mousse

In anticipation of eating lots of heavy food when I go visit Edinburgh in 2 weeks, I've been trying to eat mostly vegetables. But I also can't resist trying out all the stovetop bread recipes from Joe Pastry.

First up is my perfect pantry dish of sweet potato with lentil and frozen spinach dhal (previous iteration). It's hard to beat this in terms of price per meal.

Made some chapati as a side, which turned out moderately successful. I selectively read the instructions, paying attention to where it said to roll them thinly...while disregarding the part where it said to roll them to ~7cm diameter. Mine were about 15cm in diameter, and needless to say too thin to puff up. They still tasted fine and was good dipped in the dhal, but not super exciting. I think my preference lies with leavened breads that have a chewy crumb. Gonna buy some more flour and make naan next.

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Previous dinners were the skillet cheesy beef pasta:

I only made this to use up the last bits of a smoked cheddar that I had, since I'm generally tired of american style meat/tomato sauce because it was the first and only pasta sauce I knew how to make for years. But it's pretty tasty, the sauce clings well to the pasta since the pasta is boiled directly in the sauce. The downside to this method is that reheating leftover pasta makes this far too soft, so I'd only make this to feed a crowd. It was also hard to control how much water to add since I wasn't making the same amount as the recipe, so the pasta was a tad overcooked to begin with because I wanted to thicken the sauce more. Next time I'd use the empty tomato can to measure 1 can of water, and add some tomato paste to increase the tomato flavour.

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Speaking of cheese, another one that I found at Waitrose is the famous (to me) Kirkham lancashire:

(This also means I have yet to visit Paxton & Whitfield, which I will! But it's gonna rain for an entire week, so that's my excuse for continuing to stay in)

It doesn't taste like cheddar at all...it taste tangy like good yoghurt. I think having it on a whole wheat  cracker would be better than eating it alone, maybe with some jammy fruit too. Too bad I bought McVities rich tea biscuits instead of digestive, but I've yet to try a biscuit by them that I don't like. Sigh I'll miss the dairy and biscuits from UK :(