Chocolate Almond Spice Cookies (Basler Brunsli)

You know what, every experienced cook or chef will tell you the golden rule in cooking, or following a recipe to be more precise, is to read the recipe first.  And I still forget to sometimes. 

The problem is I've got the attention span of a fruit fly.  I'll find a recipe and I'll glance at it and I'll get so excited about it that I just start cooking and halfway through it's like oh I need to soak this overnight. Oh I need a kitchenaid. Or oh I need to leave these cookies to dry for 3 hours before I can bake them.  And so yea, I wanted to bring these cookies to a dinner but halfway through I realized I didn't have enough time....And there was also a moment of "oh this recipe makes enough cookies to feed a village".

Lesson is, again and again, I never learn - read the recipe first.

Anna Jones' Seeded Banana Bread with Lemon Tahini Drizzle

There's something really sad about those overripe bananas.  There are always bananas present in the fruit bowls at work - they come sturdy, bright yellow with a green tinge.  But then they're forgotten.  The sweet grapes, nectarines and clementines are all devoured but the bananas are just there.  And days later they're that dull mustard, marked with black spots and they seem to almost shrivel.  They're like diseased the poor things.  Overripe bananas make me sad.  And so I had to take them back home to make banana bread.

How to: Homemade Soy Milk

Ok I'm going to tell you straight out that it's too much effort.

This involves soaking the soy beans overnight, removing the skins, blitzing them, boiling them for thirty minutes and then straining them.  In China we have these soy milk makers where all you have to do is put the soaked soy beans in and then it does all of that otherwise superfluous manual labor and in half an hour you've got your soy milk.

Rendang Chicken

This is my first proper curry from scratch.  I spent my Saturday evening making the curry paste, frying it in the pan, watching it reduce with the coconut milk and then leaving it to stew for two hours, stirring every now and then. And that was one of the best Saturday evenings I've had in a while.