Pizza

Pizza on Saturday nights is a family tradition, usually in front of a movie, with garlic bread and whatever cake we've made that day. For years I made pizza with ready bought bases, until bread baking hit me. Now it's joined the growing list of Foods We Waste Money Buying When Making It Ourselves Is So Much More Fun (not to mention cheaper and more rewarding, plus less salt, fat and additives). I refuse to join the voices of those who insist that deli bought AA Italian flour is the only way to go. It isn't. But that depends why you are making it. I make it because it's something fun I can do with my kids, and because, well, if you only have one functioning leg then it's hard to get sniffy about where and how I buy my flour.

Our pizza bases come up thin, stretchy and crunchy. They taste sweet and oily at once. They soak up passata a treat. The dough makes loads and loads of pizza. The scent of them fills the house in a way that calls, eat and enjoy, rather than, have hangover! Must call Dominoes! They are misshapen and bumpy and quirky. They are what bread looked like before supermarkets were invented.

Milk Tart

There is a definite theme of comfort food emerging for which I make no apology. Nobody ever made the same appreciative noises eating even the nicest of my healthy dishes as they do when they attack the cake. But milk tart, which I encountered for the first time when I lived in South Africa for a spell, has a comfort magic all of its own. If you get the timing of your filling right, then what you get is a mouthful of spicy, cinnamon crust, with melting, unctuous, slightly frothy, light but substantial, utterly deliciously vanilla-y, wobbly custard like topping. This is the cake where nobody ever has just one slice. It's brilliant as breakfast, tea, dessert, picnic food...I have taken it twice as a gift for a sick person, and it was snarfed up before I had left, on both occasions. I made it today as a reward for managing to get on and off a bus for the first time - with arms like Popeye's from 6 weeks of crutch- hopping, I could probably jump on to the back of a truck at this point, but I thought I would limit my ambition for now. The thought of tea and milk tart on completion of my mission was enough to put turbo drive into my hobble, to the amusement of some construction workers I charged past on my way down the hill.

On the subject of crutches, it is amazing how strangers have to talk to you about what you might have done to yourself. It's like when you're pregnant and total strangers pat your bump.Paralympics, is the most oft-used word, usually by witnesses to my turbo-hop down the hill. Skiing, is another (I have never skiied in my life). And people talk more loudly. Guys, here is a tip. Foot surgery does not make you deaf.

Comfort. Again.

Back to the office today for the first time in 6 weeks, and a pretty traumatic experience, between navigating the unpredictable steps and kerbs, working out how to get a cup of tea from the office kitchenette to my desk, and fielding the endless query "What have you done to yourself then?" (my latest tactic is to look straight at the questioner unblinkingly and say "Nothing". Which, though verging on the obnoxious, is not a lie.) Home hours later and I'm exhausted and wondering whether going back to work while still on crutches is the cleverest thing I've ever done. I decide to reward myself and my family with Special Fried Chicken for dinner. The coating for the chicken is one I picked up from a friend who said it was an old Jewish Eastern European recipe. What was in it, I asked eagerly. Matzo meal, she said. Vegetable stock. Spices. And guilt.

Shortbread

Lavender shortbread. Nope, don't get it. Lavender's what you find in pot pourri in those chintzy shops in touristy villages isn't it? No, if I'm going to experiment with shortbread, and I just have, then it's chocolate (quelle surprise),almond, orange, lemon...and more chocolate. So. Tea with neighbours included choc chip shortbread, orange and almond shortbread cookies, and, um, triple chocolate shortbread. Well I wasn't so much experimenting as playing. You know. Like arts and crafts.

The Jubilee Bake Off

The arch-organiser in our cul de sac announced this week that we would be having a Jubilee street party this year. Greaaaat, I respond with a wide smile, count me in. Inside, my heart sinks. Ok, on the day I am sure it will be lovely. But the last time we did this, the rows we neighbours had aged us all 10 years. What did we row about? The food. We had worked out a simple formula, which was that we would all bring food representative of our cultures. So the four Jewish families put heads together and have a discussion that goes, I'll bring bagels. No, I will bring bagels. You can't bring bagels, you're Sephardi! What's the difference? I will make fish balls. How do you make your fishballs? Make sure you don't overdo it on the onion! Hang on, we can't All bring fish balls. You get the picture. I ended up bringing houmous and cheese and onion crisps, thus failing comprehensively to deliver on the brief. How to navigate the choppy waters this time? Well, it won't be that long after Passover. I might just lay the table with leftover matzah. By the way, has anyone noticed that Jamie Oliver refers to matzah as "biscuits"? BISCUITS? Has he ever bitten in to a matzah cracker? Well, I guess chowder and cardboard makes for a lot less attractive 30 minute cooking...

Chocolate truffle cheesecake

The love affair with cheesecake continues. I watched Hairy Bikers chugging into Belgium, and then became mesmerised as they first rolled their own handmade chocolate truffles, then proceeded to make a chocolate cheesecake, and placed their beautiful truffles, one by one, around the top. Chocolate truffle cheesecake. It's a Master cheesecake, the Cheesecake Czar. It's at least two desserts in one, it's piggy and posh, it's chocolate and chocolate, I had to give it a go. I melted milk chocolate, added honey and cream, let it semi solidify, grated dark chocolate shards on to a work surface, rolled my truffles so they were coated in dark chocolate shards, and admired my handiwork.

And then?

Let's just say I lost focus. And will have to start all over again tomorrow.

Comfort cooking

Minestrone soup, fried fish, sourdough bread and chocolate pudding. All made by me in recent days. I am no budding Masterchef contestant, which liberates me to make whatever the hell food combination I like, and these foods are filed in my mental database under Comfort Food. Do you eat when you are depressed? I cook when I am down. Of course, I cook when I am up as well. Or any other direction. But my food matches my feelings, and when I am particularly sick of dragging my left leg around in a huge surgical boot, it's food that smells rich and warm - tomatoey, oily, chocolatey, and doughy - that meets the mood. And since there is none left of any of it, I conclude that it meets the moods of my family and various visitors too...

Hospital food

If you go cattle class at my local hospital, one I have frequented so often of late that I should really be getting money off loyalty vouchers, you get served inedible slop. What the food lacks in eatability, however, they make up for in spades with liquid. Huge water jugs by the bed are refilled so often there is a constant queue for the loos. First class however is completely the reverse. The food is beautifully presented with embossed napkins and shiny cutlery, and tastes not half bad. But no water jug. Instead you get chaste mini bottles of mineral water, one a day. I am still struggling to make sense of the paradox that presumably results in dehydryated posh people up in the gods and undernourished riff raff in the back carriage.

Bread

Very busy friends who I had wanted to see for ages came over yesterday, enticed away from their relentless schedules by the seductive promise of homemade bread. Homemade bread on a Sunday morning has become an established tradition in our home. It used to be pancakes, and it says something about the wonderfulness of homemade bread that my kids don't miss the pancakes and that the bread is history less than an hour after it comes out of the oven. Yesterday it was honey and walnut bread, taken from a freebie River Cafe bread booklet that fell out of a Sunday supplement years ago. It takes around 15 minutes to prepare and 20 minutes to bake. The house fills with a honey, bready smell, just as the rest of the house is making its befuddled way to breakfast. There is all manner of shortcuts in making honey and walnut bread but I have turned Neanderthal and use a pestle and mortar to grind my walnuts because oh wow oh wow oh wow, it gives texture to the bread that can't be beat - nutty, earthy, if I lived in St Johns Wood I would call it ARTISAN (and I would be flogging it for £6 a pop). It's brilliant with butter, with drippingly runny honey,with cheese, or just hot and on its own. It's bread to read newspapers over. And, as a successful brunch proved yesterday, it's bread to make friends with.

Yellow

I can't claim that it is Spring that is making me obsess about yellow things. Have you checked the weather in the last half hour? No? Do it. I guarantee you if the sun is shining now, in 30 minutes' time it will be pouring, wind howling, and the temperature will have dropped by 10 degrees. Check again an hour after that and you may see snow. Or you may find yourself running to find shorts and a bikini. Point is, it's not the gentle onset of Spring that is driving me in the direction of lemon zest. It is more likely to be about a mixture of menopause and mid life crisis. I have always hated yellow, and I have always disdained the use of bags.I have been a weekend Kipling backpack stalwart for years. But in the last year two things have changed. Firstly, I have, seemingly inexplicably, bought a beautiful and mildly costly shoulder bag for work. And secondly, I have entered the world of lemon cakes. Given that if you do anything lemony it involves grating zest, which also means grating fingers and fingernails, and therefore is an extreme labour of love and masochism - OMG nothing compares to lemon juice sting in paper cuts - it has to be about the hormones.

Whatever. Last week it was Nigella's lemon polenta cake, using half her recommended butter (I want people to enjoy their dessert without dropping dead of hardened arteries). Today it was the Magnolia Bakery's lemon curd layer cake. Both smell of Spring,even if the weather doesn't. The layer cake wins the prize for the Most Aesthetic Batter. I stirred it hypnotically for 20 minutes before surrendering it reluctantly to the cake tins. Which is probably why they came out of the oven a foot higher than the picture. All that air. Right. Now to find a lovely yellow bag to match.

Toffee crisp and toasted almond cheesecake

I sort of have the Magnolia Bakery to thank for this one. Theirs is about Heath Bars. But I'm a Brit. We don't do Heath Bars. So. Toffee crisp it was. I thought I had reached the pinnacle of cheesecake heaven with White chocolate and amaretto. How wrong could I be. To celebrate this discovery, I followed it up with chocolate pecan peanut butter brownies. Then I had to stop. The fibreglass cast cracked at the knee. You can only kneel on it for so long. Who knew...

White chocolate

So, the thing about baking with one leg in plaster, is that you need very long arms - to reach all the stuff you need without keeling over sideways - and yes it has happened, and thank goodness nobody was there to see me crash ingloriously into the sink with a blue fibreglass leg hanging in the air - and you need a great deal of patience. So my need to bake stuff, which has always stemmed from a place that was about relaxing, chilling, taking time out with the kids - has morphed into the challenge. If it's going to take so long anyway, why not try stuff I've never baked before? Meringue stacks? Triple layered walnut cakes? Stuff that has to simmer at the perfect temperature to infuse? A few days back I found myself melting white chocolate, just to enjoy its texture. I hadn't given a second's thought to what I would do with it. I spent a good quarter of an hour trickling it from a spoon, mesmerising myself with its molten creaminess. Eventually I returned to the land of the living, and turned my concoction into white chocolate truffles, rolled in grated dark chocolate. Yum YUM.

Plaster cast as fashion accessory

Have caught myself dressing to match my swish blue fibreglass cast. It comes off on Tuesday, and if they decide it needs replacing, I might go for pastels. They are very now, after all, and it would be like a quirky accessory: yellow pleated skirt, pastel pink t shirt, lilac leg.