Degò

After a wonderful evening at Curzon Soho, watching the UK premiere of Thérèse Desqueyroux including a Q&A with Audrey Tautou as part of their 'Rendez-Vous With French Cinema', I had a delicious meal at Degò, an Italian restaurant and winebar a matter of minutes from the super-busy Oxford Circus.

The menu was full of traditional dishes and flavours from Italy. I started off with aubergine parmigiana - this version was partially de-constructed  with a beautifully sweet tomato sauce accompanying crispy aubergine interleaved with gooey mozzarella. It was certainly tasty, although a little too oily.

I was very happy with the house-made fettuccine for my mains. The pasta was perfect, just al dente, and with creamy fresh burrata and confit tomatoes was a pleasure to eat. It's a wonderfully simple combo, so I think I'll be trying to emulate it at home!

I finished with some great house-made gelato: peach, raspberry and pear - a refreshing end to a highly enjoyable meal.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

I've had a very tasty last couple of weeks, starting off of course with Christmas lunch. As a vegetarian, I didn't have any of the traditional turkey, but chose a recipe from the BBC Good Food website, and made it into more of a tart. It was delicious, especially with crunchy pecan nuts on top! We also decided to not opt for the traditional Christmas cake, instead experimenting with a quite ambitious Chocolate bombe, which consisted of home-made "cheat's" fruity ice cream (frozen cream) surrounded by beautifully buttery brioche bread and enrobed in dark chocolate! Very tough to cut, but also tough to beat!

On New Year's Day, feeling adventurous, I gave my mum a quick crash-course in rolling maki sushi, while she created a delicious aubergine dish from the Nobu cookbook. The sushi was delicious, with fresh tuna and salmon from our local fishmonger's - Moxon's. Unfortunately (or not, depends how you look at it...) I cooked WAY too much rice, and after determining to finish it whilst at its freshest, I could hardly move! The baked aubergine with bonite and dashi ponzu was also a great success. I particularly loved the way that the bonito flakes danced around on the hot aubergine!

Another recent great meal was a squash, ricotta, and sage lasagne, which finished with a wonderful crispy top, which was great to crunch through, and the combination of squash, ricotta and sage was certainly something to try again.

And just this evening, I was delighted by a lovely savoury tart tatin, with goat's cheese, caramelised red onions and chestnut mushrooms in puff pastry. It was so yummy that we polished it off before I could take a photograph! The mushrooms were great in the tart, and not something that I would normally associate with one.