After a number of posts about something I don’t usually talk about (politics and voting systems) I decided it was time to get the blog back on theme (although to be honest there are going to be more posts along those lines. The theme of this blog is, and will remain, whatever I happen to find interesting at the time of writing).

Err. By which I mean this is a post about cooking. Sorry if you were hoping for some programming goodness. There will be some eventually, I promise. Probably about Clay. Or maybe about why Ruby sucks and should be set on fire. We’ll see. But for the moment, on to the plan!

As some of you might know I live with my brother Jamie – I was looking for a flatmate, he was looking for a job, and decided that London would be a better place to find one, so he moved in with me. It’s worked out well.

We do a lot of cooking together, but we noticed that we were being quite rubbish – we were often falling back to really lame meals and a lot of food was getting thrown away. We felt bad about this, and enacted a plan to fix this. It’s extremely simple, and many of you probably already follow it, but has worked very well:

Before we do our weekly shop, we come up with a list of meals for the week. These don’t have to be haute cuisine – they’re stuff which we’re reasonably going to make. We usually try to make sure it contains something interesting (this week we’re experimenting with how to do a vegan pie. We’re not vegan, but occasionally need to feed them, and the recipe concept sounded tasty), but it also contains easy things like pizza or macaroni and cheese.

We don’t plan things out for specific days – it’s just a list. This means that we can pick something off the list appropriate to our energy levels.

We’re also not obligated to actually follow the list: If we can come up with something better on the night (with the ingredients we have to hand) we’re totally welcome to do that. This doesn’t mean we’re allowed to just go “I can’t be fucked to cook properly tonight. Let’s just do pasta”, but it does mean we’re allowed to go “You know, we have all sorts of vegetables that would go well in a stir fry. Let’s do that instead”.

So really the list only has two purposes: It guides us in our shopping, and it gives us a plan in advance so that if we’re lacking in inspiration we can just pick something off the list.

For all of that, it’s worked incredibly well. In particular:

• Previously we were probably failing to do anything sensible and eating pasta, or bread and hummous or similar for dinner at least once a week if not more. We still do occasionally, but the frequency is probably down to under once a month
• Previously we were throwing a lot of food away because we didn’t use it in time. This still occasionally happens, but it’s now a rare occurrence.
• Our weekly shops have become much smaller. Previously we were spending probably somewhere slightly under £70 / week, and now we’re typically somewhere around £40 – £45. This isn’t through any conscious attempt to save money, it’s just something that’s emerged automatically from this plan.

Maybe this is all obvious and you’re all already doing it. It’s certainly not the most ground-breaking idea in the world, but I must admit to being regularly blown away by just how well it’s worked as a strategy.

This was a very simple recipe, but it produced really good results.

How to make it: Take the aubergine, slice it in half lengthways and then cut the halves into strips so you you end up with long strips of aubergine each with some of the peel on them. Lay them out in a small roasting tin (you should basically be covering the bottom of the tin with the aubergine), cover in the marinade and roast for abotu an hour until the marinade has all evaporated leaving only goo and auberinge.

How to make the marinade: Adjust quantities to amount of aubergine. For one smallish auberigne I used about half a cup of water, two tea spoons of white sugar, one tea spoon of salt, one tea spoon of chipotle chiles in adobo, a dash of balsamic vinegar and liberal amounts of olive oil (probably a couple table spoons – roughly the amount you’d normally roast this much aubergine).

The time to evaporate the water and then roast the aubergine basically obliterates it, but in a very good way – you end up with very soft aubergine still just sticking to the peel. It’s sweet, spicy, slightly smoky from the chipotle in adobo, and very very tasty. I ate this served with corn bread, but it would probably work slightly better as a side dish to something else.

I was reading Wild Cooking earlier, and it mentioned Chakchouka. I didn’t read it too carefully, but it sounded delicious. So, when I got back from the gym feeling (for basically the first time since I embarked on this bizarre exercise in self flagellation) energetic rather than completely destroyed and with my body going “feeed meee proteeein!!!” it was basically inevitable what I would make.

That is to say, something which was almost, but not completely, entirely unlike chakchouka.

The ingredients lists are broadly similar though, and I’m definitely chalking this one as a win due to it being amazing.

Here’s what it was: Two bell peppers, one yellow one green, a handful of cherry tomatoes, pierced but otherwise whole, and three sliced linda mccartney vegetarian sausages, all fried in olive oil with salt and a dollop of chipotle in adobo sauce (this stuff is amazing. Spicey, smokey and slightly sweet. Get yourself some and thank me later). At the last minute, I added two lightly scrambled eggs and stirred till it coated everything, then served the whole thing topped with coarse grated parmesan.

This was a LOT of food. Way more than I actually needed.

I have no regrets.

Actually, the title of this dish basically sums it up, but it sure is tasty. Here’s how to make it:

Cube a small butternut squash. Toss it in olive oil and coarse salt. Roast for 10 minutes, then add an equivalent volume of gnocchi and toss it all together. Roast another 10 minutes. Add and toss about a third as much broken raw cashew nuts as you used squash/gnocchi and a dash of balsamic vinegar, roast 10 minutes more.

It’s really exceptionally tasty. I had a large first helping and then completely gratuitous seconds.

I’d meant to add rosemary, but forgot. It doesn’t really need it, but it would definitely have been an improvement.