A fiend I tell you.

I’ve never been much of a cook. Every now and then I’ll get a random urge to make something like shepherd’s pie {historically pretty much all I can do without a recipe}, and I’ve always liked to bake cakes and biscuits, for obvious reasons. But none of that maternal/womanly/let’s cook a roast instinctive stuff most of my friends seem to have been born with. Perhaps it’s a {lack of} self care thing.

But lately I’ve been possessed; I started by making some soup for the freezer {it gets hungry you know}, and then I hoiked out my massive cook book which is basically a big notebook bursting with hundreds of recipes I’ve collected over the last 14 years or so, most of which I’ve never made, and a spark of interest kicked in.

I must have minimum ingredients and no fiddly or time consuming instructions to be tempted to try a recipe. So yesterday I tried a new soup ~ courgette and asparagus. The freezer had that.

And yesterday there was my cousin’s mustard and honey chicken with lamb’s lettuce and avocado ~ good lord that was tasty. Here’s the recipe:

1 tbsp grainy mustard, 1tbsp runny honey, heat in a pan, add a bit of hot water and mix up, pour over chicken, cover with foil, stick in the oven for twenty mins, take foil off and leave in oven for another twenty. {The recipe’s for two chicken breasts but I had one and used the same quantities for extra juiciness.}

That’s it. A recipe in a sentence canNOT be bad.

Then there was the quiche! I’ve never made quiche but I found some wheat free pastry in the freezer and ‘treated’ myself to a rolling pin and a flan tin with removable base {who AM I, and WHERE has the real Tara gone}, cobbled together about four different Googled quiche recipes, and lo: asparagus, goat cheese, lamb’s lettuce and mushroom quiche:

It tastes pretty good! I know that none of this is rocket science, but this is completely new territory for me, and I’m really enjoying it, which is a big surprise. I’ll never be a real foodie {except when it comes to eating}, and art will always be my first love, but mixing up my creativity by taking it into the kitchen is kind of fun!

Today ~ banana bread and more soup. Maybe even some painting.