Between the ME and a yucky cold I wasn’t well enough to make pancakes on Tuesday, and felt very deprived! I’m finally feeling up to some light cooking, but although I’m not bad at the traditional thin British pancakes they’re a bit fiddly at the best of times, so I went for something I couldn’t mess up. I have a lovely new big, sturdy frying pan too because it had £10 off Getting the hang of what setting the hob needed to be on with a new pan meant that most of them were rather black, until the last two perfectly golden ones, but they were still tasty!

1 medium banana, very ripe
175g forest fruits yoghurt
1 large egg
100g self-raising flour

With a fork, mash the banana in a bowl, then whisk in the egg and yoghurt. Add flour and mix thoroughly with a spoon. Drop in spoonfuls onto a hot, lightly greased frying pan. When bubbles form on the surface, flip over and cook on the other side until set and golden. Cool any you’re not eating immediately between layers of kitchen paper.

My yoghurt is a Lidl one because it’s the only unthickened one I can find these days – still haven’t forgiven Yeo Valley for putting yucky tapioca starch in theirs, which I used to love! – so you might need to add a touch of milk to slacken it off to the right consistency if you’re using a more typical one. And of course, forest fruits is just one I happened to have. Strawberry would be a classic combination with the banana.

Hmm, writing this is making me want seconds as I have leftovers cooling on the worktop… I ended up with I think 9 or 10, using a dessert spoon to drop them.

Recipe from Chocolate & Zucchini. I cannot enthuse enough about this cake! Lately I’ve been finding most cakes too sweet and/or greasy to stomach (horrors!) but this deals with both of those problems nicely. I also always like to have standbys of very quick and easy recipes, and this is certainly both. The only alterations I made were to use self-raising flour (240g, it doesn’t give that conversion) and to bake it in a rectangular pan as my biggest round one is only eight inches and I didn’t want to mess about with extra depth affecting the timing of the baking and stuff – the rectangular one gives the same area as a ten-inch round tin. It’s moist and fluffy and only slightly sweet, and the weirdest but best thing is that it has an almost fruity flavour from the acidity of the yoghurt. It gives it a freshness that means you don’t suffer from the feeling of having eaten something heavy and rich after. Oh, I also used low-fat yoghurt as that’s what I had and it certainly did it no harm.

This is definitely going to become one of my regular recipes, I know it. I’m already thinking of a chocolate version… Clearly I’m more a Clotilde than a Maxence

Chop the onions and red pepper fairly finely and crush or chop the garlic. Put in a large pan with a splosh of olive oil and sweat over a low heat for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, peel the sweet potatoes and chop them into small cubes, about 1cm or a little less. Add them to the pan along with another splosh of oil, the spices, and plenty of salt and pepper, raise the heat to high and cook for five minutes. Then add the beans and mix thoroughly, remove from the heat and set aside to cool a little.

If you’re making your own pastry, now is the time to do it.

Roll the pastry out fairly thinly, but remembering it’s go to support a fair bit of substance. You’ll probably need to do only half at a time. Cut out 15cm circles from the pastry. Place a couple of dessertspoonfuls of the filling mixture just off the centre of each circle, wet the edges, fold over and seal thoroughly. Place onto lined baking trays, make a slit or two in the top of each pasty with a knife and brush with milk. Bake at 200C/Gas Mark 6 for 20 minutes, until turning golden brown at the edges.

Makes 12.

250g arborio rice
400ml cold water
3tspn white wine vinegar
2tspn white sugar
1tspn salt
About a 4-inch chunk of cucumber, deseeded and chopped fairly finely
About a third of a red pepper, as above

Put the rice in a sieve and rinse it under the cold tap until the water runs clear. Put it in a saucepan with the 400ml of water, bring to the boil, then cover, lower the heat, and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave to stand for a further 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix together the vinegar, sugar and salt in a cup or small bowl, stirring to thoroughly dissolve the sugar and salt.

Turn the rice into a large, shallow bowl, pour over the vinegar mixture, and mix thoroughly but gently. Allow to cool, mixing every few minutes, turning the rice and any liquid from the bottom to the top.

When cool, mix in the cucumber and pepper.

Serve! To add to the sushi flavour I add a bit of soy sauce to mine when I eat it. I also think some toasted sesame seeds sprinkled over would be really good, but I haven’t had chance to try that yet.

There are no words for how well they turned out. The taste and texture are utterly divine. I will definitely be using this recipe again (and again), and probably adapting it to other types of flatbreads too.

I love this pattern! It was my first shawl and it was so easy, quick and fun to knit. I’m sure I’ll be making loads more. I used cashmere & silk yarn from Violet Green, quite lovely stuff if a looser twist than I usually like. I was rather surprised at how it knitted up, I expected the black to be more dominant with just little bits of the pink and green, and those colorus are *bright*, but it’s OK.

I used Nigella Lawson’s recipe for Garlic & Parsley Hearthbreads from How To Be a Domestic Goddess, but used basil instead of parsley in the topping, and then added tomato, onion and roasted red peppers (the latter from a jar) on top of that. It is gooood. I like it better than the deli one, actually.

I just couldn’t get any photos to come out looking remotely the right colour when I had them laid out flat. The colours are much more true in this one:

I love how the design works with the shape of my hand! I couldn’t be sure until it was done if I’d got things in the right place.

I used Jaeger Matchmaker Merino on 3mm and 3.25mm dpns.  The design is my own, inspired by various ones I’ve seen online. The simple repeating background is one I came up with for some socks (and I’m sure many other people have come up with it independently), and I used a peasant thumb as it’s the only one I know how to do – the only other mitten-like things I’ve made before are many many pairs of Fetching from Knitty, and that’s where I learnt it.

This is also my first finished colourwork project (the socks are still in progress) so I’m completely thrilled, I keep looking at them and wondering how I came up with knitting that looks like it belongs to someone else! I am always confident with crafts and rarely think something is beyond me, but when I knitted when I was younger I just could not get the hang of colourwork, my tension was awful, it all ended up looking a mess, so I just set it aside as an area I happen to not be good at and ignored it. I saw so many beautiful patterns though that I just had to give it another go more recently, and to my astonishment, it was no problem at all. I suppose being a much better knitter overall by now just gives me more of an instinct for getitng the right feel of it.

These could be improved; I’ve learnt a lot from them. I would do my decreases slightly differently to make them look a bit tidier, and the thumb is about half an inch too baggy: next time I would probably do it over the same number of stitches but decrease rapidly in the first two or three rows. But overall I’m very happy and looking forward to more mittens, and more colourwork!

Anyway, I love these. I can’t believe how much difference in warmth they make, without getting in the way as I often find even fingerless mitts do. I think they look really cute peeping out of the ends of my sleeves, too. They’re perfect for using up little scraps of yarn and are easily knitted in an evening, which is just as well because everyone who sees them wants a pair!

I used 16g of 4-ply/sock yarn for a pair (Regia in the photos above), on 2.5mm needles (Clover bamboo), giving me a gauge of 8sts/inch.

By “m1″ I mean a raised increase.

Cast on 48 stitches, join without twisting and distribute across needles (I use four dpns so it’s 16 on each of three.)

Work in 2×2 rib for 3 inches.

Hand shaping:

Round 1: K1, m1, K1, P2, repeat to end.
Round 2: K3, P1, m1, P1, repeat to end.
Round 3: K1, knit into front & back of next stitch, K1, P3, repeat to end.

Work pattern of K4, P3 as set for 5 rows.

Cast off loosely, weave in ends.

I’ve also made a version with mock cables on the 2×2 rib, ending with cables across four stitches after the increases. (I wasn’t concentrating and went the wrong way on some of that last lot – I think I’ve hidden most of them in the photo so we’ll just pretend that didn’t happen!)