We noticed that a potato plant had started growing out of an opening in our composter (or our dalek, as we prefer to call it).

When I dug it out, it had grown only one new potato, but it was probably the weirdest-looking spud I had ever seen.

It clearly had a face, as can be seen on the photo, but it didn’t look anything like Jesus, as you would have expected from all the media stories about people seeing him in their toast or Ikea’s toilet.

It most closely resembled a troll, so I must conclude it was a Jesus troll.

We had it for dinner yesterday.

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I haven’t tried this one (yet), but if the guy’s reaction to eating it is typical, I guess I could win some brownie points by cooking it…

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I’ve made banoffee pie several times, and it always seems to go down well, so here’s the recipe. It’s based on a recipe from Good Housekeeping: Step-by-step Cookbook, which is a really nice cookbook, but I’ve made a couple of minor alterations:

150 g digestive biscuits
75 g unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp ground ginger
450 g dulce de leche toffee sauce
4 medium-sized bananas
juice of one lemon
285 ml whipping cream

Put the biscuits in a food processor and whiz to a crumb. Add the melted butter and ginger, and process for one minute to combine.

Line a cake tin with greaseproof paper. Press the biscuit mixture into it. Pour the toffee sauce on top. Peel and slice the bananas, toss them in the lemon juice, and put them on top of the toffee sauce. Chill the pie.

Remove from the tin, whip the cream and put it on top. Optionally, decorate with chocolate shavings.

If you can’t get dulce de leche, make it like this: Pierce two holes in a tin of condensed milk. Place in a pan. Pour water three-quarters up the can. Simmer for 2 to 4 hours, topping up the water as needed.

If you can’t get condensed milk, make another pudding.

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Amaia has always (well, for a couple of months, which is eternity when you’re seven months old) been fond of Star Trek, and she has now discovered pizza.

Anna also quite likes Star Trek, and she loves pizza so long as there’s sausage on it.

Given that Phyllis isn’t very fond of either (I mean pizza & Star Trek, not Amaia and Anna), and given that the Gautier kids prefer Star Wars to Star Trek, I’m looking forward to a lot of Star Trek & pizza nights with my daughters whenever we’ll be home alone!

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Amaia has always been a big baby, but never a fat one.

Furthermore, her appetite has been something to behold – some days and nights it seems she seems to be drinking breast milk non-stop when she’s not sleeping.

So a couple of days ago, we decided to try to feed her a bit of rice porridge with apple and pear that we bought in Denmark (marked “four months”), although the recommendation in the UK at the moment is not to feed babies food for the first six months.

Her reaction shocked me!

Normally, babies at first just play around with the food and spit out most of it, but from the outset she’s been voraciously eating it all while chewing on her fist for good measure.

She’s already finishing fairly large portions as if she was nine months old and not just three and a half.

What’s more, she hasn’t cut down on her milk intake at all, so I guess she can eat even more than we’re feeding her.

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Both books have been important to me.

The former was for many years my favourite book, and if I hadn’t read it, I might have been much worse at English (I had already stopped doing English at school, and it was only because I wanted to read Douglas Adams in the original language that it didn’t slowly get worse, but that’s really a separate blog posting).

The latter is a fine cookbook, but it’s actually been more important to me because it taught me not to regard the US a one homogeneous country.

It has divided the US into six regions: New England, the South, the Heartland, Louisiana, the Southwest and the Pacific States, and the food in each part is clearly quite distinctive.

I have often in the years since then used these regions to understand American issues, and most often than not it has helped my understanding of them.

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I’m sorry to read that El Bulli will close down.

Given that it’s been rated the world’s best restaurant for several years, I’ve always had a desire to go there, but I had to contend myself with a book about it Phyllis gave me for Christmas two years ago.

I guess it was inevitable, though. That type of innovative cuisine can’t stay at the top forever, so they had to choose between slipping down the rankings at some point, or closing while they were still at the top.

Hopefully the academy they’re creating instead will eventually lead to even better restaurants.

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Most garlic presses seem to have been designed on the premise that most people will use just one or two cloves.

However, given that we’re normally cooking for at least six people, we use more garlic than most households.

So it was a huge relief when our friend Sabine gave Amaia a garlic press as a welcome-to-the-world present.

Just look at it!

It can hold three big cloves side by side, and it’s heavy, chunky and sturdy!

Just perfect!

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It’s always a bit sad when kids drop their homemade words in favour of the real ones.

For instance, Anna’s love of ɬa (“meat, sausage”) meant that she had a whole list of words for types of meat, including ˈmuːɬa “beef”, ˈmɛːɬa “lamb” and ˈbuɬa “sausage”.

However, the latter word (which sounded like a hypothetical Welsh word “bwlla” or Zulu “buhla”) has now been replaced by ˈsɔsɪs.

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Min søster, Miriam, har givet ham flere Rasmus Klump-hæfter og fire DVD’er med den lille bjørn, og resultatet har været en glubende appetit efter pandekager, der er rullet sammen om jordbærsyltetøj.

Det er ikke en ret, der kendes her – pancakes er mindre og tykkere og spises flade med smør, og crêpes er større og spises sammenlagt med fx sukker, citronsaft eller chokolade.

Léon – der ellers foretrækker at bruge engelske ord frem for danske, når han kan slippe afsted med det – kalder dem derfor altid pandekager med jordbærsyltetøj, aldrig pancakes eller crêpes.

Men nogle gange blander han det alligevel sammen. På Charlottes fødselsdag fik vi amerikanske pandekager til morgenmad (med smør og ahornsirup), men han ville han dem på dansk, og han var meget skuffet, da han opdagede, de var for små og tykke til at blive rullet sammen.

Heldigvis for ham kunne han godt bruge lidt mere sul på sidebenene, så hans pandekageindtag er kun begrænset af min dovenskab!

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