Resist the urge to eat the plain cooked pastry. Mostly. You can have a nibble.

Pastry = 150g plain flour, 75g cold butter, cubed, pinch of salt, water. Mix the flour and salt, then rub the butter in so it goes all crumbly. Add just enough water to bind it all together and make a pastry. You’ve seen pastry before; you know the sort of thing.

Pastry pasted with pesto! Lol.

Press your pastry into a pie dish, prick it with a fork and bake it at 180°C for 20-30 minutes. BAM. Piecrust done. Brush it with pesto.

Tier 1.

BAM. Roast eggplant.

Tier 2.

BAM. Roast capsicum.

Tier 3 because why not?

DOUBLE BAM. Sundried tomatoes and crumbled feta.

The unifying power of eggs.

BAM. Pour some mixed eggs over those suckas (6, to be precise).

The final and most glorious BAM.

Bake it for about 30 minutes. That right there is a big ol’ pie of awesome. Healthy breakfast; packable lunch; delicious, full of vegetables and protein, all-round nice guy quiche. BAM.

VIVA LA FLOGNARDE!

Then I made pesto.

Shallotzachoppin

Then I made hummus.

This is a caption to a photo of pastry baking.

Then I made a roast eggplant, capsicum, feta, pesto and shallot quiche.

VIVA LA QUICHE!

I’m thinking of baking bran muffins.

I also made yoghurt and soda and iced tea and refilled all the water bottles in the fridge. I feel like I’m trying to make up for a massive gambling debt I don’t yet have.

I’m a bit surprised by this sudden burst of energy: nothing incredible happened today, I didn’t have extra coffee, I didn’t accidentally snort cocaine while blowing my nose (true story). But I got home and zing; my cooking superpower unleashed itself like a fat cat bursting through a paper bag. I could reflect on the day to figure out the trigger, and then plan to revisit the potential causes of this buzz, or I could run with it. Run like a toddler’s nose.

For a while after I got diagnosed with Addison’s Disease, I tried to keep a close eye on what variations in my day may have caused fluctuations in energy and enthusiasm, hoping to find the magic formula to secure a flawless day. Porridge + 6 glasses of water + a light walk mid-morning + wine with lunch + a good fart at 3pm + an early night with warm soy milk = ??? Now I just try and roll with it. Some days I’m up and bounding along, and I can really run with that; other days I’m tired and just want to hang back, snapping my fingers and looking cool from the sidelines; other days I’m shit on a cracker and everything sucks. It happens. Rock’n'roll. So today I got a bit of a buzz on the way home from work, felt my eyes clear, my head focus, my toes straighten, and I jumped on that pony and rode it all the way to a busy kitchen. Tomorrow I might be wrecked and stupid. If future-bethini isn’t feeling great tomorrow, she doesn’t need to sweat it: past-bethini’s got her covered.

I love crumpets. M and I have reached a point where we make more things from scratch than we buy ready-made, and now a lot of ready-made stuff has a weird preservative taste, crumpets too. So it’s been yonks since I had those lovely toasty delights full of chambers that fill with melty butter and honey (mmm) or butter and Promite (MMMM) or even – call me crazy, but it totally works – tabasco, tomato and grilled cheese. YES. Ahem. Anyway, haven’t had them in a while; want to find a way of having them without getting the rubbery-chemically ones from the supermarket (also thereby avoiding the necessity of wearing pants on the weekend); cue Pinterest. I found this recipe on Always With Butter and — well, did you click that link? LOOK at those babies! They’re faultless. Enchanté.

Crumpets are essentially a hyper-hydrated, un-kneaded yeast batter: this recipe used 2¾ cups of water to 3 cups of flour, which, if my maths isn’t totally fucked here, is about 163% hydration (also I just realised that when I cooked them, I only used 2½ cups of water, oops-la!). A regular ole bread dough round these parts is about 70%. The high hydration and long resting time both contribute to the gluten development, I gather: when I got around to the dough it was sturdy and stretchy, which is surprising for an un-kneaded dough.

So it’s Saturday morning and I’ve got the batter proofing and I’m boogying around the kitchen, then I realise I have neither egg rings nor cookie cutters, the two implements generally recommended when cooking crumpets. What’s a pantsless wonder to do?

Chop chop

With trusty kitchen scizzahs, the remains of a shipping carton, a stapler and some foil, I fashioned my own.

Crafty is cool! I should know!

M suggested I wouldn’t need rings; that, like pancakes, they would reach a balanced state where the batter’s surface tension would keep them circular and relatively even — I disagreed, citing the hyper-hydrated batter, waving my maths at him and kicking him in the kneecaps.

Homemade Crumpet Ring. (Elevation B)

I was shocked (SHOCKED) at how robust and springy this batter was. I had anticipated something like pancake batter. I began to feel bad for kicking M in the kneecaps, since it was starting to look like he might have been on to something. Compare:

Crumpets in rings, crumpets free-form.

The front one, though blobby, was definitely keeping together. I apologised to M’s kneecaps. You fry the crumpets until they have pretty well cooked through from the bottom up, forcing bubbles of air slowly to the surface, which makes the potholed top. I don’t think I’ve quite got the hang of it: my first few were waaaay overcooked on the bottom.

Liberated crumpet!

When it’s pretty well cooked through, from the bottom, flip the crumpet and cook the top, just quickly. I think I may have been a little impatient. Instead of little potholes, mine are all sealed over:

Alas, sealed crumpets! Whither art the potholes we love?

But split them open and voilá!

GASP

Chambers! Chambers ripe for filling!

JAM TIME

Chambers melty with honey!

HONEY TIME

Crumpetty goodness! Huzzah! Split them open and toast them: man, so cool!

A tower of overtoasted crumpetry!

These aren’t perfect. I won’t be updating my LinkedIn account with “Can Make Crumpets” anytime soon. But I am encouraged! I can kinda see how things are supposed to work and I’ve got a feel for what I want to change next. This is the last two, when I was felt like I got the hang of it:

Final near-triumphs

So the next time around:

1. All in rings: free-form works fine, but I like the round ones best.
2. Adjust pan temperature: I think I want them to cook all the way through from the bottom up without burning — not sure if that means a higher or lower heat. I’ll try both. Not at the same time.
3. A little less in each ring: quite a few came out waaaaaay too thick and sponge-ous.

The important thing is that there will be a next time around. These went really well, but I reckon I can do even better.

My Dadini always said “Man cannot live by bread alone: he must have a bit of crumpet.” But I think he was talking about something else.

MORE JAM TIME

When I started writing this list, I decided there were two sub-lists, really: Things I Want To Learn How and One-Offs.

Thus, in 2012, I’d like to learn how to make:

• Raisin bread: full of raisins, dried peel, and spices. For toasting! Raisin toast with fresh figs and blue cheese is one of life’s greatest food things.
• Pain aux raisins: those awesome sultana-riddled snails of croissant pastry.
• Fresh plain pasta: this will be a good one to have. Right now, when I want pasta, I have to sit around whining “I wish I had some pasta right now, boy do I ever” until M takes pity on me and mixes up the dough. And frankly that’s hurting my throat.
• Bread rolls: for lunches! I’ve made bread rolls in the past, but they’re never quite right. Never quite as soft as I’d like them to be. So that’s got to change, DO YOU HEAR ME?
• Wholegrain bread: I love wholegrain bread, crunchy with seeds. Time I flexed those kneading fingers and got some for myself. Anybody else surprised at how many farinaceous challenges I’ve got here?
• Crumpets: like the ones you get in the shops, with bubbled-open tops, but without the weird preservative smell and  rubbery texture. WithbutterandhoneyOHGODYES.
• Polenta: smooth and creamy or baked and firm? Both, I think. I want to get a handle on this stuff. Especially now I’ve read a few blog posts referring to the smooth/creamy variety as a breakfast dish. I can imagine that with cheese and cooked spinach being particularly nourishing; or, better yet, with stewed fruit and toasted nuts. YEAH!
• Eggplant: it may seem slack (not to mention grammatically questionable) to list a single ingredient as something I’d like to learn how to make, but what I mean is that I want to explore eggplants further. Get me my pith helmet and lab coat! My eggplant repertoire is currently moussaka, baba ghanoush and ratatouille, and while all these are delicious, I think I do more.

I’ve also started keeping a list on Pinterest of my to-cook list: when I see a recipe I like the look of, I pin it. Leading me to the following list. In 2012, I want to try making:

1. Quince paste
2. Yoghurt cheesecake
3. Baked felafels
4. Cornbread with chilli and corn kernels
5. Stromboli! (Which I’m fairly sure is traditionally spelled with an exclamation mark and a joyful hand gesture.)
6. Pickled carrots

Whoa, okay, steady on. If I keep this up, I’m going to have an enormous list and no time to make yoghurt. Let’s draw the line there: I can already tell you this is a long, long way from being an exhaustive list of what I’m going to cook this year. But there are some skills to be learned, and adversaries to conquer (you better believe I’m looking at you, crumpets) and cooking wine to be guzzled wept into sipped while laughing delightedly. Game faces, people. 2012 is on.

1. Referring to food as naughty, sinful, etc. This isn’t the Dark Ages: I think we can stop tying values of good and evil to the freaking bread basket. These value judgements are not useful. Fer Christ’s sake — no, scratch that: for the sake of compassion, decency and, oh, hey, let’s go crazy, maturity, let’s chuck the whole “naughty” thing, okay? It’s twee, stupid, and gets me into a big angry foam. What’s that? Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

1. Guilt and eating. We can do with less of that. Unless you’ve been living at the bottom of a compost heap for the past thirty-odd years, you might have heard that there’s a few people out there with food hangups. Even if you dodge full-blown anorexia, orthorexia or bulimia, it’s possible to be pretty disordered about food, following unhealthy patterns of bingeing, self-loathing, self-reproach and jumbled thinking that leaves you frizzy with anxiety about the avocado on your sandwich. “I nearly ate a Milky Bar earlier today, but instead I went to my dubstep-treadmill class, so I’m a better person.” Food shouldn’t be about how valuable you are as a person, unless you’re Lucrezia Borgia. It’s hard enough to chill out in the middle of a crazy-busy working day without somebody looking pointedly at your goddamn morning tea and hinting that you’re a bad, less-than-worthy person because you happen to want a Tim-Freaking-Tam.
2. Identifying something as a sin means another agent is in the position of forgiving. If your eating is a sin, it’s because some external agent has identified it as such. So some external force also has to forgive you. No. No way, José. It is not up to another external agent to tell me whether my eating is right or wrong, morally acceptable or morally condemnable. I don’t require another person to accept what I’m eating. I eat it because I want to eat it and this shouldn’t be an issue. Driving your car to work is, arguably, a greater moral concern than eating a carton of caramels every day, but nobody calls that sinful, indulgent or naughty.
3. Branding particular foods gives people the social sanction to negatively judge you. If you see someone eating a wedge of cake, suddenly you’ve got the right to assume that action is an illuminating example of their weakness and overall poorer social worth as a person because cake is naughty or wicked. Stop that, it isn’t nice. What a rotten way to talk about people.
4. Equating pleasure with sin is weird. Unless you’re a seventeenth-century European Puritan, you’ve probably figured out that pleasure and living ethically are not mutually exclusive. Love playing soccer? Reading a good book? Jet-skiing? Playing with your kids? Why are those pleasures not wicked, sinful, indulgent? And if the foods that are wicked and sinful are so good — and let’s face it, you’re unlikely to ever see a recipe for a Truly Sinful Dressing-Free Cabbage Slaw, are you? — what are the morally acceptable foods? Is it bran? Vitamin supplements altogether removed from food sources?

This is a feminist issue — not exclusively, but significantly. Look at it this way: what kinds of foods are usually marketed and labelled as naughty and sinful? Chocolate, ice cream, cakes, desserts. Less frequently: cheese platters, mashed potatoes, filet mignon, risotto. None of those are particularly scanty on the calorie side of things, but it’s the girly treats that are branded sinful, wicked, etc.

C’mon, food bloggers: referring to something tasty as wicked is just stupid, cheap and immature. You can do better.

2. The expression “you won’t even miss the meat” (usually with an astonished exclamation mark). Here’s a news flash, broadcast on all channels: some people can struggle through life without the meat. Sometimes they even go without meat for, oh, days at a time. Some true freakazoids go years – YEARS – without meat. Somehow they still manage to cobble together a meaningful existence. Sometimes they even seem happy with their food, even take pleasure in cooking and eating. How do you think they manage? I’ll tell you: meat, frankly, is not obligatory. Even most dedicated meat-lover types don’t eat meat with every meal. You don’t see Cocoa Pops with “tasty enough to make up for lack of meat” on the side of the box, do you? Cheese boards don’t come with whispered apologies for the absence of sausages, do they? Fruit salad doesn’t need a “WARNING DOES NOT CONTAIN MEATS” byline on the menu, does it? What about apple pie? Guacamole? Crackers? It’s not just vegetarian foods that cop this kind of talk: you also see “you won’t believe it’s healthy!” on anything not-horrifically bad for you, which suggests that healthy food is never anything but some sort of drear obligation, endless chewing on flavourless chaff. For crying out loud, people, can we lighten up on this sheer amazement that something could not contain pork chops and still somehow manage to be enjoyable?

I have other quibbles, such as the ubiquitousness of bacon and sriracha in every single food-related discussion anywhere on the Internet and the swarm of Oreo-stuffed baked treats that seems to be sweeping across the blog-o-world (seriously: how busy are you that you can’t take the time to eat your cupcake and then your Oreo?) — but honestly, those are quibbles about other people’s preferences and they don’t really impact me, except my slightly increased risk of eye-roll strain. But the other two are seriously bothering me. If you’re writing about food, think about the language you’re using: think about the messages you’re sending and the judgements you’re making. Yeesh.

Big Red Pot

Okay, maybe not more. The wok and the enormous mixing bowl probably are equal contenders. But I love that dern pot. Originally bought for the purposes of making no-knead bread (you heat a big, cast-iron core like this baby in the oven for a while before the bread dough is ready, then sling the dough in and the lid keeps the steam in and you end up with a beautiful crispy crust) (note to self: cook that bread ASAP), there is very little this pot doesn’t do now. Couscous, pasta, soup, rice, curries: it does it all. Stovetop, barbecue, oven, anywhere good times are had. Lately it’s been getting a lot of exercise serving my other big red love at the moment:

Rat-a-tat-red

Ratatouille. Through an odd set of circumstances we needn’t go into right now (although it involved a gnome, some compromising photos and me being in the right place at the right time), I ended up with an abundance of zucchini and eggplants. When life gives you lemons, you make preserved lemons. When life gives you shitloads of the nightshade family, you make ratatouille. My ratatouille recipe is beautifully simple: roughly chop eggplants, zucchini, capsicum and onions and tumble into your big red pot. Add a cup or so of pitted olives if you have them. Then add two tins of tomatoes, and a generous mix of the herbs and spices that fire your big red love. If you’re me, it’s paprika, cumin seeds, white pepper, salt and more paprika; then you go out and snip some thyme, basil, parsley and marjoram from the garden. Quantities are a little vague: chop up enough to stop said herbs going to seed. Mix well, then add more spices and herbs because you’ve just realised how much ratatouille you’ve made. Seriously, one eggplant, one zucchini, one onion and one capsicum doesn’t seem like much until you get chopping, then it pulls some weird loaves-and-fishes shit and BAM you’ve got a big red pot of big red everything.

Mix well — throw in an empty-tomato-tin’s worth of water for good measure — and put the big red lid on your big red pot. Bake it for about two hours or until you have to go do something outside the house and switch the oven on. Once hot, my big red pot will keep on baking for quite some time after the oven is switched off.

I’ve been making truckloads of this stuff. It freezes really well, so an awkward abundance is magically transformed into stockpiled provisions. We’ve used it:

• puréed as a pizza sauce;
• tossed with pasta;
• mixed with black beans and chillies for burrito frijoles;
• tossed into shakshouka;
• as a cold salsa on wraps;
• served with crusty bread as a fantastic meal all by itself.

Seriously, about twenty minutes’ chopping, then ignore it in the oven for two hours, and you’ve got meals for over a week. Awesome. Tonight I came home and M had taken it to the next level of big red glory:

Oh my big red stars...

Layer ratatouille with lasagna sheets and cheesy sauce, then top with cheese and bake for an hour and you have a lush hot lasagna fit for a bethini.

A brief snap before the elusive lasagna disappears into its natural habitat...

Holy crap, so awesome. You wouldn’t believe how lush, flavoursome, cheesy and delicious this was. The noodles cooked to a firm perfection, the provolone savoury and stringy, the ratatouille thick and rich. Big red love.

Oh, while we’re talking about big red loves:

Red red red red red red red

Recycled Red Redux rolls readily on! Nearly up to the waist already.

And so the legend was born. Inspired by Napoleon Dynamite, a friend of the awesome ilk invented the Dang Quesadilla.

Take yourself some tortillas — homemade unless you’re a lazyboneroo, and I’ll get to that in a sec — and spread half with chopped banana and a crumbly sharp cheese. Fold each tortilla over itself and fry or grill until the cheese is hot and melted and the banana hot. Then top with tomato salsa and sliced avocado and tangy yoghurt (if you’re not me, you can go right ahead and have sour cream there: if you’re me, sour cream = puking).

Sweet quesadilla skills

Take a bite. Holy cow, that’s some good quesadilla right there. The sweetness of the bananas mixes with the sharp salty cheese and adds depth to the salsa and avocado. And the textures are an incredible blend: melted cheese, soft banana and avocado, salsa and crunchy tortillas. It’s crazy-happy-good stuff. Seriously delicious. Do it! Do it nooooow! And make me one.

Now, about those tortillas: why aren’t you making your own, dag-blast-it? They’re super easy and a gazillion times better than store-bought, I’m telling you. For two really big tortillas: take a cup of plain flour, a teaspoon or so of baking powder and a generous teaspoon of salt. Add boiling water, a little at a time, working it into a dough. You want it damp enough to keep together, but not so damp that you get bits of dough stuck to you while handling it. Adjust with a kiss more flour if you need to. Knead it on the bench for a wee while, until it feels thick, cohesive and even: the longer you knead it, the more likely you’ll end up with soft, chewy tortillas. Leave it to rest for a bit; maybe ten to twenty minutes. Then divide into two balls and roll them out super-flat and super-thin. (Pro tip: spray a bit of cooking oil on the bench before rolling them out — it makes the super-thin target just a bit easier.) Dry fry, until those distinctive dalmation spots come up: flip and fry the other side. Give your tortillas a second on a plate wrapped in a plastic bag, or wrapped up in a teatowel — they’re a bit stiff when you first get them out of the pan, and the steam will soften them. Aw yeah. The only real disadvantage is that once you start making your own, you discover the store-bought ones smell weird. Seriously.

Make yourself a Dang Quesadilla!

Whisky whisky whisk whisk

To raise the stakes — to skirt very close to the edge of success without toppling over — I reduced the ratio of soy milk to egg yolk So I used 3 egg yolks, 1/4 cup of white sugar, 3/4 cup soy mlik, and a dash of vanilla essence. Whisky whisky whisk whisk, until it’s well blended and not at all foamy. Don’t foam it! Pour the mix into ramekins, stand them in a baking tray full of water, and bake until set. This took ages, presumably because soy milk, with a lower fat content, doesn’t thicken and set as readily as moo milk. Now, it would be esay to dodge success at this point, by under- or over-cooking the custard. But instead, I pushed the boundary and brought out some perfectly-baked soy custards.

Note the telltale "is it done yet?" holes

Nearly stumbled into success right there. A near thing, I can tell you. Top that sucker with a little cooked fruit — maybe plums? — and serve chilled and before you know it you’re up to your arse in success. Oops. Lucky break. The next step in making crème brûleé is to top the cold cooked custards with brown sugar and grill them. Okay, yes, sure, if you’re a bit fancy-pants you can brûleé the sugar using one of those dinky little propane blowtorches. Colour me sceptical: I think it’s a bit of a stretch to by a blowtorch just to make a dessert I’ve made once in 20-odd years of cooking. So I took the old-fashioned route: cranked the grill up to eleven and popped the cold custard, sprinkled with brown sugar, and grilled the whillikers out of it.

But here’s where I cunningly avoided success: when I say “sprinkled with brown sugar”, I mean “liberally caked with brown sugar”.

A deliciously close call

This helped me dodge true crème brûleé glory by taking too long to caramelise: by the time the sugar had melted all the way through, the custard below had begun to get hot and puffy and the top layer of sugar had *just* started to singe. Yes! Success evaded! Popped it in the freezer for twenty minutes or so to chill, and then shared it with M, who declared it awesome and caramelised. But it doesn’t quite look the way I wanted it.

So, final verdict: Not the picture-perfect crème brûleé I hoped for, but the top was still crunchy and cracked when you tapped it with a spoon. Put it this way, if you showed it to someone on the street, they’d be like “why are you showing me crème brûleé you random? are you demented?” but the key point is that they’drecognise it as crème brûleé. So I guess I passed, but didn’t excel. I’m calling it a silver-medal effort.

There’s still another crème in the fridge, waiting for me to brûleé the crap out of it, so success may snag me yet.

I love food. So I love reading about food, food blogs, forums, etc. etc. Awesome places to yammer about yeast, waffle over waffles and shoot the shit about shakshouka. But, in keeping with Sturgeon’s Law, 99% of food blogs are crap are not to my taste. People, it’s not enough just to shove a photo of a slice of cheesecake up there and assume that it will distract us all from bad layout, dud writing and uninteresting posts. Allow me to guide you through some basic principles.

I’ve got some rules about what I’ll read. (I didn’t sit down and plan these out or anything, these are just observed patterns of behaviour.) First rule is that you’ve got to be interesting. Time is short. Like my legs. Your skills with a baked ham may be beyond reproach, but if your writing is blabbery and unfocused, you’ll just sound like a nine year old who needs to pee LIKE RIGHT NOW, and you’ve lost me. No recipe is so awesome it’s worth trawling shit sentences.

Rule two! I am uninterested in your cupcakes. You can have photos of dear wee decorated cupcakes that moisten the panties of the masses: I can promise you they will not move my cold, dead heart. It will be as a marble heart carved on the tomb of your ancestors.

Third rule: if at any point your recipe suggests I have to open a packet of cake mix, brownie mix, powdered French Onion Soup mix, or any other prefabricated box of crap, my cursor is already hovering over the back button. Proceed with extreme caution, and know that the presence of two prepackaged ingredients is likely to result in a muttered curse and clearing Chrome’s history .There are exceptions, obviously: peanut butter, sriracha, mayonnaise, jam, Cointreau – I could go on). If you post a recipe that involves pre-grated cheese, you should be prepared for the repercussions. That chill on the back of your neck and those nightmares you’ve been having: yo. You deserved it. (If you post a recipe that involves cheese from a can, then you can expect carbuncles, bunions and plagues of dildos raining on your next garden party. That’s not me, that’s just divine justice, but I wholeheartedly support it.)

Rule the fourth! A sandwich is not a recipe. C’mon, put some effort in.

All of this boils down to one thing, and it holds true across the internet. Don’t waste people’s time. Never forget for a second that your brave little blog post is launched into the heaving, extra-spicy combination laksa of info, stories, pictures and games that is the internet, and your reader could be reading something waaaaay more interesting and informative at the click of a mouse. Give folks a reason to stick around and read your blog instead of, say, foodgawker, Wild Yeast or Rabbit’s Reviews. You’re asking someone to give their precious time and eye juices to you: to make it anything less than 100% worth their while is downright rude. And stupid.

I’m craving yoghurt and vegetables and nuts. That seems healthy until you start craving them in epic proportions.

I don't ask, I just listen. More vegetables, demanding tummy?

Today I thought I’d try some cooking. My bad recovering leg can tolerate some weight, and the crutches just piss me off in the kitchen, so I prop them up in a corner and get around by putting weight on the benches and so on.

I know what this stress fracture needs!

I’ll be the first to admit that I do like to overdo things. You’re not having fun unless you’re weeping with exhaustion and self-pity by the clothesline at the end of it, that’s what I always say. Overambition plus cravings for vegetables, raised to the power of self-congratulation after a successful cup of tea equals lunch! I took all the vegetables I could find and started chopping. The veggie cravings were one thing, but while I was slicing garlic and onions, I realised there was another itch to be scratched (damn oxycodone): the return to normalcy.

The surgery I had was really, really minor; so minor that when I tell people about it I avoid saying ‘surgery’ or ‘operation’ and use words like ‘thingo’ or ‘hospital visit’ or ‘mushrooms’ instead. But the longer effects have been rattling my cage a bit. I’ve been worrying about not being able to run, ride and drive, and I’ve been a bit grouchy about having to give up some plans. Getting behind a knife and slicing up some onions is such a normal, familiar thing it immediately reassured me.

All brought together!

It was still a bit too much: I’m pretty stiff and my bad recovering leg is tired and sore now. An easy peasy recipe, but I think I might have been moving around a bit too much. It’s a really simple crustless quiche (or baked frittata, if you like): some cooked potato and cubed broccoli stalks plus sauteéd onions/chilli/garlic/broccoli leaves plus some sliced cheese, all bound together with a few eggs and baked until set and tasty-smelling.

Things I learned about cooking with a dud leg:

• If you get into the habit of putting your hands on the edge of the bench to support your weight, you will eventually try to support your weight using the handle of the wok, extended temptingly over the edge of the bench.
• Your reflexes aren’t as good as you think they are, and even if they were, your leg is still slow.
• There really is no way of moving a hot dish out of the oven if you already need to support yourself with a hand while unencumbered with a big hot bowl.
• Your vast and glorious vision for Cooking All The Things was a delusion fed on fatigue and hospital-strength painkillers. Be realistic and maybe give foodgawker a break for a while.
• You’re probably not ready for kneading bread. No, not brioche either. Put Bertinet down.
• The smell of frying onions and garlic is a panacea, a mood enhancer and an appetite stimulant all in one. The smell of frying chilli is half glorious, half mace. Try to remember that you can’t get away from the fumes as quickly as you normally do. Either forego the chilli or accept a little cheerful weeping, coughing and snorfing over the sink.

So it’s probably a bit early to be cooking anything too ambitious — but here’s the tradeoff to weigh up: does the psychological/emotional benefit I get out of doing familiar, happymaking things erase the cost of the tired, sore leg? I’ll think about that after lunch.