Thursday's roast

A small thing made this dinner blogworthy. I will come to that small thing later.

We'd enjoyed fish and chips with my mother-in-law on Wednesday night and I was due out for a hen night meal on Friday so Thursday needed to be a healthy day. The most healthy thing would probably have been a salad, but I didn't fancy that. What I fancied was something that would use up my bargain aubergine that was looking like it wouldn't last much longer. And I didn't fancy another moussaka. So what I decided on was roasted vegetables with lentils. Augmented with some cheese, thus making a highly healthy dinner slightly less healthy, but with the added bonus of cheesy tastiness and calcium.

I selected the vegetables while heating a little olive oil in a big dish in the oven. As well as the aubergine, there was a golden courgette from our garden (it is supposed to be golden) and I decided to use a red pepper too. I could have added some carrot and potato but didn't want to break the theme (which I suppose was loosely Mediterranean). In the time it took to chop all the vegetables the oven had reached temperature (hottish) and so the roasting process started.

Many of my friends frown at me when I extol the tastiness of lentils, but they really can be delicious. Tonight I would be doing some simple braised lentils. I started off by gently “sweating” (sorry, horrible word) an onion, a couple of sticks of celery and a couple of carrots (all chopped fairly small). I didn't measure the lentils, probably about 100g (but I'm not good at estimating weight), enough to come up about half way in a normal size sieve. The lentils go in the sieve to be rinsed thoroughly. I once had a bit of grit in my lentils so at least by rinsing them the risk is reduced to clean grit. The lentils then go in the pan with the onion, celery and carrot and I added enough water (from a boiled kettle) to just cover everything. As is my preference I added some yeast extract (from a squeezy pot that Matt bought – here is not the right forum to go into the pros and cons of yeast extract in squeezy pots versus the traditional jar) and a spoonful of vegetable stock powder. Then all I did was to leave it to simmer on the hob and hope that it would be ready at the same time as the roasted vegetables.

The vegetables looked to be coming on nicely, but needed some seasoning. (Watch out, the small thing is coming up soon.) I added salt and pepper and sent Matt out to the garden to choose some herbs. He chose some oregano (at least I think it is oregano, it might be marjoram, but oregano and marjoram might actually be the same thing). Matt duly washed the herb (we have some unreliable neighbourhood cats) and threw it in on top of the vegetables in the oven.

This was all going on in the background while I topped and tailed some green beans that my mum had sent us home with from her garden. I was disturbed from my top and tailing reverie by a cry of “Quick get some tongs!”. It transpired that Matt's herb washing had failed to dislodge (or even identify the presence of) a caterpillar. Being the animal lover that he is Matt was frantic to save said creature. I extracted the dish from the oven, Matt found the tongs and extracted the caterpillar from the dish. Being the animal lover that he is that was not sufficient for Matt so while I returned to my beans he took the caterpillar to the park.

I wanted tomato to feature somewhere in this dinner – it would probably be ok added to either the lentils or the oven vegetables. If I only had tinned tomatoes it would have been a no brainer to add these to the lentil pan, but I had some lovely cherry tomatoes and decided that I'd put a few of these (minus caterpillars) in the oven. So it would be a kind of oven roasted ratatouille.

Everything was sort of looking ready so I took a chance and put the green beans in to cook. I also added a splash of balsamic vinegar to the lentils, it adds just a little sharpness otherwise they can be very rich. All that was left for me to do was to chop the feta (almost any strong / salty cheese would probably be fine but we had two blocks of feta for some reason) and beckon Matt to serve it all up (I am useless at serving food).

As usual Matt made a beautiful job of serving the food, and as usual this combination tasted delicious. There was no trace of caterpillar, which was a good job for a vegetarian dinner.

Wednesday's moussaka

I had a bit of time to make tea as Matt was off on a rescue mission to his grandad's. I had it in mind to make a moussaka because I'd bought a couple of cheap aubergines at my favourite cut price supermarket the day before. Usually the only thing I do with aubergine is curry so the extra time available would be a good opportunity to do something a bit different.

Lots of recipe books tell you that you're supposed to do some sort of fancy thing with aubergines that involves salting them but I have never done this before and didn't intend to start now. So I just sliced them and put them in the griddle pan to pre-cook.

In the meantime I got on with the main sauce. I was working totally recipe-free (I have made moussaka before so did vaguely know what I was doing) and my main challenge was going to be qauntities. In terms of proportions I knew what I was aiming for so started off with an onion (well actually one and a half onions because I had half of one left over from something or other last week) and a couple of sticks of celery. Next were some some mushrooms that were starting to look a bit wrinkly.

That all started to cook down and I started to contemplate my protein content. It was unconventional but I had most of a tin of baked beans left over and decided to put those in. The tomato sauce would probably be sufficient liquid for the whole thing. I planned to augment the beans with some vegetarian mince but when it came to it I found that we only had a tiny amount in the freezer, so augmented further with some vegetarian chicken style pieces. I seasoned with some veg stock, black pepper and a good dollop of yeast extract.

So far everything was going smoothly (if a little unconventionally) so now it was onto the white sauce. I suppose the white sauce for a moussaka has some sort of special name but I'm not sure what that is. I started off with a good dollop of butter substitute and about the same of flour in smallish saucepan and cooked these for a little while. I believe this is called making a roux. Next I added milk and then I left this on a low heat to thicken, whisking occasionally. At least that was the plan.

The sauce resolutely refused to thicken. I whisked a bit more. It still resolutely refused to thicken. I left it for a bit longer. It still resolutely refused to thicken. I turned the heat up. It still resolutely refused to thicken. I lost patience and chucked in a spoonful or so of cornflour. I knew as soon as I'd done this that it was the wrong move. Cornflour can be a very useful thing but it can also be a very disastrous thing. On this occasion it was disastrous. I should have learnt from previous mistakes and made a paste with the cornflour before adding but as I said I had lost patience by this point. The cornflour immediately formed lots of lumps in the sauce, which despite vigorous whisking resolutely refused to disperse.

At this point I should probably have cut my losses and started again, but I couldn't bring myself to do this. So I put the sauce through a sieve to catch the lumps and changed strategies. I would thicken the sauce by adding thicker things – cheese and crème fraiche – and try the microwave – rather than the hob – for heating purposes. This seemed to be somewhat successful.

I took a break from the sauce and returned to the aubergine and beany stuff; having chosen an ovenproof dish of what I had deemed to be an appropriate capacity I layered these up, finishing with a layer of aubergine. Clearly I had underestimated the required capacity because the dish was filled right up to the top, leaving barely any space for the sauce. So I got a fish slice and squished the contents of the dish down as much as I could.

Back to the sauce which had now slightly cooled and I whisked in an egg. This makes it rise a little bit which is kind of cool. I carefully spooned as much of the sauce as possible over the moussaka, which wasn't very much of the sauce. Rather than waste the rest of the sauce I decided to add another egg and try to make some sort of soufflé things. Never having made soufflé before this was exceedingly risky. I was now quite tired so rather than faff around looking for the most appropriate container to make soufflé in I divvied it up into some fairy cake cases. I had no idea about temperature so put everything in the oven at 180°C and would keep a close eye on it all.

After about half an hour everything was ready, this happily coincided with Matt's (partially successful) return from his rescue mission. We enjoyed our moussaka with a side of broccoli. I think it's unconventionality made it even tastier. I didn't partake of the soufflé things (I don't like the taste of egg) but Matt assures me that they were nice (if a little bland). It was certainly entertaining to watch him munch them from their paper cases, and maybe I'll even try an actual soufflé some time.

Sunday's blackcurrant bake

My colleague Jan had very kindly given me a bowlful of blackcurrants from her garden. Blackcurrant is one of my favourite flavours of all time (developed I think from an early fondness for cassis sorbet on holidays to France), but I have never cooked with them before. I could have gone for a granita (the closest to a sorbet that I'm ever likely to attempt), but decided that a cake might be in order. There was an early evening beach barbecue planned and I wanted to make something that I could take to share.

There was nothing suitable in any of my recipe books, so I got out my shoe box of recipes extracted from magazines. The only specific blackcurrant recipe used jam rather than whole blackcurrants. There were quite a few for general summer or other berry puddings, but I had no other sort of berry. In the absence of what I was looking for I was going to have to improvise, but improvising on a blueberry recipe would surely be a fairly safe bet – I chose a tray bake recipe.

I did my usual of scanning the ingredients before I started (I was amazed that we actually had half a bag of flaked almonds in the cupboard – I've no idea what the other half went in), but not looking at the method. If I had looked at the method I might have thought twice before embarking on this recipe – it ended up using loads of bowls and pans and given me a clue as to the number of separate processes to be completed.

First you are directed to deal with the blueberries, by turning them into a kind of sauce – so I set to with my blackcurrants. I had no appreciation of how long it would take to remove the little stalky bits from 150g of blackcurrants. I started off by trying to chop them off with a sharp knife (our sharpest) but this was unbearable so I ended up yanking with my finger-nails (clean, short and unvarnished for those of you concerned about infection control). I would recommend that you wear an apron to make these as blackcurrants turn out to be very messy. I would especially recommend to wear an apron if you are baking in your favourite pyjamas.

Once you have (finally) prepared the blackcurrants, you add them to a small pan with 100ml water, 2 teaspoons of cornflour and 50g caster sugar and then heat / stir until it starts to thicken. I'm not sure mine thickened as much as it was supposed to, maybe blackcurrants have less thickening agent (pectin I think) than blueberries. I will put a bit more cornflour in next time, or a bit less water. I think that blueberries are sweeter than blackcurrants so maybe you would want to slightly increase the sugar but I really like the not-too-sweetness of blackcurrants.

While that was on the hob I started with the main cakey bit. This was not a normal cake method, more like a pastry method and I generally have to psych myself up to make pastry – I wasn't feeling psyched but it was too late. You combine flour, sugar, ground almonds and baking powder and then rub in butter. Fortunately the food processor came to my rescue and did the rubbing in bit for me. Then you stir in a beaten egg. It wasn't looking hopeful, very crumby, but eventually came together in a sort of doughy mixture. It still looked kind of dry and I was very tempted to add a splash of milk, or even another egg, but resisted and pressed this mixture into the base of a 20cm square tin (I had gone to the effort of greasing this).

By which time the blackcurrant mixture was ready (or if it wasn't I was going to wait any longer) and I poured this over the “cake”. Then I discovered the destiny of the flaked almonds. They go in another pan with some milk and honey and brown sugar which you are supposed to heat until it started to thicken slightly. But it was kind of difficult to tell whether it had thickened in the presence of the flaked almonds so I just heated for a few minutes (the oven had been at it's pre-heated temperature for quite a while now) and then poured this mixture over the top of the blackcurrant.

It baked for about 35minutes and then you have to cool it in the tin. After which time the extraction from the tin proved quite challenging. I ended up cutting it up into 4 squares and then scooping out with a fish slice which didn't create too much carnage, there were just a few crumbs left in the tin for me to test. The test indicated that it tasted nice, although I probably wouldn't have done any harm in adding a bit more moisture to the cake layer. 

I packed up a boxful to take to the beach. Unfortunately by the time it came to get the cake out everyone was full up with barbecue, except Matt who I'm not sure I have ever known to be full up, so I brought most of it back home again (if I had been organised I would have taken some food bags so that people could have taken a goodie bag home, but I wasn't organised). We've been making our way through it over the last few days – it seems to keep very well in an airtight box – but I'm going to take the rest to work tomorrow.

Monday's potato dumplings

My mum and I had shared the vegetarian sharing plate at a local restaurant for lunch but another dish on the menu inspired me for the evening meal: gnocchi. I had planned to make a lasagne for us all (me, mum and dad, Matt – my husband – and my mother-in-law) but I thought that gnocchi would be no more complicated and a bit unusual. The pressure was on because Matt needed to eat before 7pm. Normally this wouldn't happen on a school night, but I had the day off work so with a bit of planning and the assistance of my mum as sous chef it should be possible.

I've made gnocchi once before (or maybe twice), and they were slightly gloopy so I decided to try a different recipe. My thoughts were that the sauce(s) would be easy (and slack) so I concentrated my initial efforts on the gnocchi. We debated for sometime whether the potatoes should be peeled before or after cooking, the recipe said afterwards but this would increase the time because:

1. They'd take longer to cook if whole rather than chopped

2. They'd have to cool down before peeling

So I put mum to work peeling the potatoes. And then boiling them.

Then I thought I may as well start the sauce. This would be the ideal opportunity to use up the leftover butternut squash. I started off by chopping a red onion and some sticks of celery and putting them in a big pan to sweat. Then I peeled off the skin and chopped up the squash. This was looking more and more like a reprise of the risotto flavours from last week. And it was such a good flavour I added mushrooms to complete. I mixed thing up a little bit by changing the seasoning, obviously some veg stock and black pepper but I also added some thyme from the garden. According to my mum I need to give my thyme plant a hair cut. I also set off a very easy pepper and tomato sauce by chopping a load of peppers and putting them in the oven to roast with a couple of sprigs of rosemary from the garden. I don't think that needs a hair cut.

Once that was all under way, I returned to the gnocchi. The potatoes were cooked and now needed mashing. I don't really like mashing potato (which is a shame because I love eating mashed potato), but this wasn't so bad as you're actually supposed to leave it a little bit lumpy. Once that's done you add an egg, flour, cheese, salt and pepper. On this occasion I used a hard goat's cheese – mum had already displayed her sous chef skills in grating this. It looks really dodgy when you first start to mix it up but comes together fine and then you tip it out and kneed it a little bit. This is very messy – wear an apron and remove hand jewellery. When it looks a bit less messy you have to roll it out into long thin sausages (about 1.5-2cm diameter) and then chop into pieces 2-3cm long. Maybe you could roll it all into little balls, but maybe this risks “over-handling” (if this is possible with gnocchi).

When it comes to cooking the gnocchi use the biggest pan of boiling water that you have but they need to be able to move around freely – I did mine in 4 batches. They're done when they float to the top and you need to remove with as little water as possible – I used a slotted spoon. In retrospect a chip pan would have been ideal but I don't have a chip pan. You can keep them warm in a buttered dish in a warmish oven (not the same oven that you're roasting peppers and by now tomatoes too in).

I finished off the butternut squash and mushroom sauce with a load of crème fraiche, and removed the sprigs of thyme. This was a good tea from the point of view that I could put everything in dishes on the table for people to help themselves. As well as the gnocchi and sauces there were some green beans that my sous chef had brought from her garden and prepared for me. It all seemed to go down very well. An improvement on my previous gnocchi, although they would probably have benefited from even more cheese (but what doesn't). No-one had any space for pudding which was a good job because there wasn't any. And we were nearly done by 7pm.

Saturday's made-up cake

While I was speaking to my mum the other day she mentioned that she had been to a museum café where they had on offer a courgette, ginger and lime cake. I thought that this sounded rather delicious so asked her if she had done anything useful like get a recipe (no), or try some (no). So I had the idea of this in my mind but nothing to go from. Surely the internet would help me out. No. Plenty of recipes for courgette and ginger or courgette and lime but not the three way combination. So I would have to use my imagination.

I have a rather excellent recipe for courgette, lemon, pine-nut and sultana cake, so I decided to work to a variation of this. We had one of my brother-in-law's courgettes left plus two little yellow ones from our garden. This amounted to 220g, the recipe called for 300g. So I decided to augment the courgette with some carrot. Two small carrots made up the short fall.

This was going to be a risky cake, especially as my friend Shelley who was due to visit for the weekend is renowned as a chocolate fiend. Fortunately her boyfriend George is renowned for eating almost anything – he, along with Matt (my husband) and another friend's fiancée formed what they refer to as the gluttony club after their performance with the canapés and puddings (I seem to remember the plum and cardamom mess being a particular favourite) at a wedding last year.

I grated the vegetables along with the contents of a jar of stem ginger in syrup (syrup drained for some other purpose in the future). The original recipe requires 225g of sultanas and the jar said that the drained weight of ginger was 190g and this seemed close enough. The food processor came into its own as I wouldn't have fancied my chances manually grating all the little balls of ginger.

I didn't change the composition of the basic cake ingredients: 150g butter, 175g sugar (although I did use a combination of soft brown and caster rather than all caster), 225g plain flour, 1tsp baking powder and 3 eggs. Once these were all combined in the usual manner a stirred through my grated veggies and ginger. It looked a little bit sludgy so I added a shake of poppy seeds, in the hope of giving it a bit of bite from mouthful to mouthful.

The lime was nearly forgotten, fortunately I remembered in the nick of time and grated all the zest of one into the mix. Sometimes recipes say to use the zest of half a citrus fruit but this always seems a bit wasteful, because what would you do with the other half. I would have liked to have added some lime juice as well but the mixture was already looking quite slopping so I didn't risk it.

I poured the mixture into a large-ish (20cm I think) round spring-form cake tin and put it into the oven at 180ºC. The baking time for the original cake is given as 40-45minutes and I had no reason to think that this would deviate. It started to go golden on the top and the skewer test indicated that it was indeed done after this time.

Next to the icing. As you know, I rarely bother with this, but we had guests and I had a load of lime juice to do something with. I was not going to do anything more advanced than a glacé icing though. I have learnt from previous mistakes and added the juice to a load of icing sugar rather than the other way round. This was a good job because I had a load of lime juice left even after I'd made plenty of icing to cover the cake.

Lunch was reheat pizza and risotto after which we were all rather full so I packed up 4 pieces of cake for us to take on our afternoon walk. We were taking Shelley and George for a walk along part of the Cornish coast path, which would also (much to George's excitement) feature two ferry trips. I was a bit worried about the cake because even though the skewer test had indicated that it was cooked it looked quite wet still when I cut into it. But it was too late to do anything about it now so we'd just have to hope for the best.

The first eaters didn't seem to think there was any problem with under-cooking, and Shelley didn't seem at all disappointed in the lack of chocolate. Seconds were had for pudding on Sunday lunchtime. This is the most made up cake that I've made yet and as such I'm really pleased with it. You can't taste the courgette and carrot – which is good given that they're supposed to add texture and moisture (they did) rather than flavour. The lime and ginger balanced well, you could taste them both but neither to the detriment of the other; from time to time you got a lovely chunk of ginger. Matt took some round to one of his friend's. Thirds and fourths were had by my mum and mother-in-law – more positive feedback. And now it's all gone (this cake probably has to be eaten very soon after baking because I think it would probably go mouldy otherwise – but I guess it might freeze ok).

Unfortunately I seem to have failed to take a picture of the cake. Here's a nice view of the south-east Cornwall coast instead.

Maybe I should try making some more experimental cakes.

Thursday's risotto

In the lead up to dinner today I had consumed only a small apple and a few dried apricots in terms of fruit and veg, so I was feeling a bit low on vitamins. I needed to cook something that would go a decent way to making up this deficit. We were also both quite hungry so needed to fill up on some carbohydrates too. Pasta and potato have already featured heavily this week and I didn't fancy them again. I was going to take a risk and go for rice. I was going to mediate the risk by making risotto. I rarely have success with rice on its own, but usually in a risotto it turns out better.

Matt had done the shopping last week so we had a large butternut squash. I like butternut squash but am yet to find a great range of good applications for it, but risotto is a great application for it. After spending years honing my butternut squash handling skills I think that I have finally decided that the best way is to stick it in a hot oven for a while before you want to do anything with it. This is superior to trying to:

1) Cut it up whilst raw – butternut squash is surely one of the hardest of all vegetables and its girth makes this supremely difficulty and leaves you in constant fear of losing one or more fingers

2) Peel it – the under-skin layer of the butternut squash is remarkably slippery and again the vegetable's girth makes this task both challenging and hazardous (a butternut squash inadvertently propelled at the foot is quite painful).

So the squash went in the oven. I couldn't tell you how long for exactly, but long enough for me to have a shower and take a walk around the local shops to gather some celery (and ready salted crisps). The butternut squash is probably manageable when it's looking a bit golden and the skin has started to blister up. Taking a walk to the shops is not really a very slack thing to do but a risotto without celery is unlikely to be as pleasurable as one with. Plus it was a nice evening for a stroll.

One of the tricks I have found with risotto is to use a big pan. Into my big pan (where I had already heated a little bit of olive oil) went a chopped red onion and two chopped sticks of my newly gathered celery. They need to cook until quite soft. Then I added some mushrooms. I would have used the whole pack but wanted to save a few for the pizza we have planned for tomorrow. Those few are now considerably less as Matt decided that he wanted to eat a few raw – so it might be a less mushroomy pizza.

While that was all cooking I returned to my butternut squash. It was still pretty hot, but easy enough to remove the skin and then chop. I only used half the squash as I didn't want to overdo it comparison to the other ingredients – mainly I was concerned about overbearing the mushrooms. My chopped squash went into the pan too. The veggies sizzled for a while I got the washing in (this is a really got recipe for when you've got other things to do at the same time) and then I added some risotto rice. The amount of rice can be really flexible depending on the rice / vegetable ratio that you're after, I like to aim for 50:50 but it's difficult to tell because of the way the rice swells once you've added the water. I think that it's good to cook the rice for a couple of minutes before adding the water. I add water from a boiled kettle (I'm sure sometimes it's recommended that you use cold water but that seems too time consuming for me – plus you can make a cup of tea at the same time if you boil the kettle), enough to just about cover the contents of the pan. And at the same time I put in a good dollop of vegetable stock powder (I'm coming to the end of the kilo that I brought at about this time last year), a couple of bay leaves from the garden and lots of grinds of black pepper.

I can never remember whether you're supposed to stir risotto constantly or not at all. Therefore I go for somewhere in the middle and stir it occasionally. The method I use to tell when it's ready is when most of the water has disappeared (either through evaporation or absorption) and it looks kind of gooey, but not so dry that any of it starts to crisp up. At this point I added a bit of crème fraiche – it helps to add both a bit of creaminess and a bit of sharpness. You can always add more crème fraiche later but I put some in now so that it doesn't have too much of a cooling effect.

Normally I would finish a risotto off with a bit of grated parmesan for a good salty kick. But we don't have any parmesan in the fridge at the moment (we're particularly depleted on the cheese front at the moment, just some cheddar, cream cheese and mozzarella) so instead I decided to reconstitute some dehydrated sun dried tomatoes (another use for some kettle boiled water). Here's a slack tip: once the tomatoes are rehydrated and drained, leave them in the bowl and chop with sharp scissors, rather than faffing around with a chopping board and a knife. And then I just sprinkled them on top of our portions.

It was a really tasty way of topping up on our carbohydrates and vitamins. So tasty in fact that we both had seconds. And there's still enough for tomorrow's lunch – as long as we're careful with the old rice reheating thing.

As for the leftover butternut squash, I think we might have some soup coming along.

Thursday's fajitas

We had a good selection of vegetables in the fridge, including some home grown courgettes from my brother-in-law, plus peppers, onions, mushrooms and carrots. The obvious choice was going to be stir-fry but when I tried to identify some sort of protein to go with this (usually prawns or vegetarian chicken style pieces) the freezer was depleted. I went to the cupboard and extracted a tin of cannellini beans, these would be somewhat unconventional for a stir fry but edible nonetheless. I also got out a tin of pineapple that I found in my search for beans. Pineapple and soy sauce is one of my favourite types of stir fry.

I started chopping the onion and had a sudden change of heart. Stir fry was off, fajitas were on. This would have the bonus of using up some aged wraps from the freezer and could also involve cheese. I really fancied some cheese and it was hardly an appropriate pairing for stir-fry.

The first stages of the fajita process were identical to those for stir fry. Namely the extensive chopping of vegetables. I have found that carrot never cooks enough in these circumstances unless very thin so have taken to making ribbons out of it with the peeler. Some minor level of skill is required in the order of addition to the wok: onion, pepper, carrot (in ribbons, it would have to go in earlier if it was any fatter), fajita spice (I cheat and use a pre-mix from a packet), courgette, mushroom.

I decided not to add the beans to the main mix but to turn them into some sort of refried beans. I didn't think that I had much time before the veggies would be done so this was going to have to be a total improvisation (apart from containing beans of course). I whizzed the beans in the food processor with half a red onion (I figured if the onion didn't cook red was better than white) and 2 cloves of garlic. Then this went into a small pan with more olive oil than I would usually use (most of the time I use at most one tablespoon, here I heated up 3 tablespoons), I suppose I could have put some spices in but decided to keep it simply for my first attempt.

It was all just about ready when Matt decided that he wanted to go for a swim. I had already been and was feeling slightly peckish but I was not about to discourage my husband from engaging in some exercise, so I turned off all the flames and entertained myself for the next hour or so.

Matt let me know when he was leaving the pool and all that was left to do was cut up a bit of lettuce, grate some cheese (and eat up those little left over bits that you can't grate because it's too close to your fingers) and to reheat the veggies and beans. I suppose this could be seen as the re-frying part. At this point I realised that I hadn't seasoned the beans so hastily mixed in some vegetable stock powder (this was more easily to hand than the salt) and black pepper.

I am yet to discover a way of heating up wraps so that they stay both warm and soft. The loss of heat must be to do with their large surface area. Putting the wraps in the oven turns them into crisps so for now the microwave seems to be the best option for a bit of heat.

These particular wraps were on the small side and I grossly overfilled mine. To be honest I always grossly overfill, because I prefer the fillings to the wrappings. So I had to pin my wrap together with a cocktail stick and eat it with a knife and fork rather than my fingers. (Which is a shame because I do enjoy eating cutlery-less from time to time.) But (even with cutlery) the fajitas were very enjoyable – augmented with squirty salsa, gaucamole and sour cream.

The beans turned out to be delicious – I can't believe that I haven't done something like this with them before. I think this could be a very versatile technique.

In case you were wondering I had the pineapple chunks for breakfast this morning.