Vile Potatoes

A very easy recipe that operates in the same space as boulangère potatoes, dauphinoise potatoes, potatoes au gratin and no doubt others that I have forgotten.

It’s basically just sliced potatoes, onions and garlic baked in cheese sauce:

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Chicken sort-of-korma

I’m posting this recipe for my colleague Jason Skomorowski, who enjoyed this curry when he was staying with me recently. It’s a mild, creamy curry that to some degree resembles a korma, but it’s nowhere close to authentic. Still, it’s my own recipe, and it works well. It has a much richer and more intense flavour than an actual korma.

This is not my curry, but it looks pretty much like it.

A cake that didn’t quite work

It was my birthday on Saturday, so I made myself an experimental cake:

It’s a variant on the chocolate and marmalade cake that I’ve been making. I wanted to aim for a more fresh, real flavour, so I dumped the 450 g marmalade, and instead used two whole oranges. I gently simmered them whole for thirty minutes to soften them, then blended them, and used the resulting semi-liquid in place of the marmalade.

Oh, and the chocolate-marmalade cake!

Here it is, served with full-fat natural yoghurt:

It’s a variant on a recipe attributed to Nigella Lawson — though of course recipes get handed down and around so much, with so little attribution, that it’s impossible to say where it really originated. The question might not even be meaningful, since cake recipes are like Makefiles: no-one ever wrote one from scratch, every one is copied and modified from one that’s close to what you want.

Last night’s baking

Two pies and a cake:

Back centre: smoked salmon, cream cheese and basil pie. Front left: spinach, egg and parmesan cheese pie. Front right: chocolate and marmalade cake with white chocolate icing.

Today’s savoury pies

Left: spinach, egg and parmesan cheese. Right: cream cheese, smoked salmon and basil.

Both these pies were absolutely delicious, but they both had structural issues.

Two savoury pies, done right

A while back, I made four minature savoury pies as an experiment. It worked out very well on the whole. So for a recent dinner party, when we had a vegetarian guest, I made the best two in a larger form as a starter. On that occasion I didn’t take photos. But today I made them again, and this time I did.

These are unquestionably the best pies I have ever made. And … oh, should I say it, should I say it? What the heck, I will: they are the best pies I have ever tasted, too. As my family will eagerly confirm, I am not one to boast about my own cooking; but for these pies, I make an exception.