The Juggling Unicyclist

I am heartily sick of pork. We cooked 7 different pork dishes today, each one with its own flavours, but there's only so much you can do to hide the taste of pork. Not that I dislike it, but enough is enough, or as Hervé would say, an oeuf is an oeuf.

So for tea, to balance out the protein intensive lunch, I cooked veggie leftovers, and because I know I've let you all down on the recipe front recently, I reproduce it below.

Photo right: various pork products presented in poor disguises. The disgusting looking brown round thing in the centre is a stuffed peach.

Photo below: at least the rhubarb and leek gratin looked great - before it was cooked.

Before tea came shopping, and before shopping was my final visit to the chiropractor, at least for a few weeks. The treatment has just been tweaking a few muscles and bones that are sorting themselves out from my body change from a very sedentary daily routine to a more active, vertically based one. A bit like David Banner's regular transformations from placid scientist to raging green monster I feel my muscles bursting through my ever tightening tee shirt. Strangely though, they seem to be bursting through round my waist. I digress. In the chiro's waiting room are several pictures, arranged in regimental rows. Most of them are scenes of Edinburgh, windswept beaches, or similar, intended to calm the waiting patient. One of them however stands out like Fred Goodwin's pension pot and that is a photograph of a juggling unicyclist, and I was wondering what the explanation was for this. Perhaps it was my new found friend Alan (the chiropractor)'s previous occupation. Or maybe an ex-patient, or some sort of chiropractic voodoo ritual to drum up a bit of extra trade. It shall no doubt remain a mystery.

FUSILLI RIMANENTE

Having had my fill of pork for lunch I decided to use up what I could from the fridge back at the house, and ended up with what a top restaurant would call Asian-Latin fusion but I would call a kind of pasta stir fry.

1/4 onion, finely chopped
5 sprouts, shredded
handful of mange tout, shredded
handful of baby spinach
fusilli pasta
1 tsp pesto
drop of chilli sauce
1/2 glass white wine

1. Boil the pasta in plenty of salted water for 10 minutes
2. Meanwhile, stir fry the onion, sprouts and mange tout in butter in a frying pan. Stir in spinach for 2 minutes until wilted
3. Drain the pasta, stir in the pesto
4. Pour the wine into the vegetable pan, add chilli sauce, heat through and mix everything in with the pasta
5. Thank the Lord there is no pork in it

In case you're wondering, according to Google, Riminenti is the Italian for leftovers.