Just because I happen to live contentedly alone in my little Holešovice studio does not mean that I necessarily want to subsist on my classic standby of Norsky Salat pasta and Maggi-Mee noodles every night in between all my many and varied restaurant visits lately.

For this reason, quite often I’ll cook up a big batch of something at the weekend, freeze half, and then live of the other half for the rest of the week – this week’s job lot, for example, being my Mum’s delicious red wine sauce.

This is dead easy to make, but time-consuming in that it needs a good couple of hours to condense down to a really flavoursome sauce. Basically all you need to do is finely chop two large onions and two garlic cloves and sauté in olive oil till tender. Then add three tins of chopped tomatoes, a few glugs of red wine (any cheap plonk will do, keep the good stuff for drinking yourself!), a handful of mixed herbs, some black pepper, and bring to the boil. Turn the temperature down and simmer on a low heat for up to two hours, until the sauce becomes really thick.

Serve with fresh basil and parmesan on pasta, or with roasted aubergine and feta cheese.




Yum... ;-))

I am well aware, dear readers, that after my entry on best risotto recipes a couple of weeks ago, some of you fellow foodies out there have since been constantly plagued by the ever-present thought: "but whatever happened to the other half of that butternut squash"?????

Well, people, I will keep you in suspense no longer - I actually made it into soup.

Fried up a small onion in butter, added a couple of pinches of cumin seeds and a few strips of fresh ginger, then added the butternut squash in chunks and sautéed for a few moments. Next I added some hot vegetable stock and a dose more garam masala, brought to the boil, and then allowed to simmer on a low heat for 20 minutes or so till the butternut squash was soft and tender. After allowing it to cool down a bit, I then bunged it in the blender, transferred back into the pan, added a bit of single cream, re-heated and served up with some delicious home-made fresh bread kneaded by my own fair hand (oh alright then, with the couple of manky breadsticks I found hidden somewhere at the back of my store cupboard).

And there you have it folks, curried butternut squash soup - one of my all-time favourite lunchtime bites...

Well, if my last entry gave the impression that I am perhaps a distinctly less than accomplished cook, then please let me put that notion to rest with a run down of my best risotto recipes (my personal speciality).

Basically each of the below variants starts off with the same base (quantities serve 2):

Olive oil

1 small onion

1 garlic clove

2 glasses white wine

4oz (100g) arborio rice

Hot water

Heat the oil in a large pan and sauté the onion and garlic till tender. Add in the risotto rice and stir, then add the first glass of white wine to the pan. At this point commence personal consumption of second glass. Once the wine has been absorbed, start adding hot water bit by bit, stirring constantly until the water is absorbed each time. Continue until the rice is soft and tender and your arm is aching. Turn off the heat and add the additional ingredients as below:

On his last visit to the UK, Mr K was instructed on pain of pain to bring back a butternut squash (occasionally available in Tescos here, but not lately). While the risotto was cooking, I sautéed half the squash in butter with a handful of fresh thyme. Once the risotto base was ready, I basically just added the tender squash to the risotto, threw in a handful of soft goat’s cheese and pancetta, and served topped with parmesan and pine nuts (or at least would have done if I could have found any in Albert that day). Seriously yum.

After all this eating out lately, it’s time to tighten my belt for a bit (both in terms of cost and calories!) and stay in a few nights to actually cook for myself instead.

My staple of a solo cheap and chavvy night in is my all-time favourite recipe of pasta topped with norsky salat (a.k.a. surimi salat) – my personal equivalent of culinary crack. For those of you not familiar with surimi, Wikipedia describes this supposed foodstuff as “fish slurry or paste, made from white-fleshed fish (such as pollock or hake) that has been pulverized to a paste and attains a rubbery texture when cooked, which is then coloured and flavoured to mimic the texture and colour of the meat of lobster, crab and other shellfish”. It is then mixed with mayonnaise and presumably a whole gauntlet of other additives by the good factory workers of Albert to come up with the creamy, calorific pomazanka type “delicacy” I (and presumably many more in the Czech Republic all) know and love.

Despite the less than savoury description, I would probably still mainline this if I could (probably a result of the copious amount of E-numbers contained within), and actually have been known to once eat this dish five days on the trot after an enforced two week detox in the UK last Christmas.

Anyway, if I haven’t already thoroughly put you off, ingredients of this quick and easy equivalent to addictive culinary nirvana are:

A handful of spaghetti (about 3kč)

An individual tub of norsky salat (30kč)

A little parmesan (10kč)

Half a bottle of finest nejlevnější (20kč – rising to 39kč if you finish the bottle)

Which pretty much wraps it up for a cheap night in Knedlikova style. I’ve probably discredited myself and my site utterly in the course of this entry, but do read on - I promise to return to true culinary form in my next coming entries... ;-))