"Napoleon, Make Yourself A Dang Quesadilla!"

This Monday is Wellington Anniversary Day; which I can't honestly say means too much to me except that I get to neatly evade the worst day of the week. Hoorah! The weather has finally sorted itself out, and is actually being summery. For a while there it was both humid and windy, which is the worst of both worlds; you're sweating like a mule and your hair's a disaster.

I have been cooking more goodies out of Nigella Express. Witness:

Above: Sesame Peanut Noodles - the dressing has peanut butter and sesame oil in it and is seriously good. Oh and yes, that is a Nigella Mini Whisk, which I bought on a self-indulgent whim recently, and used to make the dressing. Already I'm wondering how I lived without it...like a true Nigellavangelist. You may have noticed that I am trying very hard to work my word into the common vernacular (surely there are endless possibilities for its use?) but Google hasn't been very useful for information on how to copyright a word.

With these noodles we had Nigella's cocktail sausages, which is, admittedly, an incongruous pairing, but as they were cooked with similar flavours - sesame, soy, honey - it actually worked. Unlike the photo, which I won't post because it showcases how filthy our roasting dish looks...

Above:Two of Tim's friends stayed for the weekend, and I made us all dinner last night. Nigella's Quesadillas were very well received (there's nothing like the smell of melting cheese...) which I served with a rice pilaf and a salad of avocado and roasted cauliflower and capsicum.

Above: I got some cheap avocados at Moore Wilsons...I think I could eat an avocado every single day and never get sick of them. They always taste like a treat, you know?

Above: Something completely impractical and yet somehow necessary: DIY chocolate croissants. They are really far too small to bear the name of croissant in my opinion, but they are so easy and lovely and it is such a novel idea. Thankyou, Nigella. Two ingredients: puff pastry and chocolate. The most difficult thing, for a geometry-challenged gal like myself, was cutting the triangles correctly. In case you were concerned, I made them on the washing machine because...it was the only benchspace we had that morning. By the way am I the only one who thinks the rolled up pastries look not unlike the tiny paper creatures that torment and chase Haku in Spirited Away?

Above: Sorry again for the overexposed photos. I am no Annie Leibovitz. Heck, I'm not even Nigel Barker. But you'd think I could figure out how to make photos people can actually look at...

Back to the wee pastries - they were delicious, and fun, and just as easy to eat as they genuinely were to make.

Above: Sticking with the chocolate theme, I decided to make a cake, for general picking at over the weekend. I used a Nigella recipe from How To Eat which is a fantastic, one-pot melt and mix sort of thing which produces a luscious, moist cake with very little fuss. Note the mini-whisk again, which did a stirling job of amalgamating this darkly rich mixture.

Above: Caution: I baked the mix in two 20cm tins, with the hopes of sandwiching it together with custard buttercream...but they turned out super flat, like chocolate pancakes. Delicious chocolate pancakes, but nonetheless, I recommend just using one tin, like she says in the recipe. It still tasted great though and the buttercream filling that I made plumped it up somewhat.

I have to say we have been eating a lot of what some might call junk over the weekend...which may have something to do with going into town last night...and not going to bed till 4am...