The Mountain and the Tree

Peel potatoes (a mash variety) and a couple of turnips, chop them into small pieces, and boil them. While that's bubbling away, cook some leeks (steaming for preference; I boiled them lightly), chop a medium-sized onion into pieces about half an inch square, and grate some cheese. I used about 200g of firm white goat's cheese, but with the quantities I was making (based on about a kilo of potatoes) I really should have used more, perhaps twice as much.

At this point, it's also a good idea to start making the pastry. (I had the invaluable help of randomchris, so doing all these things at once was actually possible.) My pastry recipes are a bit slapdash, so if you're not confident then you probably want to look up a pie crust recipe and use that instead. Six large spoonfuls of wholemeal strong bread flour; a hefty shake of sea salt; a teaspoonful or so of whatever herbs look tasty; mix it all up, dump in a couple of large spoonfuls of butter or margarine (soya margarine in this case, since I was feeding it to merrythebard) and a hefty slosh of olive oil, plunge your hands in and mix it up till it's a nice uniform crumbly texture and barely sticks to your hands at all, and then slosh in some soy milk, squish it up, toss it around, whatever, till you get a squishy elastic ball which doesn't leave any mess on your hands.

Drain the root vegetables, and mash the cheese in with them - it doesn't need any extra milk or cream, but there's nothing to stop you putting it in if you like a creamier texture. Dump it into the pot you're going to use for the pie, and mix in the cooked leeks & raw onion. I added a splash of white wine too, because I had an opened bottle handy, but there's no need to worry about the non-liquidity of the filling.

Roll out the pie crust into a suitably sized thinnish blob, and drape it over the pie contents in a crust-like manner. Cut off the spare bits around the edge, make sure it's sealed down pretty well, decorate the crust in a semi-random and haphazard fashion, poke a hole in the middle to let some steam out (it doesn't have to be a big hole) and then shove it in the oven for about 45 minutes at 180 celsius or so.

Fed four, with everyone getting seconds and my cunning plan for leftovers-for-breakfast getting thoroughly thwarted, hurrah.

Looks like nou has been a good influence on me, at least in departments other than the going-to-bed-early one.

This one's terribly simple, I got it straight out of "A Wolf in the Kitchen" by Lindsey Bareham. Quantities, as always with my cooking, are approximate.

Potatoes, some. I used eight medium-small ones, boiled (slightly too much, I thought, but it seems to have worked out).
Eggs. Half a dozen.
Onions, one and a half large red. Diced.
Salt & black pepper, some. Chervil, dried, lots. The recipe says tabasco, but I didn't have any, so I just grabbed the first thing from the cupboard that went with eggs.
Um. That's it.

Boil the potatoes. Start the onions frying, then when they're about half done tip in the potatoes.

While they're on, crack the eggs into a large bowl (I used a ceramic casserole dish for these quantities) and whip them up with the seasonings. Leave to stand, then when the other half is edibly done tip it into the bowl and mix them all up a bit.

The oven should be warmed up by this point, at 150 Celsius or whatever that is in Foreign, and the dish (naturally) goes in there for ten or fifteen minutes. It's largely comprised of egg, so you'll be able to tell when it's Done.

(Edit: bad typing redacted.)

This was prompted by remembering the international food fair from my days at Cranfield - it was about 85% foreign students and at the beginning of every academic year they rounded up as many nationalities as possible and induced them to do ethnic food stalls. We had Russian borscht (with Hellman's Mayonnaise) which didn't impress me much, thin & watery, but thickened up a bit it would be lovely. Iraqi applish semolina, French apple pancakes, African stew (the gentleman apologised profusely for not having been able to get goat for it. Bit hard in the middle of nowhere, Home Counties). And a rather gorgeous Nigerian fish soup containing approximately three kilos of black pepper.

Googling around, it seems to go sort of like this - the lady who made it wasn't all that interested in explaining it at the time, she just liked having people eat it.

FISH. Lotsa fish.
Pepper. All the recipes I've found say chilli peppers or even ahbaneros, but I distinctly remember black pepper so I'll use that. All the black pepper in the world ever.
Tomatoes.
Onion.

I'm figuring on pan-frying small chunks of fish in large quantities, then just doing a long slow tomato sauce stew thing with the pepper and some previously fried onions, and then seeing whether it worked and what else I need to do with it.