Claypot chicken rice casserole!

The cat is still here. He likes 'ocean fish pate'. It's one of those cans with those tab-tops that break off. I had to use a can opener. The pate made him really excited.

We ended up not going out today and I cooked the claypot chicken rice casserole instead. It's amazing! You have to make it.

As always, I substituted with what I had: I used dark soy sauce with a splash of oyster sauce and cornflour (instead of cornstarch) in the marinade, and didn't use Chinese sausage.



Hob-cooking, just before baking in the oven.



Round cast-iron casserole from Procook. It's a pretty deep casserole for just the two of us and a little dish like this, but it'll be especially useful for cooking a large batch for lots of people.



What's left!

Nigella's Lone Linguine (but with spaghetti)

I had today off and went to a workshop about creating and giving museum tours instead, then had coffee with my friend Serena to commiserate about the pain of jobs.

James went to Oxford to see Mogwai, so I made Nigella's Lone Linguine with White Truffle. It's principally pasta with egg, butter, cream, pepper and truffle oil. Possibly not the healthiest of food, but it takes a few minutes - unless you're faffing about looking for ingredients and watching the iplayer like me - and the creaminess lessens mid-week despair a bit.

I used spaghetti instead of linguine since that's what I have, and I also believe they're the same except spaghetti is more tubular.

I find some pasta different, like I find fusili takes longer to cook than spaghetti, and I know the shells are better for sauce-type things that can settle in the little holes in the shells, and you can stuff the bigger shells. I think that pasta is mostly interchangeable and I use whatever I have.

This is what I believe.

I don't have enough kitchen space to justify having many different pasta types for different sauce types - I only keep two kinds: a long, thin pasta (I currently have spaghetti) and a representative from the chunky pasta family (currently: shells/conchiglie).

Truffle oil sounds fancy but can easily be got. Obviously there are artisan truffle oils just as there is artisan everything else (including spoons) but I used the fresh from the supermarket variety myself.



Urbani truffle oil, from Waitrose (review of bottle: bottle needs better screwcap).

I'm aware of the truffle oil controversy, but this is how I figure it: I'm not harvesting a truffle anytime soon, but I can get a 4.99 bottle of truffle oil to experiment with. With a 4.99 bottle I won't fear disappointment. Somehow I have a little bubbling feeling that truffles are massively over-rated. Possibly because they're rare and French.

My pasta was lovely.



I made a few adjustments: used spaghetti instead of linguine, colourful ground peppercorns instead of white pepper, didn't add Parmesan, but added a little bit of mushroom pate instead, with a bit on the side.



Pate-moi pate. Amazing!