1. I watched yesterday’s episode of Jamie at Home tonight, and it was all about one of the best vegetables ever - the squash. Pumpkins have to be great donâ’t they? You can make Halloween lanterns out of them but you can also make soups and savouries and sweets out of them – so, so versatile. And then there are Butternut squashes and those nutty Acorn squashes.
2. This evening I popped into Sainsbury’s on the way home from work â it was to be the Summertown M&S Simply Food but I changed my mind after I could only find candles in there (oddly the only thing that I couldnât get in Sainsbury) â and impulse bought India Corn (the decorative sort) and little squashes and tiny pumpkins to make my house all nice and festive for the Autumn season.
3. Does anyone know how one would go about drying/preserving mini-pumpkins and gourd squashes - I can remember one year I did it wasnât terribly successful. Is there a technique like with drying flowers?
4. Iâm really enjoying the current Jamie Oliver series, Jamie at Home – thereâs more of an emphasis on ârealâ recipes that you can actually see yourself having a go at cooking, and itâs all centred around vegetables, which of course, depending on the size of your garden you can grow yourself (I can grow some vegetables in my garden but its not ideal…). Given the predominance of vegetables itâs a little odd that most of the recipes end up being meat dishes. And here’s the thing, to my knowledge there havenât been any TV series out there (or indeed books) which deal with providing exciting, easy, everyday (and special occasion) recipes for both vegetarians and meat-eaters. And yet the number of households out there where couples are of mixed persuasion, or familes with a vegetarian in their midst must be in their millions. Could this idea be the next big thing? A series that gives recipes that are exciting and scrummy and everyday but which suit both tastes…
5. There should be a fifth thing here. I think you might already have guessed that I love Autumn…
