Prep: 10 mins | Cook: 30 mins | Serves: 2
Nutritional info: 691 kcal, 74g carbs, 35g fat, 23g protein

INGREDIENTS PHOTO: (I forgot the parsley)

So, first up, stick the walnuts in an oven on around 180’c for 6-8 minutes, so they’re browning but not getting hard or bitter.

Then chop off about 2cm of the end of the broccoli – the dried up bit, and then slice the rest of the stalk right up to the florets, chop it up a little if massively thick. Then add the oil to a large frying pan, and gently sautee the stalk sections for about 5 minutes.

Then add the broccoli heads, and keep them cooking until tender. 5-8 minutes. MEANWHILE. squash and chop the garlic, chop the parsley, zest and juice the lemon, and probably take the walnuts out already.

By the time you’ve prepped all the stuff, the broccoli should be about tender. Add all of the stuff apart from the ricotta and lemon juice:

heat this through for 5 minutes, and put the pasta on.

Then add the ricotta and lemon juice, stir around and heat very gently until the pasta is ready. Season well. Really well. Lots of salt (I like salt, please make sure it’s to your taste).

When pasta is ready, drain, combine, serve, enjoy.

These are easy. Cookies are easy. You should make them. And find some people to help you eat them. And come and eat some of mine, tomorrow, at Performance in the Pub. Yes. Plug.

COOKIES.

Prep Time: 30 mins | Cook Time: 20 mins | Servings: Makes 16
Nutritional Info: 167 kcalories, protein 3g, carbohydrate 19g, fat 9 g, saturated fat 5g, fibre 2g, sugar 11g, salt 0.18 g

Ingredients:

Heat your oven to 180’c. Get out some baking tins, and a wire rack. grease the baking tins, line them with baking paper if you want to be slightly wasteful of paper, but conserve water by not having to wash them up. Weigh out the butter and sugar, cream together. If you just got the butter out of the fridge you can zap it for bursts of 8 seconds in a microwave until soft, but don’t melt it.

Add the mashed banana, vanilla essence, and eggs, and beat together until smoothly mixed

In a separate bowl mix together all of the remaining dry ingredients.

Add this to the wet mix, fold together until all lovely and clumpy, and then spoon onto the baking sheets well spaced apart. 1 Tbsp per cookie, and in a sort of heaped oval that’s technically called a ‘quenelle’. I don’t know why it needs a funny name, but what it does it make sure the cookie doesn’t get too flat when it cooks. GOOEY MIDDLES.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly browned. Leave to rest for a minute or two, and then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Eat all of them. Weep a little. Write a blog post with nice pictures.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 45-60 minutes | Servings: 10-12

Nutritional Info: (based on it serving 12 – which is plenty!) 406kcals, 23g fat (6.5g saturated), 5.3g protein, 43.4g carbs, 27.8g sugar, 0.7g salt

Ingredients! (lots)

Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan160°C/gas 4. Grease a 22cm round take-apart cake tin with a little butter or oil. It’s best for taking it apart if you put a nice bit of greaseproof paper on the bottom, too. Also, don’t chop into your finger whilst simultaneously also making sweet potato and butternut squash soup for your lunch. That makes the whole process a lot easier. And less bloody.

soak the raisins in a simmering pan of 3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice and 3 tablespoons of sherry (medium or sweet, ideally, but I used dry and it was fine) until the liquid has pretty much totally been absorbed.

meanwhile put the eggs, sugar and oil in a bowl and whisk until creamy, at least 3 minutes with an electric whisk, or 5 with an ANALOGUE one.

amass all your dry ingredients; baking powder, bicarb, cinnamon, self raising flour, shredded coconut, bashed walnuts,

then when the raisins have drunk all the sherry/orange mix, combine all of the dry ingredients, plus the carrot and raisins, with the egg/sugar/oil mix, and fold together. Put into the cake tin and level the surface. I forgot to take a picture of that bit, so here’s a picture of me hastily pulling the cake out at 3 minutes into the cooking stage. IT RISES FAST:

cook for 45 minutes or until a skewer comes out the center clean, this took much more like 65 minutes, for me, but keep checking after 45 minutes. When it’s done, take it out and cool it in the tin, then turn out and cool for the last bit on a wire rack. Should be something like this when done:

Now if you like you can try the instructions for the cream cheese icing from the original recipe, here, which is: put 50g of icing sugar, 1 tsp vanilla essence, and 300g of cream cheese in a bowl and beat together. When that fails, and you just have a really runny gloopy mess, this is how you fix it. Put about a tbsp of butter (maybe 2) into a new bowl, beat it, and then add icing sugar and beat until you have a very stiff butter icing, then add the gloopy cheese mess bit by bit with icing sugar in turn, beating, to keep a stiff consistency, and until all the cheese mess is used up. It’ll be glossier and a bit looser than regular butter icing, but still cheesy and strong enough to form well and set. Here’s what it should look like:

apply it to the cool cake with a palette knife, sprinkle with walnuts. Et voila! I promise you, this is ridiculously tasty. Make for friends to save devouring the whole thing in one sitting.