A Simple Supper

Nigel Slater is always banging on about pea and broad bean salads. Generally, I skip these bits of his cookbooks and move on to the bits where he's roasting joints of meat, slathering stuff in cream, etc, but after a week of eating far too many delicious-but-bowel-cancer-inducing pork products, I thought I'd give it a go. It turns out he's on to something. A salad of freshly podded peas, broad beans, pea shoots and shavings of raw courgette, a few fresh mint and parsley leaves, dressed with a simple lemon and oil dressing and topped off with some crumbly, creamy goats' cheese. Delicious. And it involves popping broad beans from their little grey skins, which makes me deliriously happy. Win-win.

Banoffee, King of Pies

Yesterday, I put an end to a lengthy Banoffee drought. When I first dicovered how easy they are to make, I was on several a month - not a healthy way to live, but definitely a delicious one. The combination of being simple to make and UNBELIEVABLY DELICIOUS is a dangerous one, but who cares? Here's my way of doing things:

Make a biscuit crumb base. I use dark chocolate Hob-Nobs. Crush them, mix with melted butter and pack into the bottom of a flan tin (ideally with removable sides). Put it in the fridge to harden up.

The next layer is the toffee. This process seemed utterly magical to me when I first did it, but it's probably very simple. Get a can of condensed milk, put it unopened in a big pan of boiling water, cover and leave it simmering for two hours. THAT'S IT. I don't understand how but when you open it, it will have turned into unbelievably tasty toffee-like-stuff. Oh, also, apparently this process is extremely dangerous and MAY RESULT IN DEATH. I'm not sure that this has ever actually happened, but every recipe I've read for Banoffee pie has come with this warning, so I thought I better pass it on. I think if you make sure the pan doesn't boil dry and open the tin at arm's length, you should probably survive the process. Assuming you have, spread the toffee over the biscuit base.

Layer slices of banana on top of the toffee, then whipped cream on top of that.

And that's it. There's lots of variations - in fact, the place where it was invented goes for a shortcrust pastry base rather than biscuit - but the above will make a pretty delicious pie. It tastes even better after the layers have been mingling together for a couple of days, so try not to eat it all in one sitting.