A Bug's Life

I seem to have a lot of Slimming World cookbooks, plus Nigella (both cooking and baking), Heston (less a cookbook more food porn) and now a Green and Blacks chocolate cooking one that Mike got for Christmas.

We tried out the latter at the weekend and made brownies. I can see that book being used quite a bit for things of which I only eat a small bit and send Mike to share the rest with his colleagues :)

The SW ones I have a bad habit of me flicking through them once and then rarely actually using them. Occasionally I have a week where I'll pick a cookbook and plan to do three recipes from it as main meals that week - it makes a nice change. And one day last week Mike pulled the diced beef from the fridge and we flicked through four cookbooks to see what to make with it. Sadly the only actual diced beef recipe was 2.5 hours long, so we cheated and made something using diced 'lamb' instead.

I do use the Nigella cooking one as a reference occasionally, but it's not quite as good for that as I tend to hope, so maybe I need a complete Delia or equivalent too. The Nigella baking one is *awesome* in places but rarely used these days. Maybe I should find some non-diet tonic water some day soon and make the G&T jelly again.

Oh and 8 meals out of 10 in our house are of the fry onions and garlic, add meat or fish, season with herbs or spices or both and add veg and either stock or tomatoes, serve with starch - voila curry or pasta sauce or chilli or stew or even potato-topped pie. These are not generally recipes per se at all but much more like your "chuck a bit of this in" style of cooking. The 9th is probably to grill something and serve with veg and starch.