Moroccan vegetable nut roast

.. or Posh Pie as I call it. My daughter and I made it for our Christmas dinner while the rest of the family ate some creature. I've only just found the photos we took, so belatedly, here's our Christmas dinner!

I love cooking with my daughter cos she has the same 'let's try a bit of this instead' attitude as me, but here's the recipe:

10 shallots

2 red peppers

1 butternut squash

1 medium aubergine (we don't like this much so we used cooking apple instead)

3tbsp olive oil

1 tsp ground paprika

1/4 tsp cinnamon

2 cloves garlic (we chucked in loads)

5cm ginger

400g canned chickpeas (found it was too much, used half)

handful chopped coriander

125g toasted almonds

125g shelled pistachios

75g melted marg (we used oil)

1x200g pkt filo pastry

What to do: Heat oven, Gas mark 4, 180 C/350 F. Chop up the shallots, peppers, squash, & aubergine, mix with the olive oil, spices & garlic, roast in the oven for 20 mins.

Finely dice the ginger & mix with the chickpeas, coriander, toasted almonds and pistachios. Stir this into the roasted veg once they've finished cooking.

Oil up a baking/flan tin. Lay 2 sheets of filo pastry, and brush liberally with the melted marg, coating both sides of the overhanging sheets. Add 2 more and coat again - keep going till you've used them all up.

Put the veg mix into its 'bed', then fold the overhanging pastry into the centre, crinkling it. Brush all over again with the marg/oil and bung in the oven for 40 minutes. Loads of work but makes a great special occasion dish.

'Barley ate my hamster'

I really don't mind if I never set eyes on barley again. I knew it took quite a while to cook, so I thought I'd make plenty of it but my hand slipped too, so I ended up cooking TONS of it. I had to keep adding water as it grew and grew and drank more and more. Then I had to pour it, mid-cooking to a bigger pot. I separated off a big bowl of it and added tinned tomato to the remaining mass. Then I needed to add a second tin and some onion and chilli powder to make a soup which was still too thick so I watered that down. Reader, I ate it for three days. Each time I came to re-heat it, the grains had swollen further, needing more liquid to soupify it so that it seemed to never get any less!
Meanwhile, the separated bowlful went out to the ducks who seemed to love it. Little do they know that it's like gremlins - once you add water, it mutliplies.

swede & onion soup

one onion, 1/3 swede, garlic, veg stock cube.

heat olive oil in pan, add onion & garlic, after a while add chopped swede, water, stock cube. Simmer over wood stove in front room for half an hour, then whizz up with electric gadget, then eat with slightly stale ciabatta, reduced in supermarket, whilst wearing hippyish fleece lined zip up jumper from car boot sale.

perfect for a snowy Monday evening ;-)