Back in the kitchen

I've been back in Edinburgh for over a week now, but have hardly done any cooking. A Malta-based Estonian friend was visiting and as it was the last week my Greek sweetheart was in town, I had most of my meals out. Had a lovely & elegant breakfast at Centotre, a proper British fry-up at Native State, a leisurely Saturday morning breakfast and paper in Double Dutch, a Turkish meze-dinner at Nargile, another (sixth in 2005?) yummy meal at Jamaican Coyaba, a tasty, if slow, dinner at Peckham's Underground. I enjoyed them all, although I'm not really looking forward to receiving my next credit card statement at all..

The only 'cooking' I did at home during the week was smearing some Finnish herby or Estonian mushroomy cream cheese on some Estonian rye bread, covering it with Estonian smoked salami and Estonian cheese, sprinkling some Greek oregano on top and grilling these in the oven. An accompaniment: some flash-salted cucumber. And I did that not once, not twice, but thrice. But that's hardly cooking, at least in foodblogosphere..

Pasta with blue cheese
(Seene-sinihallitusjuustukaste makaronidele)

I did finally cook something on Sunday night. Before my friend Ingrid caught her flight back to Valletta, we had a quick pasta supper - gemelli pasta with Roquefort, and shiitake and oyster mushrooms. It was tasty, and it's one of my staple suppers nowadays, as I like both mushrooms and blue cheese a lot.

PS Remember the list of ten most useful cookbooks? Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories is currently No 1 on the bestsellers' list at my local Blackwells. So if nothing else, these lists make a fortune for some of the authors:)