Catch-up for my cousin Helena ;)

Sorry readers, I haven't been great at posting this week but I HAVE been eating.... a lot!!!

On Wednesday Mum cheated and made a cheats casserole. It contains chicken, bacon, pinto beans, tomatoes and some seasoning. It was served with some baby veg (mange tout, sweetcorn, beans and carrots). A lovely warming meal!



Last night, after a couple glasses of wine at a local pub with a good friend, we had a goulash with potatoes and cabbage. Another hearty meal which is perfect for the weather we've been having!



See, told you we'd had some wine:



Tonight was the traditional boiled ham, mashed potatoes, cabbage, carrots and parsley sauce. And it didn't disappoint, it was freaking delish!!! Looking forward to having some cold ham with cheeses etc on boxing day.



Tomorrow? CHRISTMAS DINNER!!!!

Sorry this has been a short entry, things are picking up around here :)

My turn to cook

So my Mum locked me in the kitchen today and told me I wasn't allowed out until I had cooked something.

Well not really, I offered to cook as Mum and Dad had a late carol service and wouldn't be back till 7ish.

So as it needed to be both a low fat and low carb meal I chose a cajun chicken recipe served with pineapple salsa on a bed of cauliflower rice.



The turkey was fried with some cajun seasoning. The shredded cauliflower was cooked for 6 mins in the microwave and then added to some sautéed red onion and red pepper with kidney beans in a small amount of chicken stock. The pineapple salsa consisted of fresh pineapple, red onion, red pepper, chilli pepper and lime juice.

The turkey was a little on the dry side for my liking. I would cook it in the chicken stock and veg next time in order to make it succulent.

I was pleasantly surprised with the pineapple salsa. I had feared it'd be too sweet, but the chilli gave you a punch in the face after the sweetness of the pineapple and so you were left with spice rather than too much sweetness. A good mix!

Mum and Dad both finished their plates and ate some remains too, so they either enjoyed it or I didn't give them a good portion size ;)

OH and I forgot to put up last nights pictures of our delicious chicken fajitas.




Rupert the cat liked the smell. He hung out with Dad for ages like this:

LAMB, I love LAMB

Tonight Mum made a greek lamb and lemon casserole. I myself get nervous using any kind of lemon zest in cooking as I've often found that it doesn't soften up enough and I don't like the sudden bite of zest. This meal however did not have that problem as it was cooked low and slow.

The lemon flavour was fresh, without being overpowering, and the crumbled feta cheese added some saltiness that complemented the tang of the lemon.

As for the lamb itself, what can I say? It was succulent and delicious, the sauce did not cover its flavour and the lamb, feta and lemon really went well together :)

I also got to have my first glass of wine since I got here. And I still haven't had any beer, and I'm in IRELAND.... that's just wrong!!

As always, don't forget to kiss your cook!!!

I write this blog entry feeling pleasantly full after 3 wonderful meals.

This morning I woke up at 3am (due to jet lag) and after 3 hours of reading and resting I decided to go downstairs to have some tea and toast.

When Mum and Dad had their breakfast around 8 I wasn't planning on having any more to eat...... until I heard what Mum was having.

It was a plain and creamy yogurt with blackberries, raspberries and red berries on top. There was also a heaped spoon of a ground up mixture that contained flaxseed, sunflower, pumpkin, sesame seeds and goji berries.

It was a great fresh second breakfast, though a little on the tart side. If I were making it for myself I would probably use frozen strawberries, blueberries and mango.

Lunch was a salad. Just what you want on a cold winters day, it really helped us warm up......ahem!

It was very tasty though and it was nice to have non-American cottage cheese for the first time in several years, it reminded me of why I used to love it so much.

After a 2 hour walk along the beach I was ready for a good dinner. Mum cooked savoury mince served with broccoli. The smell through the house when this was cooking was amazing.

The result (after wrestling with 2 pepper grinders) was a warming (seriously this time) hearty meal. I wasn't going to have anything for dessert.... until I saw a vanilla custard muller rice in the fridge which I then inhaled after heating it in the microwave. Definitely going to pick up some more of them when I am next in the shops.

Tomorrow we are going caroling at a hospital and somewhere else, so Mum thinks we might have stir fry, but we'll all have to wait and see.

Until then, as always, don't forget to kiss your cook :)

Chicken Cacciatore in County Cork

After 18 hours of traveling I was more than ready to eat some of my Mums delicious home-cooking. How come it always smells, looks and tastes better when your Mum makes it?

Tonight Mum made Chicken Cacciatore, a dish of chicken, sun dried tomato paste, tomatoes, garlic, black olives capers and red bell pepper. It was served with bow tie pasta and fresh green beans.

Mmmmm it was yummy!

A wonderful combination of flavours, chicken that was lovely and moist and the fresh bite of the green beans resulted in a well rounded meal that leaves a gentle taste in the mouth afterwards.

I can't wait to see what Mum puts together tomorrow!!!

Until then, as always, don't forget to kiss YOUR cook, I kissed mine :)

On a side note, I'm going to have tea and toast for supper tonight.... for those of you who know me, you'll know how big a deal that is!

How to Cook Stew

Find a recipe.

Chuck the meat in a pan with hot oil to brown.

Swap the meat for roughly chopped onion and carrots.

Throw the browned meat and veggies into a slow cooker with some herbs. Add the guinness.

Drink the remainder of the guinness. Try not to think about the fact that it's 1pm on a Sunday afternoon, you're wearing last nights makeup, pyjamas and drinking alcohol.

Let the stew slow cook for 3-4 hours. Try to stay awake while knitting a hat using double pointed knitting needles for the first time.

Bung in some mushrooms during the last hour of cooking.

Get dressed

Serve with mashed sweet potatoes and mashed parsnips.

This is a great hearty recipe if you like guinness. It tasted too much like guinness for my liking.

Don't forget to kiss your cook; unless she's passed out, then just leave her alone!

Tonights dinner was brought you by the colour Orange and the letter Mmmmm

Although Matt thought I should name this entry "Orange you sad you're not having dinner with us?"

So as I mentioned earlier tonights dinner was a moroccan themed dinner. I made moroccan spiced fish on a bed of ginger mash and a side of moroccan spiced carrots.

The meal was cooked in 30 minutes and was easy to make, but it was non-stop for the 30 minutes.

Another success, the fish with its butter sauce was delish. I had never thought to put ginger with sweet potatoes, but it really went well together. The ginger added some depth to the potatoes without adding more sweetness. Matt has decided that we should add ginger to our thanksgiving sweet potatoes next year.

The carrots were steamed for 12 minutes and still had a bit of a bite to them. The dressing that they were tossed in was quite lemony, but not in a bad way. After the creaminess/sweetness of the mash it was nice to have something with a bite, both in texture and in flavour. Next time I would serve the fish and mash with a non-orange veg. Matt suggested just adding steamed broccoli along with the carrots.

I wasn't able to find any harissa and instead used a hot chilli paste that we use for making spicy sushi and Pho. I could have added more, neither of us were able to detect any hotness.

Tomorrow we are having left over soup for lunch (YUMMY!) and for dinner, before Matt flys back to Indiana, I'm going to make a beef and stout stew with carrots.

Spicy Lentil Soup (said with a lisp)

I am a big fan of lentil soup. I love how hearty and warming it can be. Over the past several years I have tried several lentil soup recipes and I have always been disappointed. The end result was a soup that was bland, other than the pungent garlic, starchy and not worth keeping for left overs.

My big sister and Mum had both said great things about a BBC Good Food Spicy lentil soup recipe. And so it was a little bit of skepticism that I decided to try once more to make a lentil soup.

I was happy to see that there was no garlic required in the recipe. There must be something about lentils that cause them to react with garlic, absorb the flavour and make it extremely pungent.

The soup was extremely easy to make and took only 30 minutes. I was surprised at how few lentils went into it.

The final product was a fragrant thick soup. In my opinion it was a tad on the thick side, I would have preferred it to be a little more on the 'soupier' side and so will adjust the amount of vegetable stock accordingly next time. A squeeze of fresh lime at the table helped to cut through the starch.

The flavour was wonderful. There was a lot of "mmmmmmmm" and "aahhhhhhh" and "finally a lentil soup that tastes the way lentil soup should!" I think Matt would have preferred to have eaten his soup minus the soundtrack.

What's great news is that there are leftovers for tomorrows lunch!!!!!

As he was tidying the dishes off the table Matt asked "Naomi, why is your bowl so clean?"

I had used my finger to swipe around the empty bowl to get every last delicious morsel of the soup.

If you like lentil soup I cannot recommend this too strongly. It was great! Try it!!

Cooking again tonight, so there might be another post later today. Dinner tonight is a spicy moroccon fish dish with ginger sweet potato mash and moroccan carrots.

Until then, as always, don't forget to kiss YOUR cook.

Ok, so it's not cooking...

.... but I wanted to post photos of the finished blanket I made for baby Kaiya Horn.

The front of the blanket with God's rainbow as a border


A close up of the cross stitching



The back of the blanket

Upcoming Thanksgiving Dinner

It's that time of year when American families sit around the dinner table and gorge themselves on a typical thanksgiving meal.



The Barcomb family tends to deviate from the norm on this day. Last year we had Ham (usually a Christmas dish over here) as I want to save the Roast Turkey dinner for Christmas.



This year we are having Lamb! I'm also going to be making roast potatoes (a la Delia Smith), yorkshire pudding, broccoli and gravy.

Then on Friday we are going to be having ham with Joshua.

Trader Joes

Today Matt and I went to 'Trader Joes' a new 'specialty food grocers'. It's a chain that just opened it's first store in Omaha on Saturday.

The place was PACKED. Matt started to get grumpy about the number of people there until I reminded him that it was just like an Irish supermarket ;)

The store was nice and clean, but I wouldn't really call it a place that sells specialty foods. It was more that it sells off brands of regular food, has a higher amount of organic stuff and very little selection but a larger selection of imports than other stores.. Whole Foods Supermarket is much more what I would term a specialty food store.

Nevertheless, we bought 2 pizzas and a wild mushroom and black truffle flatbread. There are lot of little things I'd like to try from their, but most are foods that I'd serve when I have guests coming over. Then I just want to bung some stuff in the oven, toss it onto a serving tray and get loads of compliments for how nice it looks and how great it tastes ;)

I got very excited when I saw they had a large wall of cheeses, but was disappointed to see that about half of them were just different types of cheddar. Not a wedge of Wensleydale in sight!

Tonight for dinner I made some salad to serve with a couple of slices of one of the pizzas we bought.



The pizza was an organic woodfired sicilian style pizza with red pepper, provalone and peral mozzarella cheese. It also came with a small packet of olive oil with red pepper in it which was applied to the pizza half way through cooking to give it some spice.

The crust was delcious, reminiscent of crusts from France and Italy (the pizza is an import from Italy) but it was a little more crisp that they serve it over there. I think that was my fault.

Now I know you might think "Pizza? I thought she was trying to make her husband LOSE weight!" Well it's all about moderation. If I starve him and feed him nothing but salads he's not going to stick to it and is more likely to binge when he's in Indiana. So we had less than a serving size of the pizza and a huge amount of salad. Peaches were for desert.

So now it's back to 'cooking' for one until Friday, but that gives me time to think about what I can cook when Matt does get home. So I promise to have some great recipes to blog about next weekend!

Until then, as always, don't forget to kiss YOUR cook!

Who says there has to be meat in........ Ahi Tuna??

Well ME actually, it would rather weird to have an ahi tuna steak with no fish in it.

Anyway, my darling husband needs to lose weight (I do too, but for aesthetic reasons rather than being overweight). Over the years he has been slowly putting on more weight and always plans on losing it.

Well today I lost it!!! I told him that as long as he lives under my roof he can eat the food I make for him with no complaints!!

He does this anyway, but I haven't really been cooking in a way that is most conducive for him to lose his weight long term. Also since he started working out of state (and eating at restaurants twice a day) I haven't been cooking for him over the weekend because we go out for date breakfast, date lunch and date dinner. That gets uber expensive and doesn't help him in the slightest.

So no more!!

Tonight I made a seared ahi tuna steak and served it with a salad .

To dress the salad I used olive garden salad dressing, sImply the bestest salad dressing EVER.

I know I mentioned in the first blog post that I'm not a fan of salad dressings. Well this really is my one exception. It has the perfect balance of all the ingredients and tastes nothing like any other salad dressing I have tried in the past. It makes eating salad fun, and a small bit goes a long way; I used 4 tbsp of the salad dressing for the two of us and it would have been ok with only 2 or 3 tbsp.

The tuna turned out great. It was very easy, I just ground some pepper and sprinkled some kosher salt onto both sides of the steaks. I seared them in a small amount of olive oil for 2 minutes on each side. It was then time for eating! Yum :) The steak was slightly crispy on the outside and beautifully pink on the inside. It always amazes me how different tuna tastes when it is cooked. Raw beef and cooked beef taste very similar, but tuna really takes on a strong flavour when cooked.



Now I have to find something to cook for tomorrow. Matt leaves for the airport at 5.40pm and so I"m going to make sure I have an early dinner ready for him so he doesn't eat at the airport.

So stay tuned and, as always, don't forget to kiss YOUR cook!

Who says there has to be meat in....... chili

Tonights meal was another entry for the chili competition. This one was sent from Oliver in Wales.

The recipe requires

1 Pack of Quorn mince

1 tin of chopped tomatoes (none of that American rubbish, a nice decent no added anything British tin. Or Tesco Value)

1 large onion

2 cloves of garlic

Half a tube of tomato puree

Teaspoon of dried mixed herbs

Chilli powder (regular)

Fresh chillis

1 tin of Kidney beans

1 green pepper

Tabasco sauce

Cheddar Cheese (grated) – most important ingredient !!!

I was not able to find Quorn brand and so instead used morning star tvp crumbles. It was served with rice and I also additionally made some cheddar garlic scones too.

Friends came over for dinner tonight to try it. Some of them had also had the other chili I made at Halloween.

The vote unanimous: it was DELICIOUS!!!!
The tvp did not feel like a substitute that was merely acceptable. The taste and texture was great. The bell pepper added some bite to the dish and although tinned tomatoes were used it was NOT too much and therefore didn't have the acidic tang that I associate with tinned tomatoes. Mixing a serving with the rice and cheese at the table provided a really hearty dish, without the fat content of meat. Everything about the dish from the appearance to the taste and smell was a pleasure to experience. I shall definitely be making this chili again.

After talking to the people who had tried the last chili we all agreed that although the Jamie Oliver chili was good, this vegetarian chili was even better. So congratulations to Oliver, some Famous Daves BBQ will be on its way to you after the weekend!!

And, as always, don't forget to kiss your cook!!

finally, news on chili

And I'm not talking about those miners either!!

I made the first chili for the Halloween party we threw last weekend. It was a recipe submitted by Annalouise and is a Jamie Oliver concoction.

I used all fresh tomatoes (aside from the sundried ones) and I am very glad I did, the final product had a WONDERFUL taste without the processed salty 'tang'. The cinnamon stick, which I have never had in chili, added a certain sweetness to the dish and rounded out the tangyness of the tomatoes.

As it was cooking and before the beans were added I was a little concerned because it looked more like a spaghetti sauce than a chili. But once the beans were added it thickened the whole thing up.

One thing I will say is that I would have liked to have more meat in it and maybe another vegetable to add some 'crispness' and variety to the texture.

All in all it was a success, every party guest who tried it liked it! Furthermore when I took it out of the fridge a couple of days later and reheated some it tasted even better!!!! The flavours obviously had time to mingle :)

Thank you Annalouise for your entry, I will use this recipe again in the future :)

Next chili is a quorn based chili. Looking forward to trying that :D

Chili update

The first chili will be made on Saturday October 23rd. Watch this space..... again..... :D

Fizzy Mozzarella anyone?

Dear readers, I have a question for you:

Anyone know anything about fizzy Mozzarella and if it's bad??

Here's my story. I made a dinner for myself this week with a french baguette, tomato, leafy greens and a ball of mozzarella. When I started eating it I realized that something within the sandwich was fizzy on my tongue. After some probably unattractive investigation in which I probed each ingredient with my tongue I found that it was the Mozzarella that was the culprit. It didn't taste bad, but it was fizzy and kind of hurt my tongue.

For some unknown reason, I finished the sandwich, which was quite large. 3 days later and my tummy is still acting rather strange.

I tried looking up information online, but couldn't find anything.

Anyone know anything?

Update on Chili

Ok so we have the entries in and we have......... wait for it............... (drum roll)......... 3 entries!!!!

I shall do a random draw and cook them in that order.

Watch this space!!!

Some People Too Hot for Chili???

So far I have only one recipe being sent my way. Come on people, there's some yummy bbq sauce up for grabs..... (I ship internationally!!!)

Chilly Chilly..... Chili

It's getting closer to that time of year.

What time of year, I hear you ask?

CHILI TIME!!

Last winter I took part in a chili cook-off and came in last. True, there were only 4 or 5 entries, but still, last is LAST. And I know why; I used tinned tomatoes and tinned tomato juice. Very processed tasting, very salty and very acidic. In contrast, the winner of last years cook-off, had a more subtle flavour and a variety of textures.

On a side note: Kyle, the cook-off host, made some of 'the worlds hottest chili' which was so hot it literally blistered my face. I sweated and the sweat left welts!!!!

This year, I am going to experiment from scratch!

So we all know that there are some staples found in chili; beef, tomato, beans etc, but I intend to put together a concoction that will take all that stuff and make it better.

Luckily we have a small crock pot (a slow cooker for my european readers) that we have used in the past to make queso dip. I'll be able to use that to try out combining flavours over a low heat for long hours without making gallons of the stuff and forcing myself to eat it for 2 weeks straight.

We had a lovely cold snap over the weekend, visions of lighting the fire, warming some apple cider and eating bowls of chili sprung to mind. Yet today was back to around 90F (32 degrees Celsius) and so it kind of thwarted my drive to stop by the shop on my way home and buy my first set of ingredients. The rest of the week looks pretty much the same, hot and muggy with thunderstorms, so I'm going to use the time to 'think' about possible ingredients.

So I ask you, my readers, do you have any suggestions for interesting chili ingredients? If I use any of your suggestions I shall make sure to call attention to it when I use it!!!!

Ooooh, here's an additional great idea: Send me YOUR recipe for chili!! I shall cook and blog about the first 5 recipes and my favourite will WIN 2 bottles of Famous Daves BBQ Sauce

Your recipes can be any kind of variety of chili; vegetarian, chicken, bean free.... whatever!!! Just get the recipes to me (njbarcomb@gmail.com) by October 4th for a chance to win some yummy bbq sauce, perfect for this time of year to jazz up your meats!

Also, you don't have to be a follower of this blog to enter, the more the merrier, but remember, only the first 5 will be cooked and blogged :)

I won't use YOUR recipes in any cook-off this year, it'll just be something fun to try, blog about and give a prize :)

Who says there has to be meat in a burger?

As the fall season approaches it's been so nice to have the windows open throughout the house. I love the smell of an aired house, it reminds me of home.

Matt has some good news, he was offered and accepted a new job!! He is going to be working for Pillar Technology Group LLC as an agile coach and delivery lead (whatever that means!) I thought he was going into the postal service or gynecology, but no, it's software delivery. So for the next six months he'll be flying each week to South Bend, Indiana and coming home for the weekends. After that he'll be flying to wherever the next customer is located. He's super excited about it, looking forward to doing some of the work he has a huge interest in. I'm really proud of him for the way he went about looking for a new job once he decided he was through with Union Pacific.

So in just under two weeks I'll have to find way of cooking well for one person during the week.

Tonight I made portobello mushroom burgers with a tomato pepper salad and cantaloupe.

I love portobello burgers! I just add some water (about 3 shot glasses worth) and oil to a pan, heat it up and then add the whole mushrooms. I let them 'steam' for about 3-4 minutes each side and then serve. They are always so tender and juicy and get a really good flavour from being cooked. I served the burger with sauteed red onions, sliced avocado and a sprinkling of feta cheese. Yummy!

The salad was a quick throw together of tomatoes, yellow onion and yellow bell pepper, a little bit of olive oil and some hot salsa seasoning. It was fresh, tangy, crunchy and contrasted with the tenderness of the portobello burger.

For dessert we had some fresh cantaloupe melon. Mmmmmmm sticky face!

Matt has a conference tomorrow, so I'll be cooking something just for me. It'll most likely have mushroom in it as I have leftovers.

And, as always, don't forget to kiss your cook!

Too many cooks? I don't think so!

Well since my last entry both Matt and I have cooked a meal. Actually, Matt should have cooked 2 meals, but the first time he went to the store and came back with ready to eat chinese food. Hmmmm, not exactly cooking if you just have to open your fork!!

I had some left over basil from the salsa I made last week and so I used it to make some Summer chicken and basil stew.

I had to alter the recipe a bit. Instead of using 4 chicken thighs I used 1 chicken breast and 2 pork chops as I had them in the freezer and wanted to get rid of them.

It was a simple recipe and the comments from other cooks on the website said it was yummy! It was a bit of a disappointment to be honest.

The flavour was good, but it was missing 'something'. Matt suggested that some big beefy portobello mushrooms would have been good with it and I agree. I don't think I'll cook it again.

Then yesterday I stayed late at school to study for my organic chemistry test and so I emailed Matt asking him to be in charge of getting dinner. Luckily he remember his scolding when last time he returned with the chinese food, so this time when I got home there were 4 pots going on the stove. He made a lovely spaghetti dish with a creamy white wine sauce, scallops, mushrooms, spinach and tomatoes. Then at the table we sprinkled a little crumbled gorgonzola cheese on it. It was delicious!!!!! I could have easily had seconds, but I'm trying to stop that.

I did eat again later though; we have been watching the 1980s A team and so I had some large pretzel sticks while also pretending to be hannibal.

Penny was very confused and spent the whole time sitting on my lap wondering why food was hanging out of my mouth for such a long time!!

It's a wrap!

Wow, today I had my first physics lab in 11 years! 11 YEARS!!!! I'm getting old. I was in English class the other day and when the teacher asked people to raise their hand if they were too young to vote in the last presidential election, half the class raised their hands. OLD!!!

To rejuvinate myself, and hopefully prevent myself from taking a nap when I got home from school (at 3pm), I put the latino music station on my satellite radio in the car. Which then got me to think about the movie Tortilla Soup. If you haven't seen the movie but you like cooking, it's a good one to watch! Food is quite a big part of the movie and it left me wanting to own a set of brightly coloured dishes.

Feeling so inspired I stopped by walmart on my home and bought the following ingredients: tomatoes, avocados, yellow bell pepper, red onion, lime, whole grain tortilla wraps, fat free refried beans and Uncle Ben's Spanish rice.

With these ingredients, and some chicken strips and lettuce from home, I made some mexican wraps. I made a homemade salsa using the tomatoes, red onion, bell pepper, fresh basil and freshly squeezed lime. I spread that on the tortilla and added the lettuce, chicken, guacamole (made fresh) and a sprinkle of cheese. I served with a side of rice and beans.

Now, I only got the sides so I wouldn't have to listen to Matt complain of being hungry, but he didn't even eat it!!! He felt pleasantly full from the wrap. He did, however, finish his 'other side' the mango margarita!!

I loved the salsa I made, I'm happy there's left overs. I might make a meal around that tomorrow!

Omaha Limited

There are many things I specifically do NOT like about living in Omaha. One of these many things is that it's very hard to find certain types of food. While it might be possible to obtain 'speciality' ingredients in the city, one would have to literally take a 32 mile roundtrip drive to some of these stores. And that might just be for one single ingredient, now what if there are more and you have to now go 10 miles in the opposite direction? Who has that time???

So unfortunately I am not going to be able to cook all the recipes in my cook book. I simply do not have the time to search the city for (or have the money to pay for ) these specialty items :(

However, I am not throwing my towel in to the cooking arena. One must still eat!

My dear Mama told me about the BBC good food cooking website and I have signed up for that. I am now officially on the lookout for bargain recipe books too.

Tonight, brought to you by the BBC, we had Easy Thai Prawn Curry . The recipe called for tinned tomatoes, but I used fresh tomatoes and instead of a 50g sachet of coconut cream (what is that? Is it a powder? Who does liquids in weights??) I used about half a can of coconut milk.

I also used fully cooked frozen shrimp by accident.

The recipe was super easy and only took about 30 minutes start to finish. I am a big fan of curries that have coconut milk in them, they are creamy and have a distinct sweetness that is able to cut through the spice of the red thai curry paste.

Additional seasoning was required, probably due to the fact that I didn't use canned tomatoes. I wasn't happy with the depth of the flavour in the dish. It required something 'extra', but I don't know what would have done it. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Due to reading my Uncle Ken's cooking blog I half expected my cousin Victoria and her cute children (Poppy and Joey) to pass by. Alas, they didn't.... they live in Wales.

I would definitely make this dish again, it would be a nice one to serve when having guests over as it was super quick, easy and could be offered with a variety of side dishes to help contrast and cool. I often find that when I'm cooking for company I choose things that make me sweat all over, smell of garlic and set on fire!!!

Right, I'm off back to the BBC Good Food Cooking website to look for the next meal!

And, as always, don't forget to kiss your cook!