My mate Annie told me about a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe for a Cauliflower broccoli blue cheese pie that she and Andy love, so I decided to look it up and give it a try. But as I only had half the ingredients, wanted to make something with chicken and had a guest who doesn’t like blue cheese, a whole nother pie was born!

Beef olives have nothing to do with olives that you pick from a tree, but it is thought that the name comes more from its shape than anything else. In some countries one uses the German word rouladen or roulades, and in others olives. Whatever you call them, they are deeelicious and Tante Inge’s recipe is to die for!

This is a low-carb banana bread recipe that has no bananas in it. Huh? What are you saying there, crazy woman! It does have banana essence (see it’s all becoming clear now right), but tastes somehow banany even without it…

This is another recipe from our lovely friend Anja ( www.reisenundspeisen.com ) and she made it for her wonderful hubby, Micha, for his 60th birthday. Chila (or Gila) is Portuguese for fig-leaf gourd/pumpkin and gets used a lot in Portuguese desserts and jams.

This recipe is from our mate Anja ( www.reisenundspeisen.com ) and you can find it in German there too. What makes this salad so special is that the finely chopped cabbage is then pressed to release water and this makes the cabbage softer and more delicious. It soaks up the dressing even better after it’s released its water.

This deevine cake, recipe and photo are all from my mate Anouschka. She is an awesome baker and I unashamedly am posting her recipe and photo here today.

Passion is definitely the theme for January so I decided to share another passion, this time one of The Husband’s Passions. Joerg loves pancakes (me too!) and Lena’s pancakes are positively fabulous. I make a mean Apple Pancake (Lynn my American mate can vouch for this), but these are deevine too.

I don’t know about you, but I love potato salad. My mother made a deevine yet incredibly simple one with just potatoes, hard-boiled eggs and mayonnaise which we always had with braais (barbecue to the rest of the world!).

What, you say? A Gherkin soup? Never heard of it and don’t want it. Stop right there. It is SUPERB to say the very least. Lena and Dieter are deevine campervan friends and she made this for us 2 years ago and today and it was as great today as it was 2 years ago.

You met my friend Carola previously in the Beef Stew post and she returns today with yet another great recipe, this time for an English cake. This is so soft and juicy and keeps so well, you just have to love it.