What I Cooked Last Night

Yeah, I had to read it twice as well. Some headlines do that to you. Pasta with walnuts and broccoli. Something to do with flavour or texture or both. Nuts go with members of the brassica family and if you underscore that pairing with something warm and bland and homely, like traditional home-made pasta, and bind it with a compatible fat - cream or cheese or both - you have the makings of a great dish. Hence the following: Cook the pasta. Rigatoni is my fallback when discrete components appear in the sauce, but for this I used farfalle, usually incorrectly translated as bowties for the obvious reason, but when you know it means butterflies, you will never again look upon a pack of them in a shop as an item of men's clothing. Meanwhile, cook a finely chopped onion and a clove of garlic in some olive oil in a shallow non-stick pan. Then add half a cup of white wine, the same amount of cream, and a shower of walnuts. Stir and reduce. When the pasta is almost cooked, throw ...

Yes. For lunch on a cold day at the tail end of a wet July when you want something warm but light, tasty but easy, ... oh, (note to self) shut up and get on with the recipe. OK. Boil three large stalks of broccoli - last few inches of stem removed - with one finely chopped onion, a grated carrot, a scored clove of garlic, a six-inch stick of celery scored across its backbone, a scattering of dried coriander leaves, a pinch of chili powder, a few cumin seeds, and a dash of salt and pepper. (You can saute the onion first, but as a lunch recipe, I just throw everything in together. It's also lower in fat that way, if you're interested in that kind of thing.) When broccoli is done, get your propeller and puree the whole thing. The carrot will 'disappear'. Back on the flame, add half a cup of full cream milk, fold through, and serve with a spoonful of yogurt or sour cream and some chopped flat-leaf parsley. And grilled cheese on toast on the side. And a steaming mug of t...

I'd never grown snow peas before. Last year in the front garden bed we had a row of carrots. They didn't grow, and they took all winter to do it. They sulked and took up space that could have yielded something more useful than hard orange sticks good only for horses to chew. My fault of course. Probably didn't feed them enough. I'd heard of horse carrots when I was a child. Always wondered what they were. (Always wondered what those warning signs on the back of horse floats meant, as well. Caution horses , the signs used to read. I asked my father. He told me they were very careful horses, never bucked or shied.) So no more carrots. (And never believe your father when he has a smile playing about his lips.) We planted snow peas in winter instead. They grew, and they started sprouting snow peas a month ago. The vine winds about a simple three-sided pyramid of three stakes meeting at the top. The pods come out and dangle like earrings, or decorations on a Christmas tr...