Lime cream dessert

Remember that creamy lime pie from a few weeks ago? Well, I still had limes in my freezer, and can of condensed milk and cream, but no cookies for the crust nor the willpower to spend an hour in the kitchen for the full-blown dessert. So I made a lazy version of the creamy lime pie recipe - essentially withholding only the creamy lime part of it. Quick and easy, but fresh, creamy and very satisfying.

Ingredients:

• 4 limes
• 1 tin of condensed milk
• 3/4 tin of cream

Squeeze and filter the juice of 4 limes. In a bowl, mix the condensed milk, the cream and the lime juice into a thick, yummy cream. Basically, you're done.

I still divided the cream over individual glasses, and topped it off with some crumbled betterfood cookies for a crunchy finish.

Potatoe oven dish

I had a bag of potatoes growing legs, so it was time to make a potatoe dish. I hopped onto Nigella Lawson's website, a treasury of scrumptious and easy-to-make recipes. I quickly found a yummy-sounding potatoe oven dish, and adapted it to accommodate all my local supermarkets' shortage of halloumi cheese.

Ingredients:

• two-three handfulls of potatoes, peeled
• 1 red and 1 yellow bell pepper
• 1 red onion
• half a head of garlic
• olive oil
• salt & pepper
• a piece of brie, sliced (instead of the halloumi cheese Nigella uses)

Preheat the oven at 200°C. Cut the peeled potatoes, the peppers and the red onions into medium-sized chuncks. Peel the garlic. Toss everything into an ovenproof baking dish, cover with a few spoonfulls of olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Bake for approximately 45 minutes in the oven, add the sliced brie on top and let it melt & get golden brown under the grill.

It was heaven on a plate. A perfect recipe for fall.

Rosemary & parmigiano omelette

I made this for Sunday brunch. Nothing fancy, but isn't beauty in simplicity?

Ingredients (for 2 persons):

• 5 eggs
• a good splash of milk, depending on how dense you like your omelette
• a large pinch of rosemary
• a small pinch of thyme
• salt and pepper
• freshly grated parmigiano cheese, in generous amounts
• butter

Melt the butter in a frying pan. Beat the eggs and the milk and add the herbs. Season with salt and pepper. Fry the egg mixture on moderate heat. When the egg has almost completely solidified, add a good handfull of parmigiano cheese and fold the omelette down the middle. Let the cheese melt for a few minutes more before serving.

Great with a few slices of tomato and a chunck of nice multigrain bread.

Pita pizza (pitza!)

I invented these 'pitzas' one day when I really wanted to make homemade pizza, but my local supermarket was out of ready-made pizza dough. Yes, I am lazy, I do not make my own pizza dough. So instead I got some wholewheat pitta bread and used that instead of pizza dough.

Ingredients:

• a bag of pitta bread (wholeweat if you like, amount depending on how many hungry stomachs you have to fill)
• canned tomatoes
• fresh mozzarella cheese, sliced
• oregano
• a few drops of olive oil
• whatever else you like to throw on your pitza, really

Preheat the oven at 200°C. Spread out the chopped canned tomatoes on the pitta. Cover in slices of mozzarella cheese. Season with oregano and finish with a few drops of olive oil for the real italiano touch. Bake in the oven for approximately 15 minutes until the cheese had molted into a gold crust of cheesy goodness.

Creamy lime pie

I learned this recipe from my Brazilian cousin Renata. It's made with lime juice, but since those come cheap in Brazil but not in most of the rest of the world, you can use lemon juice instead. The taste is best with limes though, so it may be well worth the investment! Plus, if you buy limes in bulk you can make caipirinhas or mojitos with the rest. It's a party!

Ingredients:

• juice of 2 or 3 limes, depending on how sour you like your lime pie
• a can of condensed milk
• 3/4 of a can of cream (just use the condensed milk can to measure it, Brazilian style)
• a roll of Maria cookies, or any dry-ish cookie you like, such as petit beurres or Betterfood
• 175g of butter
• 2 egg whites
• 2-3 tbsp of powder sugar

Pulverize the entire roll of cookies in the food processor, or if you do not own a food processor, like me, put them in a clear plastic bag and go ballistic on them with the rolling pin (or a hammer, or a baseball bat... whatever suits you). Put the cookie pulver in a bowl, and knead in the butter to make the pie's crust. The dough should be moldable and should not crumble too much, but should also not be too moist. Spread out the dough in a rectangular pirex bowl.

Next, squeeze the juice out of 2-3 limes. In a separate bowl, mix the condensed mild, the cream and the lime juice to form a homogenous, thick cream. Put the cream in the pirex bowl on top of the crust, and put in the refrigerator to cool.

Beat the egg whites with the powder sugar to a mérengue-like consistency. (Tip: a drop of lime juice helps to keep the texture foamy.) Spread out the mérengue on top of the pie, and put the pie under a pre-heated grill for 1-2 minutes until the top of the mérengue layer is golden. Chill in the refrigerator until served.