Our routines were thrown off this week, leaving me a little off-balance. The skies were grey, some of the dinners were patched together, but by the time we got to Friday night pizza, everything felt a bit more back to normal. I’m starting to see what Shauna meant about the comforting rhythms of eating the same thing each day of the week. I’m not ready to go all that way quite yet, but baking bread each week, a curry at the weekend, a pizza on fridays – these start to join the week together. Especially in weeks when other parts of our routine have been discarded, there’s a lot of comfort in knowing that on Friday evenings, we sit down together, and eat pizza.

Recipes:

• Banana muffins, wholemeal bread – Brilliant Bread
• Roast applesauce – The Zuni Cafe Cookbook
• Roasted mushroom base – New York Times
• Black bean and squash stew – Slow Cooked
• Toad in the Hole – Nigel Slater’s Real Food, served with…
• Braised savoy cabbage – All About Braising via Orangette, except I ended up making a different braised cabbage recipe from the same book!

Without a recipe:

• Chicken curry with lentils
• Carrot and cabbage soup – including the leftover braised cabbage
• Pizza – with the last of the home-grown courgettes and tomatoes, and some of the roasted mushrooms
• Pork and potato hash with cabbage
• Plus a takeaway curry and bought lasagne

Reading:

• A long piece about Deborah Madison, vegetarian cook and author extraordinaire. Her ‘Vegetable Literacy’ has been on my wishlist for a while.
• A related piece in Vogue from Tamar Adler on chefs who are putting vegetables at the centre of their meals
•  Intrigued by Deb’s recipe for a broccoli roast, seasoned and then roasted like beef
• The New York Times looks at the way recipes are written differently in the digital age
• If I didn’t already have several jars in the cupboard from previous years, I would be making slow cooker apple butter this weekend.