In my defense, I spent all of yesterday afternoon baking and then decorating a massive birthday cake, and then I made pizza for dinner, and then I collapsed in a brain-dead heap on the sofa until it was a reasonable time for me to go to bed (i.e., not 10 p.m.). I was so exhausted that blogging didn’t even really cross my mind.

The massive cake is for tonight’s big “Triple-Birthday-Cocktail-Palooza”. My friends Relly and Steph also have mid-July birthdays, so we decided to throw a shindig for ourselves at In Vino Veritas and invite all our friends to come along for cocktails and celebration.

Not being the party-throwing type (it’s hard enough for me to get it together to invite people around for dinner), this is all a rather new experience for me, and I’m very happy to be doing this with friends (there’s no way I would have done it on my own). We’ve gone all out, with actual paper-based invitations, and the cake, and decorations, and everything. In just a few minutes, in fact, I’ll be heading off to decorate before rushing back here to get dolled up and put on my dancing shoes (well, my cocktail-drinking shoes, anyway).

And lucky me, this is just the start of my birthday celebrations; my real birthday is on Wednesday, when I’ll get to open all my presents and get taken out to dinner by my lovely husband (who already gave me an early birthday present of Tron on DVD—awesome!).

Whatever about “getting older”—this birthday thing is a lark!

I began writing a longer post about what exactly “plank cooking” entails, but I soon realized that it was a post better suited to Principia Gastronomica than to WordRidden, so that is where I shall post it. But not tonight, for tonight I must drink some tea, eat some biscuits, and watch some Ghost in the Shell. I’m sure you understand.

This is highly unusual, as Jeremy can attest, since I normally never, ever want to eat the same meal two nights in a row. The few exceptions that I can think of off the top of my head—things like enchiladas, eggplant parmigiana, lasagna—all have one thing in common: they’re tomato-based, oven-baked dishes which inevitably taste even better the next day. Most other things just don’t have the same charm for me when I’m sitting down to eat them for the second night running.

But we had a big lunch at Wagamama followed by band practice today, so we were both tired and still kind of full and didn’t want anything heavy or time-consuming. We considered salad for dinner, and then we considered going out for tapas, and we discussed ordering prawns at the potential tapas restaurant, and then we talked about how yummy the prawns from last night had been, and then we realized that if we were going to go out and order prawns, we really may as well just stay in and cook prawns, and then we could use up the leftover bulgur salad we had from the night before, and we could also get more avocados because they were really tasty, and we ultimately decided that since last night’s dinner had been so satisfying, it was perfectly acceptable to reproduce it tonight.

And that’s just what we did. And it was lovely the second time around too. But tomorrow night, I don’t think I’ll still be craving shrimp.

I did the best I could. A quick trip to Waitrose yielded some decent (if previously frozen) tiger prawn tails and some big fresh Red Sea prawns, which I marinated in lemon, olive oil, fresh mint and sea salt and then cooked quickly in their shells in a hot griddle pan; cooking shrimp in their shells like that not only keeps them juicy and protects them from the heat, it also makes them far more flavorful than peeled shrimp.

After last night’s meat-laden meal, I was looking for something lighter tonight, so I just served the shrimp along with avocado and red onion dressed in a lightly curried vinaigrette and some bulgur mixed with rocket (arugula), tomatoes, green onions, feta, and olive oil and lemon juice.

It wasn’t exactly like peeling fresh shrimp on the porch in Florida or cracking open crab legs on a boat in Alaska, but it was lemony and salty and messy and yummy, and it certainly took the edge off of my craving for That Which I Cannot Have. You gotta make do with what ya got, right?

In my case, you flirt seriously with the idea of just not updating for a day (gasp!)—and then you quickly go trawl the sites of some other food bloggers to look for inspiration. And, lo, I have found Inspiration. Not necessarily the inspiration to write, mind you, but the inspiration to bake, and what I am inspired to bake are these:

Cinnamon Sugar Donut Muffins.

Let’s just run through those words again, shall we? Cinnamon. Sugar. Donut. Muffins. Oh yeah. I am all over those. And they’re even made with yogurt, so, like, they’re healthy, right? Right.

The recipe has come to me via fellow Brighton food blogger Kittie (hi, Kittie!), via Australian food blogger KJ, via New York food blogger Laura Rebecca, via, ultimately The Joy of Cooking, which I happen to have sitting on my bookshelf—so the inspiration has essentially traveled full circle around the globe and back into my kitchen. And this is the magic of the Web.

I’ll let you know how those muffins turn out.

I don’t really know how it started, but it’s been that way for several years now. Almost every single Friday at about 6 p.m., I make some dough and set it aside to rise, throw together one of two types of tomato sauce, put my pizza stone in the oven and start preheating the oven pretty much as hot as it will go. I pre-cook any toppings that need pre-cooking (roast veggies, sausage), oil my pizza pan and sprinkle it with cornmeal, chop some extra garlic, maybe grate some cheese. When Jeremy gets home from work, I stretch the dough into a round, brush it with oil, and pre-bake the base a bit before covering it with sauce, toppings, and cheese, and then cooking the pizza for real, along with any excess dough which I turn into dough balls for dipping in olive oil.

I always make two different toppings for my pizza, so one half is topped with one set of ingredients and the other half is topped with something different (variety being the spice of life and all that). I don’t need my dinner list to tell me that the most common pizza by far in my house is the pizza Napoli (anchovy, caper, black olive), followed closely by ham and mushroom or ham/salami and artichoke.

In the summer, I also make pizza Margherita a lot (tomato sauce, mozzarella, fresh basil) as well as pizza topped with Parma ham, arugula and shaved parmesan. For these lighter pizzas, I’ve taken to making a sauce of fresh tomatoes roasted with garlic, fennel seeds and lots of olive oil; for heavier pizzas, I make my default stovetop sauce of tinned tomatoes, garlic, onion and oregano.

I’ve made 34 pizzas in the past year and a half. I’ve used 10 different kinds of cheese (buffalo mozzarella, cow’s milk mozzarella, parmesan, goat’s cheese, Sussex slipcote sheep’s cheese, feta, Taleggio, Gorgonzola, cheddar, and smoked Irish cheese), about the same number of meats and fish (chorizo, chicken, sausage, smoked ham, roast ham, Parma ham, various types of salami, anchovies, tuna, sardines, shrimp), and an array of vegetables (mushrooms, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, spinach, onions, and, most recently, chard, which was delicious).

I am by no means a traditionalist when it comes to topping pizza—for a long time, my favorite topping was pesto, fresh tomatoes, and feta cheese—but there are two things you will never, ever find on my pizza, namely, corn and broccoli (it’s not that I don’t like corn or broccoli, I just think they have no place on a pizza). Other than that, pretty much anything goes, from spinach alfredo to chicken parmigiana.

It’s not just the pizza itself that makes Fridays fun, it’s the ritual of ensconcing myself in the kitchen and filling the house with the comforting aroma of warm dough and simmering tomato sauce, and then sitting down with Jeremy and enjoying the fruits of my labors with a hearty red wine and a dose of Mark Kermode. And then the weekend can begin.

It’s Jamie’s Slang Dictionary, a short page on the Food Network site to help American viewers understand what Jamie Oliver means when he says something is pukka, wicked, or lovely jubbly.

I’m not sure how enlightening—or, indeed, necessary—it is, but it inexplicably cracked me up (made me laugh).

Okay, here goes: Tonight Jeremy and I had a lovely Thai dinner with Richard and Natalie at a restaurant they recommended to us: Sukhothai Palace on Middle Street in Brighton.

Jeremy and I ordered our usual benchmark dishes for Thai restaurants: som tam (spicy papaya salad), laab (ground meat with chilies, shallots and fresh herbs) and Thai green curry. And to my delight, they were very tasty indeed. The som tam and laab in particular were gorgeous and flavorful and took me right back to our favorite food stall in Bangkok. My duck curry was yummy too, though I think by the time it arrived, my tastebuds were somewhat numbed by the fiery, fiery laab.

After we stuffed ourselves with a Thai feast and cooled the chile heat with some frosty Singha beers, we all headed over to the Hope to catch a gig by Caramel Jack—one of the first bands I ever saw in Brighton (if not the first) and a band we’ve played with ourselves several times since. It was a very fun evening and a very welcome respite from the masses and masses and masses of work that I’ve had to do all week long.

But tomorrow is another early start, so it’s off to bed for me…

Always keep a can of white beans in your cupboard.

The particular type of white bean doesn’t really matter. Cannellini beans, navy beans, Great Northern beans, even butter beans—any of them will do. I like to keep little tins of steamed cannellini beans around because they’re nice and tender and they’re a handy size, but you can use anything you like.

I posted my default bean soup recipe on Principia Gastronomica a while back, and I still stand by it as a really fast way to whip up a really tasty soup. The key ingredients are oregano, garlic and lemon, which combine to create a remarkably fresh-tasting soup in a matter of minutes.

If you’re missing one or the other of those ingredients, however, don’t fret. You could use rosemary, thyme or basil in place of the oregano and you’d still have a nice soup, and even the garlic and lemon aren’t critical, though they’re very nice. Essentially, if you have white beans, some veggie or chicken broth, and ideally a bay leaf, you can make a decent lunch.

If you’re lucky enough to have other odds and ends sitting around your house, by all means, use them too. Anything smoked—ham, bacon, smoked sausage—will partner brilliantly with white beans. I happened to have a bit of kielbasa in my fridge today, so I quickly sautéed it with a tiny bit of chopped onion, tipped in a small can of butter beans and a bit of vegetable broth, and simmered it all for about 15 minutes to make a smoky soup for lunch (which is what prompted me to write this blog post in the first place).

You can make an even richer—if somewhat more time-consuming—soup by sautéeing a battuto of finely chopped carrot, celery and onion in olive oil before adding your other ingredients: garlic, herbs, and finally, beans. You can add plenty of other vegetables, too, like cabbage or zucchini, and ultimately you could head in the direction of a minestrone by using tomatoes in your soup if you’ve got them.

And if you’re really hungry, and it’s really cold, and you want a real starch-fest for lunch, you could make pasta fagioli with beans and small pasta like macaroni. Served up with lots of olive oil and parmesan, it’s right up there with macaroni and cheese as the ultimate comfort food.

So there you go. White beans: probably my favorite cupboard staple. If you have beans, you have lunch.