Spicy leftover leg of lamb

If you have a roast leg of lamb on Sunday, then on Monday or Tuesday you should almost certainly make this. For one thing, that leg of lamb was probably eye-wateringly expensive, wasn’t it? I tremblingly handed over around £20 for one last week, so I was jolly sure I was going to make the most of it. It fed the four of us a very merry Sunday dinner the first time around (teddy-bear-shaped Yorkshire puddings were involved and so was good Claret - it was the first Sunday meal following a dry January), and would easily have fed four in its second incarnation, had I stirred myself to make it in time for the children’s tea. In the end, husband and I snarfed it between us, with just a tiny bit leftover for my lunch today.

Soup opera

We took a family field trip last weekend to the wilds of Walthamstow, to see some great friends and to have a brief poke around the International Supermarket, one of my favourite food shops anywhere. Really, I'll take a well-stocked supermarket catering to a community with a vibrant food culture any day over a posh deli. Fresh and lovely produce, intriguing grains stacked ceiling high and fragrant breads and baklava. I couldn't spend as long as I would have liked (pesky family! pesky dinner reservation!) but I grabbed a bag of these lovely lentils.

Famous biscuits

"Mum! These biscuits should be famous!"

"Shall I put them on my blog then?"

"Yes! And don't forget the rules."

Much as I think the Beautiful Girl has radically over-estimated the impact of this little blog, these scrummy biscuits are most definitely worthy of note. Crisp, buttery and with a faint tang of lemon, they came about because the BG received some new biscuit cutters for her eighth birthday from one of her friends and wanted to use them STRAIGHT AWAY. A quick Google turned this up on the BBC Good Food website - easy peasy, though short on 'rules' (which, as Monica Geller and I both know "help control the fun").

For your budding chocolatiers...

Wait…. a…. minute. I might be just about to write something mildly topical. Hold on to your Easter bonnets, because, just in time for the school holidays, when you might be in the market for a fun activity for children, and Easter, when you might have a large amount of chocolate lurking around, here’s this!

Yes!

What is it?

Umm… Rocky road? A sort of chocolate collage? The result of an accident in a sweetie factory?

Read on, reader...

Actual cooking by real children

We're supposed to interest our children in food by allowing them to get involved with the selection and preparation of food and I'm all for it. Perhaps today after the children have cheerfully completed all their homework we'll slip into our matching Cath Kidston aprons, and work together carefully and co-operatively (perhaps while doing some close-harmony singing) to produce a healthy, satisfying meal that we will all enthusiastically yet tidily consume, while conversing politely about the day's events. After we've shared in the washing and cleaning up perhaps we'll probably retreat, laughing, to the sofa where we'll enjoy some improving literature before bed. Yes, yes I'm sure that's how it will go.

Fish pie

I didn’t much like fish pie when I was a child, I seem to remember. Possibly it was the colourlessness of it – white fish, in a white sauce, topped with white mashed potatoes. Maybe I thought it was a tad bland, taste-wise, too. Or maybe it was just because it was my brother’s favourite.

Now I love it. There’s just something so natural about the combination of fish and potatoes (like in those fishcakes). It’s a comforting, comfortable, rainy-day kind of food.

We all love chips

I don't have a problem with frozen food - why would I? Freezing is a great way of keeping food 'fresh' without adding nasty ingredients. If it weren't for frozen peas, GB wouldn't eat any vegetables at all (let's draw a veil over the fact that his preferred way of eating them is in their still-frozen state, with a spoon...) and I really love those bags of mixed berries you can buy (I think Sainsbury's Basics version costs all of £1 a bag) which make the most fantastic smoothies.

But I think I take some persuading when it comes to oven chips. Because it just takes so little time and energy to slice up a few potatoes, sprinkle them with olive oil and maybe a few herbs and/or spices, and shove them in the oven. And while a bag of pre-prepared 'lightly spiced oven wedges' will cost you £2.47 a kilo and cook in 18 minutes, according to the packet instructions, Maris Piper potatoes cost 78p a kilo and, when cut into wedges, cook in about... 18 minutes.