Do You Remember The First Time?

Asked Jarvis Cocker of Pulp in their song of the same name. I thought it would be rather pleasing for my first post here (not counting the long winded introduction below!) to be about the first ever Nigella recipe I made, which I recreated for dinner the other night. I was about 14 or 15 when I first saw her TV show Nigella Bites and while I didn't quite have an epiphany involving God-beams, I was pretty enthralled and had never really come across what we might now call a "celebrity chef" with such passion and such a way with words. Jamie Oliver was the big thing at the time and I found him interesting but too...frantic. Nigella was different.

Anyway, one of the things she made was this gorgeous looking creation called lemon linguine which I attempted for dinner that night using (cringe!) a can of reduced cream instead of the real thing, as it was all we had. It still tasted fantastic and since then I guess Nigella was destined to be part of my life. So, in the interest of having a nice starting point for my blog, and because I had all the ingredients to hand, I made it for dinner the other night. Was going to serve as is before remembering that well-meaning relatives would see the picture and so hastily boiled up some brocolli that our flatmate Stefan brought back for us from his parents' orchard in Hawkes Bay.


Lemon Linguine with brocolli!