Documentaries, not dishes

Nasty hormonal dragon has been in the process of unfurling itself over the past few days any my mood has been chancy at best. So yesterday I cooked and watched David Attenborough documentaries to calm myself down. Mock me if you will but it works better than marijuana, which as much as I love it only delays the bad mood instead of nipping it neatly off the branch. I mean, look at this shit:



And did you know there are rhododendron forests in Nepal? How can you stay mad when there are rhododendron forests in Nepal and lyre birds are so fucking awesome? Quite easily probably but that's not the rhododendron forest's fault, nor the lyre birds'.

So yes, I also cooked, and for once deigned to bake a dessert though I'd always figured that for women's work. Of course if was only banana bread but it still turned out divinely, and considering I had to alter all recipes out of recognition to manage it with the ingredients we had on hand I'll put it here:

100 g whole spelt flour
200 g white flour
1.5 teaspoon baking soda
sprinkle salt teaspoon
cinnamon
100 grammes butter
4 large scoops creamy honey
2 beaten eggs
4 (over)ripe bananas

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (6 on my oven). Grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and honey. Smush in bananas with hands. Whisk in beaten eggs; mix until well but not completely blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture; stir just to moisten. Pour batter into loaf pan. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes, until fork inserted into center of the loaf comes out clean. Let the cake cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.

Moist and lovely. Top marks. I made another for a friend whose birthday it is today but smashed up a Côte d'Or dark chocolate bar and put that it too, so we'll see how it turns out.

Also baked bread - same process as last week but remembered the salt this time and the rising consistency was still good, so looks like we have a winner. Put diced bitter olives into two of the loaves at the shaping stage and it was great. And made a heavyish lentil pasta dish because summer is apparently over here, from this book, Tuttopasta, by Franco Marenghi. First recipe I've used from it - the F-word bought it last week, I think - and it was great. It looks like a great book altogether - simple recipes, good process instructions, pretty pictures.

I'm half-guinea and I've been a hungry university student, so one would think I know my pasta by now, and I do more than most Anglos, certainly. But it's only in the past five years, being a skinflint, not overfond of meat, and and then living with a man who wants to be a vegetarian, that I'm really exploring what can be done with pasta that hasn't been deeply animal flavoured. In my parent's home, we would eat meat twice a day. Three times on weekends. That's a lot of animal, especially considering how comparatively little animal Daddy's family eats in Calabria and Mummy's parents eat in Yorkshire. But it's such a predictable pattern, you know? Europeans are happy to condemn the over-consumptive lifestyle of Americans, but most Americans are just a bunch of Europeans who went to America because they wanted to eat more, and most Europeans are just Americans who were either too scared, snotty, or skint to make the jump. So what the fuck does anybody expect?