Spaghetti with egg

This is one of the quickest dishes you could ever cook. Nevertheless it is extremely tasty. Just cook the spaghetti until nearly done and then quickly fry, stirring vigorously, with an egg in sauce pan. Add some fresh herbs if you have any.

Cannelloni

Cannello means tube in Italian; consequently these are large tubes. Fill them with anything you want (in this case spinach and cheese), cover with Béchamel sauce - or perhaps a tomato one if the filling is more meaty -and cook in the oven. How to make a tube from a pasta sheet is left to the reader to figure out. Very simple and equally delicious!

Greek salad

Not much to say except that it's difficult to find good olives here. Afterwards remember to shatter the plate on the floor whilst manically swirling around transfixing all women nearby. Then have a glass of retsina before daily football practise (remember: no forward passes). Ela ela!

Continental burgers

It's beef and salad in pita bread. A swift meal on a day filled with teleconferences; as ugly as it gets in other words. All I want is to forget.

Spare ribs in a tomato sauce

Not particularly interesting a cut but I got some so it had to be eaten. The problem with spare ribs is that although they are rather fat they easily go dry when cooked. The method used in this dish was to carefully seal the meat under the grill and then cook it in a rich tomato sauce. It turned out all right but I suspect the best way to cook these be to do as our dear friends across the pond and drench them in honey and who knows what else. Turn off the TV and ingest feeling slightly Laestadian.

Roast beef

The cut is called topside here, it's just behind the tail and it's very lean. The indigenous cook it for hours at a high temperature until until it achieves that acclaimed brick-like texture. Not having mastered that technique yet though I chose to cook it a low temperature until 60 degrees in the centre. Since the cut is so lean you need to add some fat for cooking; this was done by tying a herb infused layer of fat around the roast. The tying was done by the farm, the infusion by me.

With the beef two types of cabbage cooked with fennel and white wine, extremely fresh and tasty.

Gulyás

Gulyás (pronounced Gooy-ush, more or less) is the national dish of Hungary and I've been wanting to give it a go for some time. Finally I convinced one of my Hungarian friends to reveal the secret recipe that - if I understood it right - originates from 12th century Transylvania and has been passed on from generation to generation since.

The dish is essentially beef soup with pasta balls but the original flavouring (paprika and caraway seeds) gives it a bite. I thought it could have done with some garlic but the recipe explicitly forbade that.

All in all a very nice dish with a pleasant aftertaste that stays for a long time. It did make me very thirsty though and water doesn't seem to help, not sure what will...