bite

I wish I had a set of blue and white porcelain dinnerware since most food I make is beige/yellow/brown. Hauling a set from China doesn't seem like a good use of valuable luggage allowance, guess expensive shipping it'll have to be.

Food I ate ranked in terms of how appealing they look in photos (least to most):

congee form of my default miso soup

This is actually a really good dinner to have during weeks when I have lectures. Healthy and very quick to heat up and eat. The congee base (rice, lentil, seaweed, dried shrimp) can be cooked in advance, and add frozen spinach when reheating one portion. Then stir in miso paste. I've always ignored instructions not to heat up miso paste too much, in fact I deliberately char the miso paste when I make my default soup. But after using miso as a condiment in this congee, I do admit that some flavour is lost from the high heat.

lentil bolognaise

As one recipe comment says, I was skeptical of no garlic and no tomato. But I decided to trust the recipe, although adding some dried shiitake mushroom and dark soy sauce. Also swapped out some green lentil for red lentil because I have no blender to puree part of the sauce. The taste is great, mostly from the strongly cooked down carrot & onion, but the texture would definitely be better pureed as it currently doesn't cling that well to the pasta. It'd work well as a lasagna filling though.

mayo based potato tuna salad

I wasn't interested in mayo based dressing as I've always made pesto based potato tuna salads. But after liking a super simple leek/tuna/mayo bruschetta (on soda bread: nailed the dough this time with ¼ cup more milk, but messed up on the cooking "orz ), decided to continue the mayo and tuna theme. I do also need to start using up the bottle, and haven't made any grilled cheese yet. It turned out well, but I credit that to pickled carrots and salted olives.

A bowl meal from The Art of the Larder to use up the remaining of my white beans. It is time to start thinking of how to use up my pantry, guess I won't be buying any chickpea or buckwheat flour to play with :( I very very heavily seasoned the beans while cooking it, which makes a big difference. This would definitely be added to my regular rotation...except that'd require buying more beans.

I'm already dreading all the UK food that I'm gonna miss.