33: Prawn and coriander rolls, p94

Another bottle-misidentification mistake tonight - rice vinegar was actually another bottle of white wine vinegar. Damn damn damn. Got to have a good look at what's in the cupboard and what's not... Annoyingly I can picture the label on the bottle of rice vinegar, and could have sworn it was there, but knowing me it ran out a couple of years ago and the bottle went in the recycling...

Not bad at all these, but still not a patch on the pork patties... Oddly, inspite of being chiefly king prawn, and containing no potato and just a smidge of flour to help bind them together, they had a strangely potatoey texture, more like traditional fishcakes. More chilli and lemongrass I think next time. The sauce was a bit sweet for my taste on its own but drizzled over the rolls and accompanying noodles worked much better.

The enormous iceberg lettuce which has been taunting me from the fridge for its bland wateriness, and which was purchased particularly for this recipe, was finally pressed into service, but we only needed about a third of the thing and now I've got to think of something else to do with the rest... And no, Kingsley the bunny cannot have it as bunnies cannot eat lettuce, it makes them sick, with horrid stomach cramps, and they can die. So there. Bet you didn't know that. Plus Kingsley is such a fusspot, I'm sure he'd think it was below him to eat such a thing.

I always remember my dad telling us how iceberg lettuce was developed specifically for McDonalds, for its texture and shelf-life in the fastfood business. Yum.

5: Chicken broth with noodles, lemon and mint, p22

Using up the rest of the chicken broth and some of the roast chicken from Sunday - really zingy, quick soup, which was really rather nice - will definitely make this again, and will have to because I forgot to take a piccie of this one. Apparently the recipe is 'enough for 2 as a main dish' but I made half the volume and it was plenty for both of us for lunch - and more meat than I'd normally put in a soup, so a happy carnivorous hubby, even with though it included coriander, which he hates.

Clear soups like this remind me of 'UFO soups' from a family holiday to Austria many many years ago. We stayed in a little family run guest house in Soll, Tirol, where every night they served a different (?) very salty consomme/broth with what we termed 'Unidentified Floating Objects' which became a family game each evening trying to work out what they were (tiny mushrooms, spring onions, croutons, minestrone...).  If not extremely salty, the UFO soups unfortunately had a tendency to taste rather like one imagines dishwater with lemony washing up liquid might, so unfortunately this recipe triggered this memory-association slightly... although I thought it was best not to mention this as we were eating in case T refused to eat any more...