Kitchen days

Homemade cheese straws, recipe from Yumblog

Now that I'm officially unemployed, I need to find ways to occupy my time (besides time spent looking for another job, of course). There are grand plans to visit museums and exhibitions I've never been able to visit, areas of London to explore and poke around, but for the cold and grey days, I'll be spending time in my kitchen, the warmest room in the house.

While I've been making a lot of sweet things recently, my thoughts have now extended to savoury. I've been watching a lot of food programmes on TV recently, and I happened to catch an episode of The F Word, and watched Gordon Ramsay make a rather tantalising goat cheese souffle. There's something really appealing about making a savoury souffle, and I think I will try them one of these days.

Meanwhile, to start myself off, I made cheese straws a couple of nights ago while watching Crash (the Cronenburg version). Of course, there was quite a bit of cheating involved: I used ready-made rolled out puff pastry, and the only hard work was in grating the cheese and doing the twists - mine came out rather uneven.

Anyway, with more time in the kitchen now, here are some recipes I'm dying to try out soon, both sweet and savoury:

• Spinach and goat cheese souffle, recipe from Gordon Ramsay
  
• Zucchini souffle, recipe from Chubby Hubby
  
• Chocolate and Guiness cake, recipe from The Cake Book by Tish Boyle
  
• Caramel and macadamia cheesecake, recipe from Nordljus
• Plasir Sucre, recipe from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme
• Honey nougat, recipe from The Chocolate Book