Dear Friends,
While I have been profoundly absent from cisforkitchen, it is not for lack of cooking.
Here are four delicious, time consuming, and at times decadent recipes I've made in the past few months that I think you would all be the happier for (cooking and) eating.
Wintery Spring Rolls (from 101 Cookbooks) take far longer than 30 minutes allotted in the recipe but well worth it nonetheless. Mostly I've made them to bring for flights or lunches on roadtrips, and they've been great for that. These are not that decadent, but they make up for that in tastiness. (Also this is vegan and gluten free)
Summer Lasagna was probably the most delicious way I've ever eaten fresh tomatoes and basil. For something so decadent and delicious it's also quite light and not too expensive, unless you splurge on buffalo mozarella. This recipe tells you to make the lasagna noodles by using a pasta machine (which I did) but if you don't have one you could probably just as successfully roll it out by hand.
Sweetcorn Polenta with Eggplant Sauce is a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi that was blogged about on Food 52. Basically you make polenta out of fresh corn (which is sweet and savoury and perfect in an unreal way) and top it with an eggplant sauce made with tomatoes, oregano, and more. I found the eggplant sauce was tastier with a bit of lemon juice which isn't in the recipe. Also, this meal goes well with a simple salad to balance the ecstasies of butter and oil that go into the other parts of the meal. (And Gluten Free!)
Lemon Curd Tart with Olive Oil was a relatively straightforward recipe with the interesting twist of olive oil instead of butter which made it more savoury, which I liked. The dough is a bit hard to work with because it gets soft really easily, but if you read the reviews there are tips that are useful - like putting the tart pan in the freezer before putting the dough in, and treating the dough as a paste you spread out rather than like a traditional dough that is firmer.
Enjoy!!!
xx