Normandy pork with crusty bread

This is another recipe from the BBC website. As always, just click on the title of this entry for the recipe. I modified the recipe by quite a bit. I added fresh mushrooms and carrots to the casserole, and I added a bit of cream to the sauce before I baked it under the grill. I also sprinkled some cheese on top of it before I served the dish to M. The taste of this dish is alright, although it would be much better, if instead of condensed mushroom soup, chicken stock and porcini mushrooms or any other strong tasting mushrooms were used as the base for the casserole. I would also add more cream to it. I will experiment more with this recipe one day.

Belgos

Since I moved to London, there is one restaurant that I have been to, more often than any other eating places here, and that's Belgos, a Belgium seafood restaurant. Last weekend, we were there for dinner. Belgos is clearly a very popular venue as even though we were there at 6pm, there was a 1 hour waiting period as we were without a reservation. We had to walk around Covent Garden for a while. The starters were as unexceptional as ever. We ordered chicken liver pate, cheese sticks and a smoked haddock and potato soup. There's nothing really much I can say about them. The only reason why anyone should go to Belgos is the 1kg Steamed Mussel Pots. We ordered the Green Thai Curry, and the Traditional (white wine sauce) mussel pots. The portions were as enormous as ever, they are 1 kg each after all and the mussels were large and juicy. For 12 pounds, this is actually quite a good deal for seafood in London.

M's favourite food: Rosti

This is undeniably M's favourite food: Rosti and to be precise, creme fraiche since, as you can see in the picture, she's perfectly capable of eating a spoonful of creme fraiche without anything else to eat it with. This is, therefore, one of those recipes that M forces me to make, on a very regular basis. I think it's three times in a week so far. She bugs me so often about it that she's actually willing to make it herself when I refuse to do so. But sadly, she is not very receptive to instructions. To cook this, you have to first grate the potato and mix it with melted butter then season it with salt and pepper. Then, you are supposed to fry it with olive oil until the potato is crispy and cooked on both sides. Unfortunately, she has an unhealthy obsession with butter and so she decided to fry it with butter instead of olive oil. What happened was that the butter turned brown rapidly, burning the rosti in the process. She was quite distraught to find a blackened rosti when she removed it from the pan.

Thankfully, I can follow instructions and so it looks perfectly fine today.