Dim sum, a pasta bake and banana bread

Sometimes I am confused.

My food shows this too.

Some people say that variety adds spice to life. 

I agree.  Especially when that is applied to food. 

So this is what I ate on one day at home.  A seemingly random assortment of food stuffs.  All the better because it didn’t seem to immediately fit together.

Xiu mai and har gao with genmaicha.  Much as I would like to say this is all home made, this was stored bought frozen from the local Chinese supermarket and then steamed up locally.  It did taste quite good though but maybe this is my faulty memory speaking.  It has been 7 weeks since I’ve eaten something which was not cooked at home…  How I miss food outside.

Prawn, chicken, onion, garlic and mushroom macaroni pasta bake with panko and Parmesan on top.  This was something really quite good.  Throughout this period at home, I have been trying more and more of the recipes from justonecookbook.  The website is run by a Japanese woman in American and her instructions and recipes are excellent.  She takes standard Japanese recipes or even Western dishes and shows you how you can make them better.  For example, who would have thought about adding soya sauce to a pasta bake with panko on top!

Banana bread with clotted cream icecream and genmaicha.  This was another suggestion from her online cook book.  I have always had a bit of a soft spot for bananas.  Even more so when it is part of a bread.  When combined with raisin, this a combination of some of my favourite things.  With the ice cream on the side and the tea to wash it down, the soft, bouncy and light bread with fruit flavouring for a delight.  I would say if I say so myself but I always thought that statement was rather unnecessary, this was one of the best cakes I’ve made.  Then again, I’ve only made less than a handful in my life, so it isn’t that hard!

So at the end of the rather random eating day, wondering what to do, what to cook, what goes with what, how much I should eat, what the ideal placement of the food is, what others would think, overcoming thoughts of comparison, and on and on, I think things turned out alright.  As although my mixture of food may not seem to have a central or easily identifiable theme, it seems marginally more coherent than the UK’s response to covid 19. 

Now, if they could just let out for a coffee the world would be a brighter place.