New Mexican Mild Red Chilli Bread (by Marlena Spieler)

This recipe comes from Marlena's very good book, called "Hot & Spicy" which basically, is a lot of recipes, all of which are, er, spicy.

This is essentially just like garlic bread, but with the addition, in the butter, of mild red chilli powder, spring onion, coriander leaves, and parmesan cheese.

Beanfeast with Cheesy Dumplings

This most excellent recipe comes from an old Sainsburys recipe book called "50 recipes for cheese" (which you might be able to find on Amazon Marketplace..) Basically in a big pot you do onion, carrots, parsnips, tins of tomatoes, butter beans, and kidney beans, and a bit of curry powder, then you make dumplings with a noggin of cheese in the centre and let them cook and fluff up ... and when we made it here, we put more cheese on top.

We ate it with veggie sausages, and Marlena Spieler's recipe for New Mexican mild red chilli bread!!

Pasta Bake

This was made with minced beef, chilli sausagemeat, tomato sauce, more tomatoes, tomato puree and red wine. Mixed with pasta, then with cheese sauce (with added eggs) on top. Baked in hot oven until golden on top.

Fred's Ultimate Sandwich: BLT with SGD

I want more Ultimate Sandwiches! (Thanks to Hannah for the idea too)

This is the Ultimate Sandwich of my 9 year old son. I am glad I was able to take a picture which captured every ingredient. This is essentially, a BLT with added sausages, and garlic dip... so starting from the bottom we have "lettuce" (although in this case, it's watercress and baby spinach), garlic dip, crispy bacon, sliced tomatoes, and sausages. At the time of writing, he is demolishing it with fervour ..

Fred's Banoffee Cheesecake

My son wanted to adapt a recipe for lemon baked cheesecake, so we omitted the lemon and added mashed bananas to the mixture. After it had baked and cooled, we just drizzled toffee sauce over it, and served with a dollop of sour cream.

I suppose, adding more sliced bananas and/or chocolate in some form or another would also be good.

Meatball and Butter Bean Stew, with Mash and Creamed Leeks

Another gorgeous, steaming, savoury consoling bowlful of joy! I made this stew much as I always do. Take care to use some good stock. Stir in flour at the beginning when you are frying / sweating the vegetables, this will help it get nice and thick. Let it cook very slowly, for a lonnngggg time. I made my meatballs using a method picked up from my friend Kirsty's mum: add a handful of dry stuffing mix to the mince, and an egg. Mix well with your hands and form walnut-sized balls. Just drop them in before it all goes in the oven. The stuffing mixture seems to season them perfectly without taking over (you would never guess it was there) and also keep them nice and firm so they don't fall apart. Finally I added a tin of butter beans (plus their juice) about an hour from the end.

For the sweet, buttery side-dollop of creamed leeks (something I remember my Nan making, I think) I cooked sliced leeks very gently, not letting them brown, in butter for about half an hour. I then added a spoonful of flour, stirred it in, and gradually added splashes of milk and stirred until I ended up with soft leeks in creamy sauce.