Spaghetti again

With a sauce of red onion, pancetta, tomato, rosemary, oregano and enoki mushrooms. With edam on top for a touch of authenticity.

Basmati rice

cooked with turmeric then mixed into a wok-full of onions fried with cumin seeds and some smoked paprika, peas, raisins, pine nuts and prawns.

Spaghetti carbonara

Following Nigella's good recipe but omitting the marsala.

Chinese takeaway

Yum yum.

Baked aubergine

...for about half an hour then smeared with yogurt, tahini and thyme and grilled. With couscous containing peas, toasted pine nuts, black sesame seeds and shimeji mushrooms, purely because I was so astounded to find them in Asda. And salad.

Lasagne again

I made extra on Saturday so here's the other half. Cameron is away and I've had no sleep so it was a bit of a life-saver.

Oyako-don

(chicken and egg rice-bowl).

Make a broth of 1 cup dashi (Japanese stock made from konbu and/or bonito, or out of a packet), 1/2 tsp sugar, 1 tbsp mirin and 1 1/2 tbsp soy sauce - I use a mix of dark and light soy. Bring to the boil and add half a sliced onion, then after a couple of minutes, some chicken thigh cut into 2-cm cubes. Cook until the chicken is done then slide 2 beaten eggs onto the top; cook until the egg is soft but cooked. Serve over a bowl of rice - inauthentic brown rice in our case - and with some nori crumbled over the top (or mitsuba is even better but I didn't have any). Do not add carrots unless you have a small child; they taste weird with it.