In brief

 I have cooked *so much*, and I have blogged *so little*. It's a busy time at work, after a very quiet Janaury, which is not helping my brain. I'm also just a bit foggy and unimpressive, including a free Saturday afternoon spent mostly napping. I don't think 2022 is shaping as my finest work. 

The most exciting thing I've done is to buy the M&S Valentine's menu and firmly freeze half of it, while using the Double St Jacques as a fabulous Sunday dinner. I love subverting the supermarket social pressures that way, and now I have spare fizzy wine (hola cocktails) and had lashings of scallopy stuff. 

The green bit on the side was the makings of this green shakshuka (Honey & Co cookbok), which I've been meaning to make for ages but am distracted by the fact I don't really love baked or poached eggs. It's still nice to make a load of shredded mixed veg, spose. I cooked the second half with scrambled eggs and I do not regret it.

It's been a bit of a shredded greens week, in pursuit of vague Middle Eastern/Mediterraneanity but also some vitamins. I had actual cabbage on toast for a couple of days (these Greek Greens, which are tasty, but it really was just dressed cabbage and spinach, without most of the herb extras. It was still delicious).

It's not all been green. There was a very excellent sweet potato and chickpea salad, dressed with tahini, though I admit lettuce was involved:

There's a barley tomato "risotto" with feta which is *mostly* a good thing but hell to clean up, as you may imagine from an hour of simmering a splattery passatta-filled saucepan of barley till done. It's tasty, thank goodness.

Then there are two I recommend to you unreservedly. One is ridiculously indulgent but perfect winter comfort: blanched small potatoes, halved, roasted and served with a ton of aioli (but mixed with yoghurt, which makes it fine, definitely), and pine nuts toasted in butter and smoked paprika. Ottlenghi Test Kitchen, you're evil.

The dill and green beans on the plate are attempting to pretend this isn't chips n mayo with extra butter. But it is. The antidote to cabbage on toast. 

The other recipe I've loved is watercress soup. Another Ottolenghi, from Jerusalem, and I'm delighted I tried it after years of thinking it was too much faff. It's meant to involve chickpeas, but I'm fairly chickpea'd out this week so I used some of the small potatoes as thickening and spicing. 

There are two main bits to this: firstly, some chopped carrot and chickpeas/potato bits mixed with cinnamon and ras el hanout and roasted in the oven for about 20 minutes (as it may be, when you're doing some potato roasting for a lush dinner). These just get mixed in at the end, so do them and forget them.

Then the soup: onion and chopped fresh ginger, sweated off till soft. And in my case, potato too. If it was chickpeas you'd just bung them in at the end with the green leaves. (The ginger really, really surprised me by how well it worked in this soup.) 

Then add vegetable stock, plenty, bring it to the boil, and stir in loads of chopped watercress and some spinach. Or, as it may be, rocket.  Oh, and a few extras - some sugar, some salt, some rose water. Your average watercress soup. 

Rose water doesn't go off, right?

 

Cook for a couple of minutes, no more. And blend. Serve with the carroty mix, and yoghurt if you want. I didn't think it was needed, which is rare for me. This sounds like such faff, but it's not really if you've got the oven on for a thing. And the bits of it are both really tasty and really interesting. I was dead impressed.

Even this soup is limitedly faffy, so I think I've done pretty well overall with this week. Lots of slightly different flavours, lots of my self-imposed themed challenge fills (lots of recipes I've flipped past before and paused on this time), and nothing that wasn't worth the effort. 

Now, where did I put my head?