I started thinking about cooking
I started thinking about cooking again last night - I haven’t cooked in months, and I think I’ve really missed that little bit of physically creative force in my life, it’s made me a bit flatter, a bit duller, a bit more depressed. So when I boiled up some sweet potato for Lola’s dinner, I started concocting an idea for something to make Gill tonight.
The idea worked, even better than I’d expected. And best of all, it was entirely my own thoughts, nothing from recipe books. Something to make me feel a little proud.
My big idea was for a main course, but when I realised it would be a little un-filling and lacking in protein I thought I’d better whip up a starter too. Simplicity itself - I’d got some pastry cutters, as I wanted to experiment making food that went in little circular mounds in the middle of the plate, and it was the best I could find to make it so. I just emptied half a tin of cannelini beans into a bowl, crushed them up a bit with a fork, mixed in tiny cubes of feta cheese, avocado and tomato, dribbled a little olive oil and lemon juice into the mixture, and spooned it into the biggest pastry cutter to make a nice little tower of beany-salad on the plate. As Gill mentioned, it could have done with a bit of mint, but I’m still surprised that it tasted as good as it did.
Anyway, main course… what inspired me was how good Lolly’s mashed sweet potato had tasted. Well, actually it was more crushed than mashed… I boiled the sweet potatos (organic ones, and white rather than the usual pink/yellow) with their skins on and then peeled the skins off after, and just crushed them up a bit. For ours I also mixed in some olive oil and quite a lot of toasted black cumin seeds. And then I floated it in a little sauce I invented - some shallot, red chilli, carrot and mango, softened up in a little ghee, then cooked in white wine and rice malt syrup with a tiny sprinkle of turmeric and ground cloves. And liquidised. It was scrummy, and the spicy-sweetness went nicely with the starchy-sweetness of the sweet potato. Oh, and I steamed a bit of asparagus and broccoli to go with it. Scrum.