saturday night dinner

 Tonight I got all fancy in the kitchen, making Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's beetroot tart tatin for the grown-ups and a simple mini beetroot tart for Dulcie.  Her individual tart turned out so cute that I had to photograph it.  I'm taking this baby on Masterchef!  Incidentally, I've gone off Gregg Wallace these days, I'm sure you'll all be relieved to hear.

 Hmm, food photography has never been my strong point.

Here it is alongside the grown-up version.  The reason I made Dulcie her own individual tart was so that I could leave out the salt and sugar that I added to ours, but in the end she pretty much demolished the shop-bought puff pastry (and all its salt) and left all the healthy beetroot.

 

I try to trust Dulcie to self-regulate a bit when it comes to what she eats and leaves in each meal.  A few days ago she couldn't get enough beetroot.  Tonight she ate pastry and potatoes, something she nearly always ignores, so I figure she needed carbs.  Well, that's the hope.  She did also have peas and a clementine so was not entirely fruit and veg free.

Anyway, you can see Dulcie enjoyed her food, but the main point of this post was supposed to be to inform you how much Graham and I enjoyed ours!  We planned to eat half the tart tonight and have the leftovers with salad for lunch tomorrow, but we couldn't resist scoffing the lot.  The tart does take quite a long time to make, but most of that time it's just sitting in the oven, so in terms of workload it is really very simple (if you're like me and cheat on the puff pastry).  I've cooked this for my family before and they all loved it too.  And if you're very lucky, it will make you pee pink!  Exciting!

In other tasty food news... last night I made us roast parsnips with parmesan and today used the leftovers (I made loads for this purpose) to make Covent Garden's parsnip and parmesan soup.  Holy frick, it was good.  If you do fancy making this soup, I wouldn't cook your parsnips quite so much as the lady who posted the recipe did.  If you make them too brown, the soup tastes a bit bitter and burnty as we have learned from previous experience.  Of course, since I am a domestic goddess these days (ha!) my soup was perfect today and not burnty at all.  Go me!