Dinner - Meera Soda (week 1 #cookbookchallenge)

The first week of #cookbookchallenge - after surviving Christmas in robust health - saw me struck down with a virus that made my chest rattle like the suspension on my beloved Mk 3 Ford Fiesta I drove around in the late 90s.

The New Year also heralded my fourth year of #veganuary (probably another blog post in itself), so I needed something plant-based with recipes easy enough to rustle up between coughing fits and watching festive reruns of Agatha Christie. Which made Dinner, by Meera Sodha an easy choice. 

Dinner was my cookbook of the year last year. In fact, it's one of the only books I have diligently followed multiple recipes from. Considering my love of cookery books, I have never found following instructions quite as enjoyable. Probably because I have a short attention span, get distracted easily and am prone to going off piste with the misplaced confidence that I know far more than any chef with their carefully tried and tested recipes....

While there are lots of tried and tested favourites in the book - the potato and cabbage curry, and the potato and spinach curry are great. As is the haggis keema with tattie rotis that I made for Burns Night - I had a crack at a couple of new recipes, The carrot falafel with pink pickled onions; and the sesame and crispy soya mince noodles. 

The former were pretty quick and pretty easy. Oven baked, so no perilous deep frying, although you do have to remember to soak your chickpeas well in advance. And my blender lacked the firepower required to get them to stick together, so I painstakingly blitzed batched in the Nutribullet to turn the mixture, that resembled spiced sand, into something with some structural integrity. 

The noodles were both quick and easy. I used allotment kale, grown by my wife, rather than spinach; and added some finely chopped mushrooms to the soya mince. But I was faithful to the sauce, which uses tahini and chilli crisp. Vegan stalwarts that can make anything taste good.

I also made what is already becoming a fast favourite - the buckwheat and tahini banana bread. When followed to the letter, it is gluten free and vegan. I didn't have any buckwheat flour, so I used rye, which does contain gluten, and might be the reason it puffed up alarmingly; although it settled down after it came out of the oven. 

While it may sound worthy, it tastes delicious. Despite only managing to eat approximately one and a half slices (toasted, with peanut butter, which is really the only correct way to eat banana bread) before the Ewing snaffled the rest. 

Guess who's back

And so, here we are again. The same, but slightly different. After five-year hiatus, I have resurrected my blog. Well, a new blog which will probably be much like the old one. Random musings; pictures of my lunch; lots of lists; questionable punctuation. 

One of the things that led me to stop writing last time was the self-imposed relentlessness of doing and then writing about what you're doing. Ad infinitum. A madcap cycle of increasingly unfeasible ideas and ill-fated attempts at things. Followed by the slightly overwhelming feeling that I really should blog about it all And often failing. As evidenced by the numerous unpublished blogs I found sitting there when setting up this one. 

And although I do feel like the wider world has missed out on pictures of my majestic fish finger sandwich on a crusty homemade loaf from a recipe in Cook, Eat, Repeat - liked on Instagram by Nigella herself - this is a new beginning. Unencumbered by any pressure to post or any particular thing to post about. Although I already have far too many ideas in my head that I can ever get down on paper....

This time I want to try and stick at it with some regularity but, most importantly, to enjoy it again. And, while I may lack in the callow enthusiasm I had when I first started blogging this has, hopefully, been replaced with a worldly-wise realism. Oh, and I can confirm I still very much like eating and drinking.

You can still see all my previous food-related posts at Pies and Fries - abandoned like a less mysterious, but tastier, version of the Mary Celeste – but I will be posting new updates here. NB I will be clinging on to my love of a dash, Despite AI’s attempts to hijack it and insert into everything, I was randomly employing it first; see also the semi colon.

Whilst this is a new start, there’s always time for a quick reprise. When I stopped posting in Dec 2020, I had almost completed posting about my #cookbookchallenge. An arbitrary attempt to cook from one of my cookery books each week throughout 2020. Well, if you weren’t following along on Instagram, I can now reveal that yes, I did complete it. And I enjoyed it so much that I decided to resurrect it for 2026. 

Which is one of the reasons I wanted to start blogging again. An Instagram caption just won’t cut it when you want to muse on the technicalities of making walnuts and lentils taste like spag bol; or why your banana bread resembles a bathroom sponge; or where to find tofu knots and garlic chives in the Chilterns.

Cookbooks are rather niche, so I may throw in some musings on other random things. Such as deciding, the week before Christmas, that I should probably listen to all 1001 albums You Must Hear Before You Die, from the tome of the same name. And, as with most things, I have a lot to say about it.

I have signed up to the daily album generator. As the name suggests, that only gives you one album a day. And at that glacial pace The Ewing (yes, the TE is very much still about) pointed out it would take three years to complete. And I am far too impatient for that. 

So here I am, a month into things and already hundred and five albums deep. In fact, Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate is playing as I write this. And yes, it's come to this, it's come to this. And wasn't it a long way down. Wasn't it a strange way down?

Anyway. It's good to be back.