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It can easily be made without the bacon to be vegetarian.

When my husband and I first moved to South Africa, I struggled with the heat. I got there and felt sticky and full all the time, so the idea of eating food, let alone cooking it, was anything but appealing (don't worry, that changed, and some great recipes came out of our time there). Obviously sustenance was still required, so I looked up and started experimenting with various cold soups. Gazpacho is a classic, and living right in the middle of South Africa's food belt the watermelons were huge and beautiful and sweet and seemingly always available. What could be more natural than combining these two, producing watermelon gazpacho? Ingredients: 1/2 of a medium sized watermelon 1 medium onion 3 cloves of garlic (Beware: I am normally all for super-garlicking everything, but in this case it is overpowering. Start slow and add more if necessary,) 1 cucumber 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar A handful of basil leaves Salt and pepper 1 slice of bread (Optional) 1) Roughly chop all ingredients and blend - the consistency is up to you. Season to taste - you may need to add a little extra balsamic, depending on how sweet your watermelon is. 2) If your gazpacho appears too thin, blend in the slice of bread. 3) Chill and serve - good with croûtons. I find this soup to provide a refreshing and very light lunch, perfect for a hot day (we're in the middle of a heat wave now!) Since coming back from South Africa, watermelons are less plentiful, but whenever they are available this soup makes it back into rotation.

Here is another new twist on an old favourite. Having made a green curry for dinner, we had left over lemon grass and ginger (although we almost always have ginger on hand so I hesitate to call it left-over). Continuing on our soup for lunch trend, this made its appearance and proved an excellent addition to the repertoire. It can also easily be made vegan by switching the chicken stock to veg stock, too. Ingredients: 2 tbsp peanut oil 4 onions, chopped 1 (largish ) chunk ginger, chopped 8-10 carrots, chopped 1 sweet potato, chopped 2 c chicken stock 3 stalks of lemon grass, chopped salt to taste For garnish: Sesame oil Coriander Sumac 1) Heat oil in a heavy bottomed pot. Sauté onions and ginger until the onions are translucent. Add other ingredients and bring to a boil, then simmer until carrots are tender (30-40 min). 2). Blitz until smooth, drizzle over a little sesame oil, sprinkle with shredded coriander and some sumac and serve. Beautiful and warming. I love this new twist on an old favourite full of delicate (and not so delicate) flavours.

This recipe was a mistake, but it worked out both for savoury and sweet purposes so I thought I would share. I was preparing the ingredients for the onion rings recipe from Ottolenghi's Flavour cookbook, and I failed to read the recipe through before starting to mix things. I was working on the assumption of a batter, but as it turns out the recipe was for egging then flouring the onion rings. As such, being a bit of a numpty, I mixed the wet and dry ingredients together without really paying attention and then realised I had messed up. I set aside the batter I had begun and instead followed the recipe as it was actually written. I detest food waste, so the batter I had begun needed to find a use. The use I found for it was to turn it into pancakes. These I both cooked normally, and a few I deep fried (as I already had a pan of oil going), which had very interesting results. They got puffy and light and cooked faster. As a pancake variation they were tasty and I will revisit them in future. Being a mistake doesn't make them any less worthy of sharing! Ingredients: 1 c whey (or buttermilk) 2 1/2 tbsp white wine vinegar 1/2 tsp turmeric 1 1/3 c flour 2 1/2 tsp nigella seeds 2 tsp lime zest 2 tsp baking powder 2 eggs (or more accurately, 1 egg and 1 egg white as I used a yolk to make mayo) 1 tbsp butter 1) Mix the dry ingredients well with a fork. Gradually beat in the wet ingredients to form a thick-ish batter. 2) Heat a griddle or frying pan and butter. Drop batter onto the pan in two tablespoon dollops. Allow to cook at medium heat on the first side until little bubbles come to the surface and the pancake lifts away from the pan easily, then flip and cook for another minute. 3) Alternatively, if you want to deep fry them, make sure the oil in your pan is shimmering and hot. Drop the batter in in dollops and wait until they turn golden brown, turning once mid-way through. These came out really well, especially for a mistake! It had never occurred to me to put nigella seeds and turmeric in pancakes before, but they worked both with the onion rings and mayo and baked veg that I was originally making that night, and also for breakfast with butter and jam. definitely a win! Let me know what you think if you try them! When I made these (and perhaps a small amount of distraction from the cooking to focus on my book instead explains the mistake that led to their creation) I was listening to The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. I found it absolutely absorbing. Told as a biography of a brilliant man, set in an undefined future, it presents a beautiful picture of the society the narrative is set in, as well as pointing out its cracks... and those of our society too. I absolutely loved this book! My favourite by Hesse so far, but then I haven't yet read Narcissus and Goldmund,

I made pickles for the first time in the autumn. Bread and butter (sweet) cucumber pickles and spiced beetroot pickles. I made each a couple of times and was delighted to discover how easy it was to pickle. Based on those experiences, I decided to try my hand at an idea of my own, namely spiced pickled carrots. I had a hunch, so I read up a bit more on the pickling process and went for it. I made these in the winter sometime, but then they needed to sit for 3 weeks to mature, and then other things came up, so here they are now. Ingredients: 1 - 1,5 kg carrots 3 1/2 c apple cider vinegar 1 tbsp mustard seeds 1 c sugar 1 tsp salt 8 cloves garlic, sliced 2 1/2 - 3 " ginger, sliced 2 black cardamom pods, crushed 1 tsp turmeric 1) Place the vinegar and sugar in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add other ingredients and cook until the carrots are tender. 2) Meanwhile, sterilise your jars. Bring a big pot of water to the boil, and keeping it at a rolling boil, submerge the jars and their lids for at least 15 minutes. 3) Spoon the carrots into the jars, pour the vinegar over the top, wipe the rims of the jars and seal. Place the jars upside down until cool, then store in a cool dark place for about 3 weeks before opening them. When these were ready to go, I pulled them out at my parents' place first. They have been on the side of a quite a few meals since then and have proved a hit. I am pleased with how the spicing came out, and in general the idea worked as well as I could have hoped! Now for more pickling ideas...

Next on this winter's odyssey of marmalade batches is a lime one (and yes, I say "a lime marmalade" as I plan on making another one), and for this one, I decided to add gin and almond extract. Not sure exactly why I decided on this, but I am glad I did. I am afraid that with night shifts and a teething toddler (how many molars does one kid need?!) who is now in a big boy bed (woohoo for sleep disruptions again!) I opted for the easy, lazy method again. Ingredients: 1,5 kg limes (about 20 limes), halved 1,5 l water 3 c sugar 2 tsp almond extract 1 c gin 1) Squeeze the limes and place them and the water in a large heavy-bottomed pot. Bring to a boil and cook for about an hour until the limes have softened and the contents of the pot has begun to reduce. 2) Blitz and add the other ingredients. Continue cooking until the marmalade thickens to desired consistency. Taste test to check for sweetness and gin content. 3) Boil jars for 15 minutes to sterilise them, then spoon the hot marmalade into the jars. Wipe the rim clean, seal and place upside down on a tea towel to cool. This came out really well. No tonic in the jam, but it still tastes like a G+T (sort of) so I am sticking with the name. Unfortunately, the almond flavour doesn't come across much, but the lime does, and it proved a very popular spread when I brought a jar up to my parents' house for the weekend. Let me know what you think if you try it!

I really liked the first Rose Cake recipe I came up with in versions 1 and 2, but I wanted to try again using fresh petals. To try out two different ways of incorporating the rose into the cake, I split the butter cake batter and tried two versions. In version 3, I soaked the petals (mostly red this time) in the milk and then strained them out and continued with the batter normally. For version 4, I blitzed red rose petals into the milk before incorporating this into the batter. This turned out to be the best version, so it is the one I am including below! For these cupcakes, I made a butter frosting, incorporating rose petals blitzed with milk into a normal butter frosting. It was beautiful! This frosting also worked very nicely with lemon cupcakes, too, just, you know, if you're in that kind of a mood. Ingredients: For the cake: 1 3/4 c sugar 2/3 c butter 2 eggs 2 3/4 c flour 2 1/2 tsp baking powder 1 1/4 c milk 1/2 c fresh rose petals, roughly chopped For the frosting: 1/2 c butter, soft 1/2 - 3/4 c cream cheese, soft 1c (ish - this boils down to taste) powdered sugar 1/2 c fresh rose petals, roughly chopped 3 tbsp milk 1) Blitz together milk and rose petals. Let sit for 30 minutes to allow the rose flavour to infuse the milk. 2) Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time. 3) Mix flour and baking powder together, and add alternately with milk, starting and ending with flour. Mix well and pour into a prepared pan or cupcake tins and bake 30 -35 minutes at 177°C. Remove and cool on a wire rack. 4) Place butter and cream cheese in a bowl and beat until fluffy and homogenous. Gradually add the powdered sugar, taste testing until you like it. 5) Blitz rose petals with milk until smooth. Incorporate into frosting. Frost cake or cupcakes. I added slightly too much milk to my rose petals, so the frosting came out as more of a drizzle than a frosting, but it was very tasty just the same. The cake was light, fluffy and moist with a very nice crumb and a delicate rosy flavour. It was slightly bluish though because of the colouring of the rose petals once blitzed. I do want to try it with yellow rose petals for comparison, but so far, I am more than happy to stick with this.

The neighbour gave us a basket of chanterelles, and trying to decide what to do with them, a recipe we tried a few years ago came to mind. I don't remember where the recipe was from, and don't have it saved anywhere (at least, not to my knowledge), but I tried to sort of recreate it from memory, with a couple of ingredient swaps. So here is what came out of that. Ingredients: 5 onions, whole 3 c whey 1 tsp herbes de Provence 1-2 tsp dried orange peel 1 tbsp butter (and some for greasing the baking dish) 4 c (approx) chanterelles 1 c cream 1 c barley Salt and pepper to taste 1) Place the onions in a saucepan and pour over the whey (my whey was half yogurt whey, which is more acidic, and half ricotta whey). Add herbes de Provence and orange peel, salt and pepper to taste and bring to a simmer. 2) Meanwhile, melt butter in a frying pan. Add chanterelles and cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes, allowing the mushrooms to render their liquid. Mine gave up quite a lot, so instead of draining it in the sink, I poured the extra liquid over the onions. 3) Add cream and pepper to the chanterelles and stir. Cook for a few minutes, allowing the sauce to thicken, then cover and set aside. Butter an oven proof dish. 4) When the onions are tender when stabbed with a knife, transfer to the baking dish, reserving cooking liquid. Pour barley into the saucepan with the cooking liquid and cook until al dente - 15 to 20 minutes. 5) Pour the contents of the saucepan into the baking dish (it's ok if there is still a little liquid), arranging the barley snugly around the onions. Pour the chanterelle sauce over the onions and barley and place in a pre-heated oven at 180°C for about 10 minutes. This was delightfully warm and filling, without being heavy. The onions were sweet and tender, and the barley and mushrooms complemented them very nicely. I am not sure if this is exactly what we had a few years ago, but it certainly worked well! I might omit the oven step next time and see how it goes though. It might have helped marry the dish and the flavours a little, but I am not sure. Anyway, a big hit with all three of us, and then it held up very well as a left-over lunch at work for me (mostly blind with almost no onions or mushrooms, but still tasty). This could work well as a side course with meat, or with bits of bacon or something in it too.

As mentioned in Day 34 of The Challenge Mushroom season is here now too! (I know, so many seasons... plums, pumpkins and now mushrooms, but that is the beauty of autumn and the harvest season. My tomatoes are coming in too, as are little cucumbers on my balcony garden). Chanterelles are ridiculously over priced most of the year, but suddenly in September and October they aren't! They are almost like a normal food! So we got a little wooden basket of them from the store and made... a tart! Ingredients: Crust: (you can use a store bought crust if you want, but this is also very quick and easy, I promise! It is better if you have a half hour to let it chill before rolling it out, but it still works if you don't) 3/4 c flour 1/2 c cold butter, cut into pieces pinch of salt 1/4 (approximate) water Tart: 250g of fresh chanterelles 1 1/2 c fresh cheese (the eat with a spoon-fresh like quark or blanc battue) a few sprigs of fresh thyme 1 tsp of dried sage 1 tsp butter salt and pepper to taste 4 zucchini flowers 1/2 tsp dried mint 1 tbsp parmesan 1 tsp olive oil Salt and Pepper to taste 1) To make crust, mix flour and salt. Cut in pieces of butter and mix together with fingertips until it forms a crumb like texture. Add water and mix with a fork, then knead into a soft dough. 2) Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes. 3) Mix the fresh cheese, reserving 1/4 c of it, with the thyme, sage, salt and pepper. Add 1 tbsp of water. 4) Roll out the crust to approximately 1 cm thick and line the bottom of a pie plate with it, and stab with a fork to create breathing holes. 5) Spread the fresh cheese over the crust in a thin layer. 6) Sauté the chanterelles briefly in the butter to allow them to give up their liquid (we didn't the first time making a mushroom tart and it was tasty, but swimming), then drain them (reserve the liquid if you want for use elsewhere) and sprinkle them over the cheese layer. 7) Take the remaining fresh cheese and mix it with the mint and some salt and pepper. Using a teaspoon, gently fill the zucchini flowers with it. 8) Place these on top of the tart and drizzle the olive oil over them. 9) Salt and pepper to taste and bake at 200°C for about 20 minutes. Serve warm with a side salad. Light but warm, it made a good lunch for an early autumn day, and easy to assemble too.

Have I ever mentioned how much I like chestnuts? Ever? Maybe once or twice, with the Chestnut Cookies, Caramel Chestnut Risotto, or Chestnut Puddings... They are a seasonal must for me around Christmas, and I absolutely love them. The smell of them roasting conjures up images of Christmas markets, hot chestnuts in paper bags, burnt fingers and the delicious sweet earthy flesh warming you from the inside... For Christmas, we usually have pumpkin pie and mincemeat pie, but this year we decided to add in a new one, Chestnut Pie. Somehow, bouncing around ideas about something else entirely, and the idea of trying a chestnut pie came up. Other ideas are still pending testing, but the one we decided to make a reality is along the same lines as a pecan pie. However, those involved in the discussion agreed that pecan pie is generally too sweet, so we reduced the amount of sugar. I also don't like corn syrup, so instead, we used honey and citrus syrup left over from making Candied Peel. We also figured that the citrus would balance out the earthy flavour of the chestnuts. To address the sweetness, we also made a thin pie in a large dish rather than a deep one. For the first try, we used frozen chestnuts (defrosted, of course), but raw. I had thought that 40 minutes in the oven would be enough to cook them, but it wasn't. In the second try, therefore, I used cooked chestnuts, boiling some first (saving the chestnut water, we'll see what it will come in handy for. Oatmeal maybe?), some I roasted. For the pie crust, I used vinegar syrup from making pickled plums this summer. The added flavour was interesting, but a regular pie crust would work fine. Ingredients: Pie crust: 1 1/2 c flour 1/3 c butter, cold and cubed 1/3c milk/whey/plum vinegar syrup Filling 1 kg chestnuts 3 tbsp butter 1/2 c light brown sugar 1/2 c honey 1/2 c citrus syrup (use molasses or maple syrup if need be. Or more honey) 3 eggs 1) In a large bowl, rub the butter and flour together until you achieve a wet sandy texture. Stir in the liquid, gathering into a dough, manipulating as little as possible. Chill. 2) In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugar. Stir in honey and syrup, then beat in eggs. 3) If using raw chestnuts, boil for about 10 minutes until tender. Then roast about half at 190°C for 15 minutes (alternatively, I did it in the air fryer). 4) Roll out pie crust, and line a pie plate with it. Pour in the chestnuts, and then the batter. Bake at 180°C for 40min. Allow to cool and set, then serve at room temperature. I really liked this pie! And even the pecan pie doubters (*cough* Hubby) enjoyed it. I liked it better the first time around, but the chestnuts were better cooked the second time around. I would merely use pre-cooked chestnuts or boil them next time, and skip the roasting. I would also deliberately use light brown sugar. The second time I used dark brown sugar, and I think that worked less well, although that opinion was not unanimous. The pie crust worked, but a regular one would have worked equally well. The citrus syrup definitely worked, and I may even add orange zest or candied orange peel to this pie next time. We also used double the amount of chestnuts the second time around, making it super chestnutty. I would maybe split the difference in future and use 750g. The first time we had it with whipped cream, and the second time with mascarpone. Both work, but I think I preferred it with whipped cream.