2 recipes: chocolate bavarois (p47) and piedmontese peppers (p149)

Medium time no see... sometimes we all need time away, a period of adjustment to the things we cannot change, often whilst being blind to the things we can. So no cooking: I had thinking to do that it would have interrupted, and I needed to decide whether that was part of my old life or could continue into the new. And since I'm sat here looking at a trayful of naked peppers, I think we can safely say that it's continuing.

There were 3 simons booked for last friday; salmon, chocolate and creme anglais. In the end, the local fish suppliers beat me and Hwngo came too late, too tired and too hungry for me to justify going to the next town for supplies. So, fried duck breasts and onions (it would have worked better if they'd been the steaks that we thought we'd taken from the freezer, but it was still a surprisingly good combination), and the chocolate bavarois I'd made earlier. Hwngo looked appalled at the mussel soup; I had totally forgotten his revulsion at seafood, mainly because it is so out of character for his type of adventurer.

Anyways, the bavarois. Started early; finished just in time to get to Hwngo's train. Everything behaved fine except the cream: try as I did, I just couldn't get it to do soft peaks, so I whipped it as long as I could, shoved it into the mix then the mix into the fridge and ran off to fetch Hwngo. The result was a lovely chocolate erm soup. Three hours after finishing, it still wasn't set, so we ate it anyway. It was gorgeous; chocolately and milky but not in that 45% if you're lucky English candy bar way. And the next morning, when we had it again for breakfast, it had set into the sort of deep chocolate mousse that only a good French chef (and amazingly, the one at the Brest Flunch but that's another story, one with good steaks a point in it even) can make. Well worth trying again, but best accompanied by lots of exercise.

And today: the Piedmontese Peppers. Pretty easy, but two things to muse on. One, there is a lot of freedom in a recipe, which is both a good and a bad thing. I can slice garlic to sub-millimetre thicknesses, but I'm not sure if that's what "slice thinly" really means. And two, there are some tricks in cooking which one is incredibly grateful to have learnt. In this case, how to get the skin off a tomato, which is something that the person who first taught me how to make salsa properly taught me (along with that sometimes the hardest thing to do in cooking is persuade people that it's okay to throw part of your ingredients, e.g. tomato innard, away). Boil a kettle; pour the hot water into a bowl and throw the tomatoes in it. Wait 5 minutes; if you don't do this, the tomato will be as reluctant to shed its covering as a good catholic girl in a casting couch (the other thing I learnt in the past is that patience is a much undervalued but crucial ingredient in cooking). Then make a short line in the skin with a knife and peel it off gently; if it's had enough time, this will be as easy as stripping paint from a damp wall.

And the final verdict? Pepper and pepper and tomato are just such a classic combination; I love burnt peppers anyway, but the tomato has softened (like a good Sunday-morning fry-up) and mixed its taste with the pepper and garlic, and both are offset by the sharpness of the black pepper. The only thing I have a bit of a problem with is the anchovies. I can see that the dish might need something to balance it, but the salt in the anchovies is offputting in this context. Somehow, a softer fish, maybe one of the meatier white fish, would seem a better match for this dish. Maybe I'll try it that way next time.

My weight? Let's just say that a weekend with my mother feeding me up and a week of comfort-eating ('s all brain food honest) has taken its toll. About half a stone of toll. I'll start monitoring it again from tomorrow.