Mmm - lunch...

[desperance]

I made pepperonata - red & yellow peppers, onions, garlic, one of last year's chillies, all softened together with tomatoes and good olive oil - which would have been the basis of a piperade if I'd stirred some eggs into it, but I scrambled the eggs separately with caramelised apple, because I had some really good black pudding from Richard Woodall to fry up in butter and serve with, and there is little nicer than black pudding and apple on the same plate. Except when there's egg there too, obviously, and a bit of pepperonata.

Sometimes it's good to be me.

Those of you who know me, though, will know that when I start writing a lot about cooking - and/or cats - it's because one of two things is happening; either the work is not going well, in which case I'm looking for displacement and hoping for approval both at once, or else the work is going well, in which case I'm barely leaving the house and not doing anything else worth writing about. Frankly, the full-on writing life can be very dull to describe; it's good to have garnish, whether that's food or felines.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'd been looking vaguely into the fridge, wondering what to do with old red peppers and some shallots.

Pepperonata is now cooking. Might add the egg. Haven't decided.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

C'mon, then - what more did you do, what else did you put into it, how flavoured, how did it taste, were you happy, would you do it again and if so what differently...?

(Sorry - these are the sorts of questions I always want to ask readers about their reactions to my books, but generally manage to hold myself back from, as being too egotistical for words [but so interesting...]. When people cook my food I'm less inhibited, because it isn't really my food to start with - pepperonata has been around since capsicums met olive oil, at a guess - and certainly isn't mine by the time someone else has cooked it. Granted that a book is no longer uniquely mine after someone else has read it, and that every reader reads a different book, but even so...)