There aren’t really any food links this week, as I haven’t found much time for food reading. That’s not quite true – I have done some offline reading. The new issue of Delicious arrived, and I’ve also picked up this month’s Good Food. I’ve been dipping into some old books as well: MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, and Nigel Slater’s third kitchen diaries. But it has been a busy week with work, so there hasn’t been much room for leisurely reading.
I have made good use of the weekend so far, though, by spending some quality time with a new notebook! I am a big fan of Bureau Direct, an online stationery shop run by serious stationery geeks (that used to have a real-life shop in Leicester Square). They have been describing the virtues of a bullet journal in this month’s blog, and I decided that a fresh notebook, and a new month was the perfect time to get into it.
If you haven’t come across the term bullet journal (or #BuJo as the bloggers and pinners disturbingly insist on calling it), you can find the whole system explained very simply in a video by its creator, Ryder Carroll. Basically, it’s a to-do list combined with indexed notetaking, and relies only on a notebook and a pen. There are lots of others offering advice online, and I found Boho Berry’s post and video on combining bullet journaling with GTD particularly useful (and she has some beautiful page designs).
Basically, I’m hoping this is a good way to combine the part of me that loves good notebooks, and crossing things off lists, with the part that enjoys the comprehensive list making of GTD. We will have to see how that works in practice.
Recipes:
- Baked pumpkin risotto – loosely based on both Donna Hay’s recipe in Modern Classics 1 and The Food Lab’s advice on risotto. I par-boiled the risotto rice the night before, and then when ready to bake, I combined a sweated, chopped onion (in the Thermomix) with finely chopped butternut squash, the rice and hot chicken stock before piling into a baking dish and cooking covered in foil for 30 minutes.
- Yotam Ottolenghi’s butterbean and oxtail stew – made with beef shin instead of oxtail, and in the slow cooker. I can’t say this completely converted me to bkeila, the fried spinach condiment it’s made with, but it was very tasty nonetheless.
Without a recipe:
- Pasta bolognese
- Waitrose pizzas
- Lasagne (made by my mother-in-law) with bread and salad
- Pasta with sausage, tomato and broccoli sauce
Using Mainly Spoons 