All recipe-d out

It's a sad day when you realise your culinary creativity has run out.

After months of posting 15 or more recipes a month on Recipes for Millie, this month I'm down to two. I was all set to post a couple more this evening, only to realise that I'd made spinach and stilton quiches and baked eggs with chorizo and lentils a whole year ago. They're obviously an October thing.

Oh well. Back to the Ottolenghi book and some more copies of Olive for inspiration...

Glut

There's definitely a theme to this month's recipes over at Recipes for Millie: courgettes. So far since coming back from holiday we've eaten

• ratatouille
• courgette and goat's cheese pancakes
• courgette, chickpea and filo pastry pie
• the smaller ones sliced raw in salads
• the larger ones diced and thrown into any recipe that requires vaguely Mediterranean veg
  

It's all a bit of a novelty, really, having so many of the things. The last couple of years we've grown them from seed, and then planted them on the balcony in large pots, where the slugs have promptly eaten them, or the courgettes themselves have turned yellow and dropped off. Turns out what we really needed to do was get a couple of cheap plants from B&Q, chuck them unceremoniously in a flat bit of the allotment with a bit of manure, and leave to their own devices. Maybe ignoring more plants is the way forward?

Anyway, next on the agenda: courgette and cheese loaf, piccalilli, and possibly courgette chutney, if I get round to it. Then it's onto the potato mountain...

Recipes for Millie

As some of you may know, I write another blog called Recipes for Millie. It's a simple idea (and one nicked largely from the Sainted Nigel Slater whose Kitchen Diaries are marvellous) - I'm writing down all the things I cook (maybe over a year or two), with a view to parcelling them up in a book at some point, to give to my three-year-old when she's grown up.

I'd love to know what my Mum fed us in the depths of the 1970s on a daily basis - I know about the fancier dishes that she made like spaghetti bolognese and her special fishy pizza - but even then the versions both she and I now make have probably become corrupted over the years. There's probably a lot more olive oil sloshed around the place for a start. So I thought M might enjoy looking back on the sort of things we ate in the late 2000s, when she gets to a nostalgic sort of age.

The blog's been going since July 2008, and gets a fair amount of random traffic via Google - not surprisingly it's mostly people searching for recipes. At the moment, staying in must be the new going out, because visitor numbers tend to peak on Fridays. And parsnips are surprisingly popular.

The current top 10 recipes are:

1. Chicken, ham and leek pie
2. Bacon and parsnip pasta
3. Smoked salmon, lemon and courgette pasta
4. Roast pork with especially crispy crackling
5. Black halibut and parma ham parcels (sounds very poncey this one, I do admit)
6. Toad in the hole
7. Onion and goat's cheese tart
8. Lamb, aubergine and apricot tagine
9. Chicken and spinach pie
10. Pork tenderloin stuffed with prunes

Of course now I've gone and skewed the results by linking to them, but you get the picture. It just goes to show that (a) you can't beat a good pie and (b) there's a lot of carnivores out there.