And so I bake up a debacle. Last time it was butterfly cakes. It seemed like a good idea – little wings of cake nestled in a pile of cream, glace cherry on top. Premium product, right? The cakes were fine. I was pleased with myself. They had chocolate chips. I had decided to use dairy whip instead of cream. I told myself that this was because it would save me time and mess but really I just wanted an excuse to hide behind the fridge door squirting tinned cream product down my throat. The cakes were duly creamed and taken to school. We literally live across the road from this marvellous institution but by the time the cakes had been delivered the “cream”, which is of course 99% air, had subsided and was flowing across the surface of the cakes in a greasy slurry. Cherries slumped forlornly on the plate. I placed my cakes on the communal table, comfortable in the company of a stack of nuggety offerings that had been crammed into old cereal boxes and strapped up with masking tape. The only person who purchased a fairy cake that day was The Child, bless him.

Scenario 2: I find out at the eleven and half-th hour that the kinder is having a working bee. A BBQ and beer  will be provided (yipee!) but a salad is requested. I never know what is happening at the kinder because my husband is the President of the Kinder Committee. This makes me assume that he will tell me the information I need to know in a timely and helpful fashion and so I don’t bother paying attention to anything the Kinder actually tells me. Therefore, between our mutual failures, I never know anything. But salads? Salads I can do, even at frighteningly late notice. Salads I understand. Salads I can not only happily provide but can actually use to impress and provide subtle indications that maybe, just maybe, I am one of the good mums. This lentil salad is a miracle of cooking, able to be conjured up out of next to nothing from stuff I nearly always have to hand, easy to prepare and so startlingly delicious that every time I make it I am inundated with requests for the recipe for weeks afterwards. Plus, despite being completely free of animal products, it has the remarkable quality of tasting like bacon.

Brown lentil salad

This recipe comes from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion where she describes it as a classic French dish. As such, it should ideally be made with Puy lentils (and they are much better, being nuttier in both texture and flavour). You can now get Puy lentils from major supermarkets but the readily available green or brown lentils (just different names for the same thing) are just fine and I use them 99% of the time. The trick is in the soaking time – they need 2 hours. Less than that and the skins won’t soften, more than that and the salad goes soggy. It is very important to soften the skins so that when salt is added at the beginning of the cooking time, they don’t toughen.

• 375g brown lentils
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 cup chopped flat leaf parsley
• 1 tbsp red-wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil (extra)
• Black pepper

Wash the lentils and soak them in plenty of water for 2 hours. Before you drain the water off, reserve a cup of the water – you will need it for cooking. Heat the oil over a moderate heat in a heavy based pan (not non-stick!). I use an enamelled cast iron frying pan and it’s perfect for the job. Add the onions and fry gently until golden. This may take several minutes. Add the garlic and continue to fry for 1 minute. Then add the lentils, reserved soaking water (or tap water, if you forgot) and salt. Cook the lentils for about 25 minutes until the water has evaporated and the lentils are cooked. If the water evaporates too quickly, turn down the heat and add a little more. Don’t let them get mushy – they should still be a bit crunchy. Tip the lentils out of the pan into a bowl and stir in the the remaining ingredients. It’s best to do this while the lentils are still warm to take the edge off the vinegar and allow the flavours to infuse.

Which brings me to his Nasty Bits, which is now right up there with other favourite essay collections by viciously clever men such as David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Martin Amis’ The Moronic Inferno. Among numerous hilarious, angry and insightful essays there is one so far that really touched a nerve: “Are you a Crip or a Blood?”. Bourdain’s Crips and Bloods are actually drawn from yet another novel (excuse me while this post is sucked up into a sphincter of post-modernist referentialism), Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park. Crips are insane, driven seekers of the culinary ‘other’ who will go to considerable lengths to obtain the newest, the best, the most exotic of ingredients. The Bloods are the purists, the locavores. I’m mostly a Blood – it’s just that I was born in the wrong country.

I love to immerse myself in the immediate and local because it is real and meaningful, but quietly my inner Crip is yearning for bizarre ingredients I don’t quite understand from Asian wet-markets. Problematically for my inner locavore the food I really love, my soul food, the food that I am (no false modesty here) absolutely completely smoking hot at cooking, is all Asian. Problematically for my inner locavore I find most of the so-called great cuisines that would suit readily available produce (say, French and Italian) to be comparatively unsubtle and largely over-rated. Problematically for my inner locavore I live on just about the southern most tip of the Australian mainland, remote and hemmed in by raging oceans and cool-temperate rain forests.

And so I too have returned to study. My Crip is learning to find expression within these limitations without resorting to that appalling bastardisation which is “fusion food”. It is planning to build a hothouse and grow turmeric and galangal, imagining spots to plant the lemongrass and kaffir lime, cooking with native sand crabs. Meanwhile, my Blood is learning to produce good food with local, seasonal ingredients that I enjoy eating and challenging itself with the weekly mixed box delivery from Birregurra Organics. I’m far more interested in what the Crip is doing, but right now I have to admit that it’s the Blood that’s keeping the family in food. Let’s just say I’m work-shopping some pieces right now: this recipe for honey-roast pumpkin lasagna is one of them.

Honey-roast pumpkin lasagna

• 1 whole butternut pumpkin, peeled, seeded and cut into approx 3cm cubes
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 generous tablespoon of honey
• a few fresh sage leaves
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• 500g firm ricotta
• About 3/4 cup shaved Parmesan cheese
• 1 lightly beaten egg
• Fresh or dry lasagna sheets. If using the dry sheets, soak them in water for a a few minutes before use
• 1/2 cup walnuts

Place the pumpkin on a large piece of foil and toss with the garlic cloves (peeled or unpeeled), olive oil, salt and pepper and sage. Drizzle with honey and wrap in foil. Roast at about 200C for 15 mins and then open up the foil and roast for another 10 minutes until tender. Meanwhile mix the ricotta, the egg and half a cup of the Parmesan. When the pumpkin is cooked, mash, blend or puree it until smooth. Take a small baking tin or dish – shallow and long is better than short and deep and lightly grease it with olive oil. Add a layer of sheets, half the pumpkin, a third of the ricotta and then another layer of pasta. Repeat. Cover the top layer of pasta with the remaining ricotta mix and sprinkle the surface with the roughly chopped walnuts and the remaining Parmesan cheese. Cover with foil and cook for about 45 minutes, taking the foil off for the last 20 minutes. If you’ve used dry pasta, it won’t be ready until it’s tender enough to slip a knife through.

Apparently simple and straightforward things (like mayonnaise) are often difficult to make, require real precision and understanding of what’s going on and a fair bit of trial and error. The simpler the dish the harder it is to conceal your mistakes. If you don’t understand the chemistry of the process (a knowledge which most home cooks only acquire gradually over a number of years) then you probably won’t be able to fix it if it goes off – course. Then there is the fact that most cooks have a style that they really understand and are comfortable with and some additional things that they just don’t get. With me, Italian food and doughs of all sorts fall into the latter category.

So you can probably understand why gnocchi has never been my forte. I have tried to make it at home but it has always been jaw-breakingly  tough and awful. Plus, it is time – consuming and fiddly when compared to buying the pre-made stuff. I persist, however, because there is simply no comparison between well made gnocchi and the pre-made product. And so it came to pass that I had a heap of old potatoes from Birregurra Organics that needed to be dealt with or be wasted. Gnocchi apparently needs to be made from old potatoes (something about the quality of the starch, I think) and I had a feeling deep inside that this time it was going to go well. And indeed it did. I did a lot of research and a bit of meditation (seriously) and entered the zone of marvellous gnocchi. The recipe below is what I did and I hope it will work for you as well as it did for me. There are a couple of tips and tricks in the method, the main one being to work gently and deftly. The amount made fed 2 people and I froze it after making. I chose to serve it tossed in olive oil and lemon zest and topped it with fried haloumi. I feel a little ashamed of the outrageousness of this but the soft, salty bliss was indescribable….

Baked potato gnocchi

• 400g baked potatoes

• some plain flour – start with half a cup – you may need more

• Beaten egg yolk.

Lets start with the potatoes. You need 400g of potato – this is the weight after it has been baked and removed from the skins. I would guess this is about 6 medium to large sized potatoes. Cut the potatoes in half and bake in a medium to hot oven until tender. This was the Eureka moment for me. I think that baking keeps the potatoes very dry which is one of the keys to successful gnocchi. Remove from the oven and allow to cool fully before scraping out the flesh. Pass the potato flesh through a fine sieve – this is very important if you want to get a nice, light texture so please, please, please don’t skip this step. Add the beaten egg yolk and gradually start working in the flour and kneading it gently on a well floured surface. Add flour until the dough is be soft and pliable. Don’t be tempted to add too much – when you are concerned that its still a little bit too sticky, its probably ready. Take small handfuls of the dough and roll it into logs of about 2cm in diameter. Keep sprinkling flour on or it may become too sticky to handle. Cut into pieces about 2cm long and make a thumb mark in the centre to hold the sauce. Place on a floured tray and use immediately or freeze. If you are going to freeze the gnocchi, place them on the tray in the freezer until they are totally solid before transferring them into a container or they will stick together and become a sludgy mess when you cook them. To cook the gnocchi, drop them into lightly salted boiling water. When they rise to the surface they are ready.

The cuisines I most like to cook for people are all Asian, specifically south east Asian, Indian and Chinese. I love these foods, they are my culinary heartland. I love the cunningness of Chinese cooking, the mad combinations, the double cooking, the peculiar textures. I love the delicacy and balance of south east Asian food, finding the perfect balance on a narrow flavour profile where the slightest mis-step is the difference between sublime and banal, or even downright awful. I love how food from this region is created from stinking, pungent, difficult ingredients and transformed into something beautiful and sophisticated. It’s like starting with Courtney Love and ending up with Audrey Hepburn. I love the huge variety of spices and methods in Indian food, the profound sense of satisfaction in creating a curry paste from scratch and the total sensual immersion required to cook it well.

I love to cook bog-standard b-grade meals for my family on a nightly basis, to know that they are well fed and a bit more educated about the world of food. I love to cook for guests. When Pete has people to stay (usually old friends or Kendo players) I’m always seeking an opportunity to make them sit down for a meal I have cooked. But most of all I love to cook for special occasions and this is where I really shine – in the kind of meals that take at least a day to make. Blissful, complicated hours of dedication to food to be destroyed in a single act of consumption like the dissolution of a sand mandala. And here I have added a new weapon to my arsenal: I have all but mastered the art of making beautiful, light flaky south east Asian style Roti.

Roti take time and patience, but otherwise they are not too complicated. I have not yet mastered the art of throwing the bread like a proper roti-wallah, and given the way I nearly broke my wrists and dislocated my shoulder in the first attempt I probably never will. The tragically unskilled white girls way of doing it is serving me just fine so far. I should probably stop perving at the roti guy at Rich Maha, however. My interest may be misinterpreted. The secret is in the oil bath. The little balls of dough like to relax covered in oil. They need at least 4 hours. Seriously, don’t even bother trying less than this. My experience suggests they don’t like too much more than 8 hours, though, or they become too relaxed and can’t focus on the task at hand. Give these a try – they are delicious, impressive and will cause sighing, shivery delight among those you love.

Roti

• 3 1/4 cups plain white flour)
• 1 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1 tbsp white sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 tbsp milk
• 3/4 – 1 cup water
• About 1/2 cup of peanut oil, plus extra to cover. You could also use canola.

Sift the flour, salt and sugar into a large bowl and mix thoroughly. Make a well in the center and add the egg and milk before folding them into the dry ingredients.  Add  the water slowly while working the flour with your hand to form a moist, sticky dough. Knead for 5 to 10 minutes until the dough is soft and elastic. You’ll know when its there – if you’re having doubts, you’re not there yet and need to keep going. Cover the dough with a damp cloth or plastic wrap and let rest for a couple of hours.

When its had a nice rest,  pull off enough of the dough to form a round ball about the size of a lime. Knead until you get a smooth, creaseless ball. Place on a tray greased with oil and continue until you get about 12 balls. When you’re done, place them in a large shallow bowl and cover them with oil. Cover them with gladwrap and place them in a cool place for 4 – 8 hours. If they go into the fridge, take them out at least an hour before you plan to cook them. They will be much more relaxed and elastic at room temperture.

Oil a work surface and press a dough ball into a flat disc. The trick now is to stretch it as thinly as you possibly can, pulling, stretching, whatever, until it is  big flat sheet of super thin dough. You will find that it pulls back quickly and is thicker around the working edges. I guess this is where the proper roti throwing techniques would come into their own. When you’ve got it as thin as you can, hold it one hand so it hangs down in a long string and swirl it into a snail-shell like disc. Place on an oiled surface and continue until you have completed them all. Heat an iron pan or griddle over a medium heat and when hot pour a splash of oil on it.  Pick up one of your discs and flatten it out until its about 6 inches across. Remember they are very elastic and will contract very quickly. Shrinkage is completely normal. Fry on one side and then the other until golden brown.

The last and most fun step is to tale a piece of paper towel in each hand and hold the edges (not the surface) of the roti between your hands, resting it on the work bench. Then you are basically going to clap your hands together while rotating the disc around. Smash it this way a few times until it becomes flaky. You’ll figure it out.  Place the bread in a bowl lined with kitchen paper in a warm oven and repeat until finished.

Secondly, its insanely cheap to make. For many people who have managed to pull off a largely more mature adult lifestyle and possess such things as homes and proper cars this won’t matter much but for me, it’s really important. As a family comprising a self employed student and a community-sector worker, when the Dreaded Global Financial Crisis hit my first fear was that my family would be able to afford nothing other than bad white bread and cheap carbs. Then I remembered the brown lentil soup. And, yes, the Dreaded Global Financial Crisis did hit us hard and, yes, the brown lentil soup was with us and is with us still. If you make this from scratch it will probably put you about $10.00 out of pocket but I nearly always have some or all of the ingredients floating around. Its smell-of-an oily-rag health food. Yay for brown lentil soup!

And of course, most importantly, it is really delicious. It’s warm and wholesome and nourishing and deep. It’s easy to eat and it always makes me feel the love. This recipe has been adapted from Kurma Das. Remember Cooking with Kurma on SBS? Certainly the only Hare Krishna show on prime time and one of the few vegetarian cooking shows I’ve seen on TV. Apart from the whole replace-the-garlic-with-asafoetida thing (and I’ve made it clear before exactly how I feel about that), Kurma sure knew his way around vegetarian cooking. I’ve adapted this recipe over time, and so here it is:

Brown lentil soup

• 375g pack of brown or green lentils
• couple of potatoes, peeled and diced into about 1 cm cubes
• couple of sticks of celery, diced (include leaves if you’ve got them)
• couple of carrots, diced into about 1 cm cubes
• Couple of cloves of garlic, crushed or finely diced
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Handful of spinach (optional)
• Bunch of coriander, preferably with the roots on
• Half a teaspoon of tumeric powder
• 2 tablespoons ground coriander (yes, that is the correct amount)
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1-2 teaspoons salt
• 1 – 2 tablespoons of lemon juice

Put the lentils in a medium saucepan with plenty of water. I’m no good at quantities but fill half way up to begin with. If you have coriander roots, wash them well and add a  few now. Bring slowly to the boil and cook until  mostly softened – this will take around half an hour. In the meantime, heat some olive oil in a pan and when its hot throw in the black pepper and tumeric for a few seconds. Add the potato, carrots and celery and fry until the vegetables are starting to colour and soften. Add the vegies to the softened lentils and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the cumin and coriander and simmer another 10 minutes. You’ll find you have to keep topping up the water. The cooking time isn’t critical – just make sure that the lentils are really starting to break down as the soup will be thicker and tastier like this. Finally, add the salt, lemon juice and spinach if using and wait a few more minutes before serving. Garnish with fresh coriander leaves, a drizzle of olive oil and some yoghurt or sour cream if you have any.

Summer 2010 – 2011, in terms of weather, was a complete fizzer: grey, wet and cold and so there has been an absence of the usual signs that the season has turned. The strongest evidence for the arrival of autumn has come from what I have been producing from my Friday Surprise Box: maple-syrup roasted vegetables, soup made from honey roasted carrots etc. My must-have dish of the season though has undoubtedly been an incredibly simple salad made from rocket, pears, walnuts and Parmesan. These ingredients all have a deeply warming and sustaining nature and this dish is a reminder of the joys of cold-season salads when you tend to forget that it is still possible to “eat light”. In Chinese medicine, walnuts support the kidneys which is a fine thing in the cooler months.  With this salad on board, you can make a sensational dinner in 15 minutes and wallow in that glow of smug self-satisfaction that comes with feeding the family something  tasty,  nutritious and cost-effective. Or maybe that’s just me.  You could serve this salad with heaps of different things but it doesn’t get any easier than sausages.  In these parts we are able to get a tray of 6 lovely sausages from Birregurra Farm Foods for a handful of dollars and this feeds the 4 of us just fine. The salad, which is tangy and peppery, really cuts through the fattiness of the sausages. Have it with a glass of stout and swan about in the golden autumn light for guaranteed happy times.

Pear and parmesan salad

• 1 -2 pears and/or apples, cored and thinly sliced
• Few handfuls of rocket or other peppery greens
• A handful of walnuts, very roughly broken up (I just crumble them into the bowl with my hands)
• Freshly shaved Parmesan
• Finely sliced fennel bulb and fennel leaves (optional)
• Couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon of wine vinegar
• Salt and pepper

Mix the rocket, pears or apples, fennel and walnuts in a bowl. Make a dressing by mixing the oil, vinegar, salt and pepper well. Dress the salad and then add as much shaved Parmesan as you like. It may not surprise you to know that I like a lot of Parmesan. Eat it with meat, eat it with pies, eat it with frittata. Eat it on its own. It will please you.

But there, at last, a solution to my problems: a curry made with unripe bananas. To tell the truth, the whole concept was kind of freaking me out and the weird gray mush pictured on the asafoetida site was not helping at all. I took the basic concept (bananas simmered in coconut milk and tempered with spices at the end) and largely tried not watch as I made the dish. The (imagined) texture of the bananas was doing my head in and it was largely this that drove me to make the fresh green bean pickle to give it a crunchy lift. This was a particularly good idea, if I may say so myself, as the combination of soft and crunchy was marvellous.

In trying to imagine this dish, replace “green banana” with “sweet potato” and you’re getting the picture. The unripe bananas don’t actually taste very much like bananas – they are more just like sweet, starchy dumplings. Not sounding so bad now, is it! Coupled with the crunchy beans it was really very lovely. And while I was eating it, I had an epiphany about how we consume food in our culture. We are such selective and extravagant consumers, taking only the finest cuts and types and leaving the vast bulk of foods behind that don’t meet our exacting standards. How much food do we waste like this? We grow food plants and consume sometimes only a fraction of their edible parts (think beetroots and broccoli) or kill an animal and take only the premium meats. It’s unsustainable and its disconnected. Think about it next time you reject a vegetable that is less than perfect. Mind you, that’s not to say I’m going to be taking up tripe and jowls in the near future, no siree…

Green banana curry with fresh green bean pickle

• 6 – 7 unripe bananas, peeled and cut into chunks (you may need to cut them into chunks first and then cut the peel off)
• 1 cup of water
• 1/2  tsp turmeric
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 3 dried red chillies, chopped
• 1 cup coconut milk
• 1 tin chickpeas, coarsley mashed
• 1 desert spoon fish sauce
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsps brown or palm sugar
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut
• 1 1/2 tbsp peanut oil
• 3 dried red chillies – additional
• 1 – 2 tsps black mustard seeds
• 1 – 2 tsps cumin seeds

For the green bean pickle:

• Handful of green beans, finely sliced on the diagonal
• 1/4 red onion, finely sliced
• Handful chopped coriander
• 3 tsp salt
• 3 tsp sugar

Start with the green beans as they need a bit of time to pickle up. So combine the beans and onions and sprinkle with most of the salt and sugar, leaving a pinch of each aside, rub to combine well. Leave to sit while you make the curry (or for half an hour). Then rinse well and gently squeeze dry. Mix well with the coriander and reserved sugar and salt.

So, the curry: quickly put the peeled and chopped banana pieces into the water with the turmeric, chillies and garam masala. They start to go black and manky looking if you leave them too long. Simmer gently for 5 minutes and then add the coconut milk, salt, chickpeas and shredded coconut. Simmer for another 10 minutes then add the fish sauce and sugar. Simmer until tender. The last step is to temper the curry. This just means heating the peanut oil in a small pan until very hot, then throw in the mustard and cumin seeds and additional chillies. Let them fry in the oil for a few seconds but don’t let them get too dark. Pour the hot oil over the curry and stir through. Done! Serve the curry with a pile of the pickled green beans on top.

Strained Greek yoghurt with banana, honey and cinnamon

On day one I used it as the basis for an embarrassingly simple yet incredibly tasty breakfast: one sliced beautiful banana from my weekly Birregurra Organics box, some lovely dollops of yoghurt, a drizzle of raw organic honey and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Just too easy, and I can’t even tell you how good it was followed by an especially good triple espresso from my beloved Bialetti Brikka (temperamental as a racehorse but when it’s having a good day you won’t get a better coffee anywhere, especially if it’s running Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, but that’s a whole other story…).

My standard breakfast coffee - not really relevant but oh so tasty...

On day two, I noticed that some of the above mentioned organic bananas were getting too brown to eat. What’s a girl to do but make banana muffins? Breakfast on day three is basically a repeat of day one except that the bananas are now in muffin form…that’s OK, isn’t it?

Day 4 sees a return to healthy usage: a dollop of yoghurt on top of a bowl of brown lentil soup. Its a yummy soup and a popular favourite, laden with vegies, full of coriander, cumin and tumeric and blasted with lemon juice and handfuls of rocket at the end. The yoghurt makes an already lovely soup deeper and creamier.  Day 5 saw the re-appearance of the yoghurt at dinner and still no-one in my family is indicating  that my new culinary friend might have outstayed its welcome. Tonight it was made into tzatziki to be smeared on minted zucchini and sweetcorn fritters and mixed through wilted beetroot greens. I love beetroot greens and these were a luscious armload from my very own garden. A really lovely vegetarian meal.

Zucchini and sweetcorn fritters, beetroot greens and tzatziki

So all I can say is, go to the Supermarket. Buy a big whack of Greek yoghurt. Strain it and see where your fancy takes you. I predict you, too, will fall in love with this lovely Mediterranean culture.

Pasta with Broccoli

You need to use the orecchiette or shell style pasta to catch all the garlicky oily yumminess.

• Orecchiette or shell pasta
• 2 heads broccoli
• 4 cloves garlic,finely chopped (do not use a garlic press)
• 6 anchovy fillets (drained and minced)
• Handful of black olives, pitted and lightly bruised
• Cup of breadcrumbs, fried in olive oil until golden brown
• Parmesan cheese.

Break the broccoli into small florets and blanch in salted boiling water until just cooked. Drain, splash with well flavoured olive oil and set aside. Warm a splash of oil in a low to moderate frying pan. Saute the garlic and anchovies gently until the garlic is fragrant and the anchovies have melted. Toss through the olives, stir for a moment and then add the broccoli. Toss the sauce through the cooked pasta and serve sprinkled with breadcrumbs and Parmesan.

Pasta with lentils and yoghurt

This (somewhat modified) dish comes courtesy of Jill Dupleix’s New Food. It may sound odd but is actually really, really delicious and well worth a try. 

• Cooked thin spaghetti
• 1 cup brown lentils
• 1 litre of water
• 1bay leaf
• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tsp each of ground cumin and coriander
• generous pinch of smoky paprika
• About 1 cup of passata
• small tub of natural yoghurt
• Chopped coriander and parsley

Put the lentils in a pan with the bay leaf and cold water. bring to the boil and cook for around 20 minutes or until tender – DO NOT salt the water as this toughens the lentils. Drain, but reserve around a cup of the lentil water. Saute the onions in olive oil until golden, then add the spices, lentils and salt to taste – I need a lot of salt to make lentils work for me and would use about a teaspoon for this recipe. Add the passata. If it’s too dry, add either more passata or some of the reserved lentil water. Warm through and then toss with the cooked pasta. Stir through the yoghurt and serve with the coriander and parsley.