Glorious Bounty!

Hello everyone. I thought I'd share this picture of the railings by St Giles church in Northampton. I passed last week when I was in town sorting out things for the launch of a book I edited. These shoes look a bit too pristine to be recycled, but what an idea! An interesting way of displaying plants while celebrating Shoe Town.

 

 Part of me likes to think these might be the shoes of drunken women exiting Bridge Street clubs in the wee small hours, cast off Cinderella-like to the gutter, only to be ignored by the be-Ben-Shermaned princes of the town. Alas.

Anyway, despite the weather being hotter than Aiden Turner (i.e. very, very hot), things on my allotment are still alive! It's looking very fruitful indeed.

 

I got given a load of spinach by one of my allotment neighbours, so I made spinach and ricotta cannelloni! OMG, this was flipping tasty.

I got the broad idea from Jamie Oliver's website, except if I had followed his recipe, this would have been a lot more expensive.

I used no-pre-soak lasagna sheets for the cannelloni, and just soaked them a bit so I could shape them, which was filled with a mix of cooked spinach with nutmeg, a tub of ricotta  and an egg. I topped this with a sauce made of passata, flavoured with garlic, bay and basil.  Jamie Oliver's recipe called for Mozzarella and Parmesan on top, but I didn't want to go out to buy fancy cheeses, rendering the dish a lot more costly, so I made a small amount of white sauce and grated over cheddar instead.

After 40 minutes at 190 C, it was ready!

And I ate way too much...

Really enjoying being back to veggie. No more weight off, but I feel trimmer.

Right, will finish this blog post now, but will be back to talk about my amazing weekend!