lapin d'or

I wish Eat Soup was still going - I really liked that magazine. Can I add Frances Bissell to the list of good writers - I still have loads of cuttings from when she was writing in the Times and the recipes always worked. I just look at online editions of papers now - they never seem worth the 2 mile drive I have to undertake to get to a paper shop. I say this with regret because I used to enjoy 'reading' a weekend paper and always chose which one I bought by who was writing the food and gardening sections. I no longer find OHM inspiring or useful but maybe I would be more interested if I did not have the internet which provides far more of what I am looking for.

So how many did you try Filipe? Is this an annual event? My one book on the food of Portugal has quite a few sweet recipes; I will have to try some of them out now, but the egg thread recipe says it is very difficult to make at home. Are any of these pastries easy to make? Thank you for the photos, they have really brightened my morning! And made me hungry

I live in the UK and as far as I know if I buy organic meat it will not have been fed any hormone growth promoters. Is there not an equivalent grade of meat available in the US? It really upsets me that we so often turn to giving up eating certain foodstuffs rather than giving up some of the more dubious agricultural practices we currently employ to produce them. I am really lucky because I live in an area where I can get very good quality beef. There are plenty of things I avoid but if I know a producer is doing a good job then I try to support them - I would rather buy a cheaper cut of meat from a good producer than a steak from a source I know nothing about. Off my hobbyhorse now.

Daniel those mexican dishes look really tasty. My roll of the roulette wheel this week came out with another soup recipe. This time from Lorenza de Medici's ' A Passion for Fruit'. With no husband around this week to do a random pick for me I counted up the number of cook book shelves I had and got the computer to give me a random number. Then I counted the number of books on the shelf and got another random number. That picked out the Passion for Fruit book but when I opened it at random I hit on a page of fresh fig recipes. No fresh figs in my part of Devon right now so I split again and hit the crab apple section. Now this was really lucky as I have a crab apple tree in the garden with just a few fruits left on. So this weeks recipe was Crab Apple Soup. This is actually a lightly curried soup with crab apple, poached chicken breast, rice and cream. The soup base is pureed and then the chicken pieces added at the end with the cream. I also added some parsley for colour but it has quite a nice warm yellow from the curry powder anyway. I think the crab apples added just the right amount of tartness to the otherwise quite creamy soup but I loved it and it was the first recipe I have done from the book so it has encouraged me to try a few more. I cannot get any pictures worth posting at the moment but will keep trying.

I've cooked puddings like this before but the recipe had you cover the whole tray with a large sheet of thick aluminium foil so that the steam stayed inside the 'package' as much as possible. It worked fine but took a lot longer than when I use an electric steamer. It could have been my oven was not at the right temperature. good luck

Anna those moulded chocolates look so good. I had my first go with a mould this week but the chocolate did not drain out evenly so some of them have far too thick shells and no room for filling. More practice needed. Choosing your first mould shapes is so difficult. I went for 2 very plain ones in the end thinking I could vary the finish with different piping but my wish list was (and still is) very long.

Well the fish soup I cooked for my first pick which was Moro The Cookbook (named after their restaurant I think) didn't all get eaten the first night and reheated very well a day later so that gives it extra points. The book has a lot of recipes using sweet spices and saffron; they describe it as Spanish/North African in style. Next I was going to pick from my box of recipe cuttings but after splitting the pack several times in search of a recipe I had the ingredients for I realised I had a lot of rubbish in my boxfile. So that prompted an evening spent weeding out all the stuff I could not remember why I had torn out in the first place. I now have a much lighter box and my next completely random pick turns out to be 'Chilli Sausages with Roast Butternut Mash and Spiced Onions' by Nigel Slater. This was a lucky pick because I have some home grown butternut squash that need eating up and I love sauage and mash. I am hoping this willl turn out good enough to photograph.

We have just had the Fish Soup with Brandy from Moro The Cookbook and it was really very good and quite easy to prepare. I did substitue fish off-cuts for the fish head and I cut the brandy down from 200 ml to 100 ml and made up the volume with extra red wine but there was still a good strong flavour. No photograph as it just looked like a rustic tomato soup with lots of parsley but I would really recommend this recipe. The soup was flavoured with smoked paprika and chilli which really gave it depth. Next I am going to pick a random recipe from my cuttings file which has been growing for many years and rarely gets used.

My books are also ordered such that I couldn't make a random selection so my husband has just picked out Moro The Cookbook by S&S Clark and we are going to cook Sopa de pescada ' Fish Soup with Brandy'. I have cooked very little from this book but it all looks very good. The soup recipe was one of the few where I had all the ingredients to hand but there seems quite a lot of brandy - 200 ml in a recipe that serves 4! That will be dinner tomorrow night so I will report back later on how it tasted.

Hi, I have purchased dried barberries from an ethnic foodstore where they were labelled as zeresk. I first had them in a Perisan restaurant in Paris in a delightful chicken and rice dish. The closest recipe I have found to this is 'Teheran Zeresk' which is in Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Food recipe book. The rice is cooked in a mould with the chicken in the middle and if you can get it right you get a lovely crispy layer of buttery rice on the outside. The berries have a very sharp taste which contrasts well with the saffron/butter/chicken flavours. Jill