A week of new recipes

Last week I managed to make great headway on my 52 in 2010 challenge with not one, not two, but three new recipes tried during the course of the week!

The first came from the wonderful Apples for Jam
and was for a simple beef stew with carrots. Not necessarily the most exciting dish in the world, but a good hearty winter meal all the same. Served up with some home-made mash this was very welcome of a bitterly cold evening. The carrots added a certain something that gave it a slight step up on most beef stews.

After being inspired by seeing Nigel Slater's cookery programme on the TV recently, my next two dishes came from his book Real Cooking
which has been on the shelf for a while now with us only having tried about one recipe from it previously. 

 

The first I tried was pasta with spicy sausage and mustard which was very similar, but slightly different, to something that I saw him cook on the TV. This has to be one of the quickest meals I've ever made. Sub fifteen minutes to go from starting to one the table and one definitely worth remembering as a quick thing to do for supper. The dish itself was very tasty with the combination of mustard and chilli flakes giving it a super edge.

I then also tried the one directly below it in the book: pasta with caramelised onions, basil and cream. Again a lovely creamy dish, but despite the lovely caramelised onions this one was lacking a certain something. We served it initially as a side dish with some grilled chicken and it provided a good meal, but with something definitely missing. If I were to do it again I may well look to add some crispy bacon, or possibly (as I did when I had the leftovers for lunch the next day) add in some sun-dried tomatoes. 

My final note on these Nigel Slater recipes is the amount of pasta he suggests using for two people. In both the book says between 250 and 300g of dried pasta, but this seems an awful lot for two people. Saving the leftovers for lunch the next day certainly isn't a problem for us, but it seems strange that so much is suggested in the recipe. Has anyone else noticed similar with any of his other recipes?

(Or, as Mr C thinks, do you think he's actually looking quite Alan Bennett like on this latest TV series?)