Chocolate oat crumble

I have a friend, the only regular reader of this blog I suspect, who will be retching at the thought of this pudding because he will not entertain cooked fruit of any kind and hates all berries.  I, on the other hand, love both and so have been looking forward to pudding all day.  Everything in this works - the raspberries are perfect with the apricots and the chocolate came through really well - indeed the oats and chocolate were for us a really interesting alternative to a traditional crumble topping.  I think this would be a fantastic dinner party pud. The fussy daughter loved it (!) saying it was 'bursting with flavour'.  

A whole baked fish with aubergines

The sun is shining, the fussy daughter is at work, so it's time to eat fish!  Sardines are my fish of choice here, greatly helped by finding them on offer this morning.  This lunch was simplicity itself to make and so tasty - it's this kind of dish that made me want to start this blog in the first place i.e make me cook and eat things I wouldn't normally bother with. Having cooked  almost the whole of The Kitchen Diaries and now having embarked, albeit slowly, on Eat my confidence as a cook is at an all time high and I just know that anything I'm going to make will turn out just fine and will be delicious.  Once again, thank you Nigel.

Ricotta burgers

I'm a massive burger fan and will probably complete the burger bit of this book before anything else.  To me this was the perfect burger - the creaminess of the ricotta peeking through and the delicious sun dried tomato relish on top - all the flavours wonderfully complementing each other.  I even managed to sneak the capers in past the fussy daughter as they were such a subtle flavour.  A triumph Nigel, a triumph!