Lentil Shepherd's Pie

Dear Readers, it may come as a surprise, but other than cooking, checking recipes, exploring restaurants, watching cookery videos and reading food-related articles, I've got other hobbies too.  I like sudokus, jigsaw puzzles, bananagrams, Rubik's cubes and things to do with psychology.  But now I've got a new interest - metal detecting. 

Let me take you to the night where I made this Shepherd's Pie.

My dear friend, Nina, invited me over to her house for dinner with her friend, her husband and her son.  Ok, not related, but look at how cute her son is?  That's Miles with his finger dipped in chia seeds.  He's going to be a strong healthy boy.  Forget crackers and peanut butter jelly sandwiches, this kid has chia seed puddings as his snacks.  Cute little Miles.

Breakfast Lentil Porridge with Apples and Lime

So about every two months I go vegan for one to two weeks.  It's like my inner guilty Italian catholic forces regular lent upon me.  Some people think it's to lose weight, but really, I just sort of overload on carbs most of the time.  When we're at a pub and people order cheesy nachos and burgers, what can I eat?  Chips.  Crisps.  Maybe a burger bun.  It's not too healthy really.  It really is more of a discipline thing as usually I just devour anything in front of me, now I only devour it if it's vegan.  I've been eating a lot of plain bread and rice.

I like to eat eggs and porridge for breakfast, and as I cannot have the former, ran out of the latter and have a bag of red split lentils to use up before I leave Edinburgh next week -- lentils for breakfast seemed logical.

Zingy Butternut Squash

I've missed eating homecooked meals.  I hadn't in a long time as I had been working two jobs in Edinburgh.  I was hostessing at restaurant A and I was waitressing at restaurant B, both jobs were making me slightly miserable (perhaps A more so than B), but they were both just to get some money and last Saturday I was fired from both.  So now I have all the time in the world to cook for myself.   Look at how beautiful this butternut squash dish is.  It's got all these wonderful things like spring onions and lime and ginger and just look at the colors.  I really can only describe it as full of "zing". It's like a more summery/springy take on this winter root veg.

*Sigh*.  Ok, here's how I actually got fired from both jobs because it's quite entertaining.

How to Make Your Greens Taste Good

One should always be cautious with school cafeteria foods.  I can still see the horrid scene of steaming piles of mush in metal trays and thinking that I should just eat the side vegetables, the vegetables should be fine.  See, it's easy to screw up a moussaka or pasta (oh the sight of the pasta was heartbreaking -- flaccid pieces of penne stuck together and drowning in a pool of "cheese sauce"),  so, I thought, okay, let's stick to the vegetables, and I got a plate of broccoli and peas and I had no idea you could screw up simple vegetables. They were of that lifeless dark green, tossed in some cheap butter, unsalted and just..cooked to a soft mush. Urgh, I've used the word "mush" twice already and it's never good to describe food as "mush".  But it was.  And I was there, struggling to finish this bland mush, thinking to myself, how the f*ck do you screw up vegetables?

How the f*ck do you expect your country to eat their 5-a-days if people are only exposed to such ways of eating vegetables?  I had always found it mind-boggling why people kept advertising these smoothie recipes with "hidden" greens because you wouldn't taste them.  What the f*ck?  I love spinach, why would I want it somewhere where it can't be tasted?   And then it all made sense to me as I stared at my pile of mush - I wouldn't like my greens either if people cooked the life out of them and didn't season them. Broccoli, spinach, kale, green beans, brussels sprouts, chard can all be delicious and now I will teach you how not to screw them up (you are welcome, NHS).

Table for one, please.

Yes, I'm that person that goes to restaurants by herself.  It's a treat for me.  I'm also that person that goes to one coffee/lunch/dinner/drinks date after another, trying to fit in as many social functions into my diary as possible, with a smile glued on my face, ready to be engaged, ask questions, listen and chat away and all the mean time keeping up with social media, replying to texts and Facebook and Whatsapp messages and...yea.  I actually love being alone sometimes where it's just me and my thoughts. 

http://www.asupposedlyfunthing.com/post/2814395980/notes-on-food-courts-and-eating-alone