Plantes Vertes

I think blue cheese goes nicely with fruit (figs, pears, peaches), roasted vegetables (especially sweet ones), mushrooms, nuts, peppery leaves like rocket, celery, brassicas and roasted garlic and onions. The texture of cambazola is good for putting in sandwiches. Put some of it in a gratin with sweet vegetables like celeriac and fennel. Serve it on small toasts with grilled figs and honey and a bitter salad. Blend it with crème fraîche and put it on endive leaves scattered with some toasted walnuts. Make a blue cheese butter or a mushroom and cheese sauce for steak. Use it in gougères. Make a cheese souffle. Have it in a blue cheese sauce with cauliflower and broccoli. Add some to a Waldorf salad. Blend it into a celery soup. Grill some on top of sliced and roasted butternut squash and serve it with baby spinach salad. You'll probably want to eat something else after that

There'll probably still be quite a bit of it left for sticking candles in by the time Halloween comes round

2oz medium-dry cider 1oz calvados 1/2oz London dry gin Build in the glass These days I love apples.

The shallots ended their days in a tart this evening. They were sweet and delicious. No particular sherry flavour though.

How do you cook a whale? Whale tart! I grilled (broiled) the monster in slices with garlic, lined a tart tin with phyllo, then béchamel, then the monster slices, some braised shallots and green beans, and baked it for 20mins. It was good!

Thanks for your answer, huiray. Breakfast-for-dinner is a concept I hadn't come across before eG. Actually, North American breakfast is among the most foreign cultural customs I've encountered on here.

Yes, this is the product. That's the first time I've tried them but they're really good.

huiray, I notice that the difference between your breakfast and lunch meals is not clear to me. The way I cook and was brought up is to eat quite distinct foodstuffs for breakfast and for the other meals; cereal, fruit, yogurt etc for breakfast but not dinner, for example. Soup for lunch but not breakfast. Do you cook differently for the different meals, and does your habit come from culture or preference?

Yesterday I cooked Penne Macaroni al Cavolfiore from Truly Italian by Ursula Ferrigno. It's cauliflower in tomato, chilli, garlic and parsley sauce with pasta.

Oh, and, the shallots are in the fridge awaiting their true destiny, and I wholeheartedly recommend oat noodles; they're really chewy.

Shallots Braised in Sherry Full disclosure: this recipe took a left turn in the middle... The truth, the whole truth: this is in no way a French recipe. Utter candour: the recipe is for braised onions, but shallots are what was in the veg rack. One more thing: this was a large recipe calling for eight white onions. I love onions, but there are limits, so I reduced this a good deal; the quantities were therefore somewhat, uh, approximate. This recipe contains a large quantity of soy sauce. But it's in the book so I considered it valid, and I like soy sauce so I considered it tasty, and I had some shallots so I considered it dinner. Peel, wash and dry the shallots and cook them in sherry, olive oil (butter in the recipe) and sugar to reduce the liquid by half. Then add stock and bay, cover and braise. Because my recipe was small I cooked this on the stovetop for 20mins rather than 2hrs in the oven. Once done, remove the onions and bay and add a mixture of water, tomato paste, soy sauce and cornstarch, and simmer to thicken. It was too hard to be dithering about with fractions of teaspoons so I decided to make a full recipe of the sauce and just use part of it with the onions. Now, my shallots were looking and smelling pretty appealing... ... and I was loth to smother them in tarry black sauce. And, I had dismembered a cauliflower the day before and had some cauliflower greens eyeing me accusingly from the crisper. And I had some fried onions left over. And, I have suffered a lot in this life and did not feel I deserved a second meal of cauliflower greens soup this week. So I did a three-point turn. I quickly steamed the greens: Boiled some noodles, combined the lot and devoured it. Some more of the sherry insinuated itself into the picture. It was really great.

The soup today was leek and pea. Two small leeks, 1/2lb peas, vegetable stock, 1/2tsp citric acid, salt and pepper.

I tried making a Jack Rose with Crème de cassis in place of grenadine. I'm calling it a Rachel Rose. 2oz calvados 1oz lemon juice 1/2oz c de c Shake + strain It was nice. Sharp and sweet. My friend had an Opera. 2oz gin 1oz Dubonnet Rouge 1/4oz maraschino Stir + strain

Guess you'd better have another.

This evening we had some 75s before going to the pub quiz. 2oz calvados 1oz London dry gin 1bsp absinthe Shake and strain Holy Hell that's dry.

One slight downside is that drinking around swords and severed glass is a laceration hazard. But you only live once.

It's simple. Chill the bottle, remove the foil and wire and find the seam. Unsheathe your glistening rapier* with the obsidian blade, run the blade gently but quickly up the seam, then when you get to the lip, swiftly flick your wrist to remove the top of the bottle whole. That's the gentleman's way. *Keep rapier out of reach of children

You can add a little bit to an Aperol Spritz (1-3bsp), or there's the Mulberry from the Manor House Hotel Bar: 1 x Bar Spoon Mulberry Jam (can be substituted for a good quality Blackberry Jam)4-5 leaves of Fresh Garden Mint1 oz Bombay Sapphire1 oz Pimms No 1 Cup½ oz freshly squeezed lemon juiceDash Elderflower CordialMethod In the base of a cocktail shaker gently crush the mint and Mulberry Jam. Add all other ingredients apart from the Elderflower and shake hard with cubed ice. Strain the cocktail into a tall glass with fresh ice and top up with Elderflower.

Yes, the texture is great. Very soft but still firm. I like them with hummus and also in salads, and they're good to line a tart with too.

Today was a very simple preparation of red peppers. I've made that plenty of times before, although not from the book. You scorch the skins: Then you stick the peppers in a plastic bag to steam the skins lose, then peel them once cool: Remove the seeds and membranes: Slice the pepper flesh, lie the pieces in a dish, sprinkle with garlic and olive oil, and add some black olives: Then grill (broil) it on a low heat until the garlic browns slightly. I served it for my family with mozzarella, and myself, I tackled some leftovers. It was good, but I still have not come to trust the quantities in this book. I only used half the garlic, and you can see that there was a lot. I also didn't know whether I was supposed to remove the garlic before serving. I removed part of it; next time I will remove it all as the flavour was very strong.

A very lovely fennel salad has orange slices, very thin slices of fennel and red onion and dry black olives, and is dressed with fruity olive oil and a little sherry vinegar. Fennel is also popular with fish and shellfish such as turbot, bream, salmon, lobster, crab, mussels, clams, scallops. You could pickle or ferment it and serve it with smoked fish as well. For example for 2kg mussels you can saute a few cloves of sliced garlic in olive oil, add thyme and 1/2 cup white wine, reduce by half, add 2-3 crushed tomatoes and a sliced bulb of fennel, reduce by half again, add a splash of Pernod and then steam the mussels, covered, over high heat for a few minutes, shaking the pan every now and then. Confit or grilled fennel is a good accompaniment for game birds, lamb or pork and apples. Fennel and brown lentils are nice together.

What is the purpose of your calculation? If you are doing this to improve your diet then there is no point in being more precise because the nutritional content of food varies enormously depending on its production conditions. The values on the box or wherever you are finding your information are averages and therefore often wrong. Even if you could accurately measure the nutritional content of each of your foods, the body's requirements also differ widely depending on weight, type and degree of activity, other health conditions etc, so you wouldn't know whether you personally were getting the right amount of whatever it was. Finally, the daily intake recommendations of different countries are quite various, so even if you could know the recommended amount for exactly your physical condition, the science could not reliably guide you (although of course following the guidelines is advisable in the absence of better information).

If you have hard water in your area you could try adding 1/4tsp bicarbonate of soda per lb dry beans to the soaking water. It's supposed to make the beans less tough.

Four Leaf Clover Denis Broci, Maze Bar, London 2oz white rum 1oz apple juice 3/4oz lime juice 1/2oz honey syrup 1 clove Muddle clove, shake, strain

Thanks for sharing your memories, LindaK; this really encourages me to carry on with the book. The aubergine gateau does indeed look spectacular - do you have the picture of the woven presentation? Amazing. Please show us what you make if you decide to reconnect with Vergé. .