Tag: bacon

Quick spicy sausage & bean casserole

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s a kid, I was a super picky eater. Not in the way that’s shown by TV shows which decry the state of the nation’s nutrition – I don’t remember being particularly enamoured with chicken nuggets and I didn’t eat chips till the age of 17 – but in a “give me cheese or give me nothing” way.
Quick spicy sausage & bean casserole // The Dinner Bell At 24 years old, I’m still finding things that I’ve never eaten, things that are totally normal and cause people to look at me like I’ve come from another planet.

I had baked beans for the first time a couple of months ago.

I had no idea what I’d been missing out on all this time. Easy, tasty food that can be tarted up without much hassle and is a great hiding place for secret veg! That’s my favourite.

So, this quick sausage and bean casserole is now my go-to, just a matter of whacking things into a pan in a few rounds then curling up with a warming Spanish-tinged delight. And as Beyonce no doubt meant to say, if you like it then you shoulda put an egg on it. Silky yolk running into comforting, spicy casserole? Yes please. Continue reading →

Squash, sage, and Stilton mac ‘n’ cheese with bacon

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hen I was at sixth form, I also worked three jobs (ish), and dreamed about all the free time I’d have as a grown up. Monday to Friday was sixth form – although around half of that time was sitting in the common room, or taking trips to Tesco in free periods – and Friday afternoon was cleaning for a family friend. Weekends in retail. Half-terms split between retail and a part-time feature writing job at a local magazine. Monday to Friday, nine to five, sounded glorious.

How adorable, right?

Now, it’s all busybusybusy, hours flying by before we can even stop to think how we’re spending them (the tube. The tube is where we’re spending them). And it’s for this reason that I’ve become a cheat in the kitchen, relying on recipes that can be made in a big batch and easily tweaked and recycled across multiple nights. For months, this was big bubbling pans of chili, made often enough that it became a flat joke. The holy grail of lazy home cooking? Big batches that can be frozen, and reheated fairly quickly. Continue reading →

English breakfast parcels

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MushBacOne

It’s no secret here that I think about breakfast a lot. Usually this means pancakes and porridge and an abundance of hot cross buns, but every now and then you need a proper English breakfast.

The other thing about breakfast, though, is that I like mine to be transportable, or at least able to be eaten at the office – I even took speculoos pancakes to the office to reheat and have with bananas. These parcels tick those boxes. Okay, so there’s no beans (how I like my breakfast) and it’s almost like a quiche. But you can pick it up and eat it on the move, without sacrificing any of that proper breakfast goodness. Continue reading →

Speculoos pancakes

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specpancakes

I’d been doing so well.

After the Great Speculoos Poem of 2012, I kept my distance from the stuff. I couldn’t be trusted with it – I’d go into the kitchen to do some washing up only for my housemate to find me hunched over the jar, wild eyed like a fox caught in the act of tearing a bin open, and shovelling spoonfuls into my face. So I finished up the jar – this may or may not have included me dragging my fingers through the nooks and crannies to get the last bits – and vowed not to buy it again until I’d either gained willpower or lost about 3 stone. Continue reading →

A little bit of anything (but mostly butternut and bacon) risotto

This is a dinner that melds a few of my current obsessions perfectly. First up, the butternut squash – technically, it’s not in season any more, but still I can’t get enough. When I went to London’s Borough Market (more on that later), there was squash everywhere, which I feel totally validates the fact that I’m always thinking of new ways to use it. It’s a classic autumn vegetable, and great for veggie dishes too in place of meat. Continue reading →