Random Recipes - Magazines, Cuttings & Pull Outs

Great theme this month for Random Recipes - my stacks (and stacks and stacks) of foodie magazines go largely ignored in favour of cookbooks, recipes from the internet and my own head, so it's great to have an excuse to dig through the magazines for a change.



I randomly pulled a magazine out of a big shelf full of them and ended up with the March 2011 edition of Good Food Magazine - definitely my favourite of the food mags. This particular issue was familiar because I happened to be reading it in the bath and dropped it in, and rather than go out and buy a new copy, I spent about half an hour drying each individual page with a hairdryer. It looks like an absolute mess (I'll update this post with a photo tomorrow when it's bright again as the one I originally took seems to have vanished) but it's a particularly good issue with lots of budget recipes.


I opened it randomly and ended up at a page with recipes for main meals, but thought I could do without eating any more cake so I chose a recipe for lentil ragu. I made the whole batch (to serve 6) and hubby and I had some with pasta for dinner, and the following day I turned the leftovers into a veggie lasagne which was actually really nice. This is definitely a recipe I'll make again.

My version alongside the magazine version!

Recipe [url=http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1139652/lentil-rag]here[/url] on the Good Food website.

Apologies for terrible iPhone photos, the natural light had gone by the time dinner was ready!

We Should Cocoa - Happy Birthday!

Chele is hosting this month, and it's also We Should Cocoa's First Birthday! So very appropriately she chose the theme of "a chocolate masterpiece fit for a first birthday party".



Now when I was a kid, my birthday parties were fantastic, because my mum put so much effort into them. But I never had a chocolate birthday cake - back then birthday cakes were always plain sponge cakes in the shape of your age, covered in white buttercream with pink piping for girls and blue piping for boys, and crushed nuts round the sides. EVERYONE had a birthday cake just like that, and I absolutely hated them.

However what I did have at my birthday party every year, and what I absolutely adored, was a veritable mountain of chocolate rice crispie cakes. I bet if you're reading this in the UK you had them too (do they have rice crispies outside the UK?). My mum used to let me "help" make them, and even back then I was happiest with a wooden spoon in my hand.



Anyway, as I do love a bit of nostalgia, here's my rice crispie cake mountain. It's only a small mountain (more of a gentle hill, really) as there are only two of us here to eat them all up. But one day in the nearish future, hopefully I'll have a little mini baker of my own I can pass the wooden spoon along to, and I'll be able to make proper rice crispie mountains just like my mum used to :)


A big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to We Should Cocoa and a huge THANK YOU to Chele and Choclette!


Oh and I've had a bit of a funny month, from technical issues to my dad being in hospital to me changing jobs and I just haven't had time to be baking, let alone photographing it and writing blog posts, but now things have thankfully settled down so I should be back into the swing of things. And I'm still wading through weeks worth of emails so if you've sent one and I haven't replied, sorry but I will!