoons of curry paste (I used one with a lot of coriander & cumin). Pour in a can of full fat coconut milk (the light stuff is a waste of time & taste) and double the amount of vegetable stock - I use Marigold bouillon powder. Add a tin of drained chickpeas. Simmer for five minutes. Whilst simmering, take a frying pan & fry tiny cubes of paneer in vegetable oil until browned. (You can use haloumi in place of paneer - delicious!)

Then add about 300gms/half a pound of frozen spinach to the coconut milk pan and cook till fully heated through. Then add pre-fried paneer. In a separate pan fry thin slices of the garlic shoots. Use to garnish as the slightly crunchy texture adds a fabulous contrast to the silky smooth soup, with its nuggets of melty, chewy cheese and meaty chick peas. Serve with warmed naan bread, brushed with melted butter. Feeds four people. Even nicer if eaten next day. (Add more water or stock as it thickens overnight.)

Kattebelletje's food blog has more on garlic shoots for food obsessed people like me

Picture: By me.

Cupcake action

I am rather proud of my cupcakes. (It's amazing what a girl can achieve, given a toaster oven, a few lucky guesses and some determination).



(I found the beautiful vintage green pressed glass cake plate for $6 at the East Village flea market on East 11th & A. A bargain, although not a very sensible one, considering I'll have to transport it back to London some day.)