A few recent experiments (by which I mean “recipes I hadn’t tried before” rather than me inventing things).
A relatively healthy potato gratin / dauphinois using cauliflower cream (literally a head of cauliflower, chopped up and cooked with onion and soy milk, and then blended into a cream). Very nice!
Corn and courgette fritters. Yum.
Some extremely green burger patties made with chickpeas, lots of coriander and mint leaves, peas (minted; oops), and… I forget what else went into these. They were definitely minty. I shan’t make these again, but they were too green not to take an (out-of-focus) photo of.
Making zucchini bread with a yellow squash seemed immediately odd to me, in spite of them being functionally identical… it’s just something I’ve never done I suppose because many Americans are picky about vegetables on principle, so we need to put something green in it as a sort of warning… don’t want to bite into a lemon cake and discover it’s actually a “courgette” cake
They are just a yellow variety of courgette (‘atena’, for anyone who’s interested). They taste identical to the green ones. I did warn the recipients of the cake that it would have vegetables in it though
Edit: the cake tasty pretty good. Very lemony and not very courgettey
Been on a bit of a push to eat a bit better and get exercising more.
Spent an evening making up a range of hummus varieties for the odd veggie dinner or 2:
Regular hummus base
Lemon & cracked black pepper
Roasted red pepper
(Air fryer) dried tomato
Pesto
Nice, surprisingly filling dinner of a selection of carrots, cucumber, celery, peppers etc and a few very quick flatbreads (50:50 self-raising flour and yoghurt, bit of salt; mixed in a food-processor, rolled and 5-6 mins in the air fryer or a pan; all done in 10 minutes)
I love making hummus. One of my go-to flavours is smoky paprika (either using smoked paprika or, my preference, regular paprika plus a bit of liquid hickory smoke), which is really good with carrots.
Basil pesto is great as well. I love your method of identifying the flavours!
A colleague gave me a load of home-grown cooking apples, so today I made Dorset apple traybake. It is also unseasonably hot, so I did the mixing in the garden.
We had our housewarming party and we made a lot of things:
smoked 3 pork shoulders for pulled pork
some sausages for the kids
grilled feta with tomatoes, onions & garlic for the vegetarian crowd
salsa (also smoked some ingredients) with nachos
cole slaw to go with the pork
greek orzo salad (noodle salad with all the ingredients of a typical greek salad
cheesy oat crackers (I do these all the time, one of my default recipes)
waffles (see above)
chocolate cookies (slowly returning to “default recipe” status)
porcini butter (when there is none at parties, people are disappointed)
basic hummus and veg plate
Also our guests brought a bunch of salads, snacks and cakes. Because that’s what we do.
And as leftovers we got 3 pieces of cake, some oat-crackers, a bag of nachos, some salsa and a bit of hummus & and a few portions of 3 salads.
Our friends ate all the cake except for three pieces.
Then they vanished the appetizer buffet.
And I thought for sure that we’d have days of eating pulled pork ahead… because by the time that was on the table, they had to be stuffed.
But they finished off all 3 pork shoulders like they were nothing.
They also drank up about 5 24xcases of various beery and non-alcoholic drinks and something like 7 or 8 bottles of wine.
It was a good party But we need to work on kitchen logistics in my new kitchen. And we need more plates. And apparently despite all the bottled drinks more water glasses.
We had a couple because we usually had 1 BBQ on Jan 6. And we even had a distributed BBQ that first covid January with everyone doing stuff at home and meeting up to eat on Jitsi. Jan 6 is ribs usually. Pulled Pork is reserved for summers and we have not had that since 2019 as far as I remember. That was the last time we had a party here. Not only because covid but because last summer we were renovating and the summer before we thought we were starting to renovate and my dad had moved and generally the house didn’t permit the logistics of a party, so we had a smaller one at the apartment.
It was quite subtle because I didn’t smoke all the ingredients. Next time I would do more tomatoes on the smoker. And a bit more spice with the chilies. Mostly I remove the kernels, I should have roasted 1 of them whole. But yeah, it tastes quite delicious.
I’ve been making a variation of this salsa for quite some time now.
tomatoes (roasted or smoked or just from the tin)
1 red onion (raw or smoked)
garlic (i prefer roasted or smoked)
at least one fresh chili (raw or smoked) or as much as you enjoy. I often use jalapenos.
some chili powder
as much cilantro as you enjoy (none feels like the salsa is missing something)
sugar, red wine vinegar (not citrus!), salt to taste
Put it in the mixer and mix. One could probably also use a knife to get a less puree consistency.
I make this more often than we smoke something though. So cannot always have it smoky.
The original recipe is from a book called “The Border Cookbook - Authentic Homecooking of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico”
I suppose because many Americans are picky about vegetables on principle, so we need to put something green in it as a sort of warning… don’t want to bite into a lemon cake and discover it’s actually a “courgette” cake 
