Sorry....

….but I haven’t been keeping you up to speed on the day-to-day dinners at our house, have I? Well, to be honest, they haven’t been particularly eventful. Personally, I’m doing fine on the feline-diabetes-friendly tinned food – in fact I’m loving it, and am feeling much better since I’ve been on it, thank you very much for asking.

As for human food, Martin has been revisiting a few old favourites this week. Sunday was faisanjan, an easy Persian dish that makes the most of pomegranates, which are still in season. To make it, you brown pieces of chicken (about a kilo of thighs with skin on and bone in, on this occasion), then fry some sliced onions with roughly ground walnuts (about 100grams). Remove the skin and pith from a pomegranate and put the seeds in the blender, whiz to a pulp and add to the browned onion and walnut mixture with the juice of a lemon and about 2 tsps of brown sugar (or honey). Replace the chicken and add stock, white wine or both to cover (the wine’s not traditional but helps the flavour), bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer until the chicken is ready. Sprinkle with some freshly chopped green herbs (coriander, flat-leaved parsley, dill, mint, whatever) and serve with your vegetables and carbohydrates of choice – M went for salad and mashed potato this time.

Monday night, they finished off the crab-cake mixture from Saturday (see Sunday 12th November for recipe), but without chips, it not being the weekend. Tuesday was a kind of bubble-and-squeak thing - as I wrote in my last post – Wednesday a bit of chicken curry was stretched out with some mushrooms (good combination) and then last night, M came home to find that neither the bratwurst nor the carne en salsa he’d taken out of the freezer had thawed, so he threw together some puttanesca sauce (see September 22nd for recipe) and boiled some pasta, as Annie was in a hurry to go to her Spanish class. Tonight it'll be one of the icy specimens that didn’t make it to the table yesterday, I would imagine.

Here’s a picture of spaghetti a la puttanesca – possibly one of the most impressive things you can make and serve from store-cupboard ingredients in less time than it takes to open a tin of cat food.

Before I sign off, I’d like to say “hi” to Zero, a cat from Cologne in Germany who left a comment on my blog back in September. Entshuldigung, Zero, dass ich vorher etwas nicht gesagt habe, aber heute war das ersten Mal dass ich deinen Komment gelesen habe. Vielen Dank, und es tut mir leid dass mein Deutsch so schreklich ist. (Aber vieleicht nicht so schlecht fur einen Katz, ja?)