My chum film-maker Sarah Akrobettoe challenged me to make a cooking demo video over Easter and I did it! It was so much fun to make and edit. I did it all in one day, as my mum would say “all by my own self” on Easter Monday – and I am stupidly proud of it. I tend to feel that food photography and video making are beyond me. But I guess we all just have to have faith and give it a go. Here’s my video! Showing how to make Peter Falk’s Pumpkin Lasagne in around 1 minute…
I froze most of the pumpkin lasagne that I made for this video and had some for my dinner tonight. I am really pleased to report that these big shells of pumpkin-ness freeze just fine.
My chum Michelle Kerry put an idea in my head that I included in the Columbo cookbook…
She tested this dish for me and said… “This would be good served with a sauce, maybe something cheesy, or slightly spicy like an Arrabbiata chile/tomato sauce.”
so after defrosting a batch of the filled shells in the fridge while I was at work all day, when I got in, I put some spicy tomato sauce in the bottom of a casserole dish (admittedly courtesy of Mr Lloyd Grossman)
popped the shells on top,
put the lid on and heated it up while I was practising my GO-GO ROUTINE (I have promised Mr R to learn this by his birthday – 1st Jan 2019 – I am pretty rubbish at it, so need to do it at least once a week if I’m going to make a passable attempt at it by then).
The resulting dish was very lovely indeed.
I had half of the pumpkiny shells tonight
and will have half tomorrow for lunch before I head up to the Muswell Hill library to give a little talk about Cooking With Columbo – do come if you are in the hood! 2pm – 2pm. It’s FREE and there will be Rue McClanahan cookies!
Alongside the pumpkin lasagne in the photo above is one of my fave salads, from the Ed Smith On The Side cookbook. I don’t bother with the quinoa because I am lazy, but everything else is YUM.
The salad was leftover from a FAB DINNER with my lovely friend and celeb chef Alastair Hendy last night. We had 3 Yul Brynner dishes with Ed’s salad as a starter, and I’ll be reporting on our Yul Brynner Dinner soon… Ed, if you are reading this, Alastair had THREE HELPINGS of your salad!
Let me know if you would like Peter’s recipe, it’s in the Columbo cookbook of course, and I’m too drunk now to find it and put it in this post. But if I remember I will come back and do it!