This week was an example of what happens when I don’t plan meals for the week. Travel over the Easter weekend, and sickness immediately afterwards meant there weren’t too many meals to organise anyway. Even so, the wheels came off the wagon a bit, to be honest. What just about held things together was some slow cooker pork ragu, and a session of vegetable preparation, part Tamar Adler and part Shutterbean, that gave me vegetables as well as a lentil salad for lunches.

Recipes:

• Lemon Meringue Cake – Nigella’s ‘Feast’ – a birthday cake for my mum

Without a recipe:

• Pork ragu pasta
• Pork ragu lasagne
• Charlie Bigham Fish pie
• Lentil salad with broad beans, tomatoes, roast broccoli

Reading:

• I liked this Food52 summary of ways to ease yourself from winter into spring eating.
• On my list to help with this: homemade ricotta (post coming soon).
• Nigel Slater’s recipe for malt loaf
• Other bookmarked recipes: Warm butternut squash and chickpea salad – Smitten Kitchen; Healthy ‘snickers’ crisp rice slice (although I think we all know it’s not that healthy) – Little Loaf; Little gem salad with lemon cream and hazelnuts – Bon Appetit.
• Bee Wilson profiles those with little or no sense of smell – and describes how they can sometimes recover.
• The FT goes inside the high-tech Institute for Global Food Security in Belfast, where they are trying to detect all sorts of food fraud.
• Bon Appetit also describe the process of developing a recipe in their test kitchen