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The other week I had a slight health scare. Y’see, the medication I’m on has the potential to shut down your immune system (scary stuff, I know) so if you start feeling unwell or have a raging sore throat, you’re advised to go and see your doctor immediately or you could be dead within a week. After a wonderful weekend in Brighton celebrating a birthday, I woke up with a horribly sore throat and a slight fever. As I’m sure you can imagine, I panicked.

Waiting to see whether or not you need to go to hospital urgently is not the best way to start a Monday. I was supposed to be working in the city right at that moment and instead I was at home, waiting for the email. It finally came, “go to the hospital” and I was off, fighting through the mid-morning crowds at Waterloo. The first nurse couldn’t find a vein. “Do you have problems giving blood?” He asked, my answer a curt shake of the head and a tense, “no. Not ever.” The second nurse had a quick look at me and plunged the needle into my right arm, drawing blood immediately. They sent me home where I waited for the results whilst trying to work. A few hours later they came back: I wasn’t dying.

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Truffle Pasta, originally uploaded by jaxies.

As the (lack of) Summer draws to a close I can begin to turn my attention more fully to comfort food. Creamy sauces, rich meals that make you fall into a food coma shortly afterwards… nothing short of wonderful. Winter is the time to get fat. At least if you’re around me, that is. Well, let’s be honest, around me you’re going to get fat no matter the season…

This particular recipe, then, was my last hurrah to summer. I was lucky enough to stumble across some truffle butter and summer truffle at bargain prices, so I could finally make one of the recipes that was screaming out to me from Ina Garten’s Back To Basics – a book I had purchased on a whim and then completely and utterly fallen in love with. Truffle butter tagliatelle was finally going to be on the menu, baby.

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Pasta Is The Food of Champions, originally uploaded by jaxies.

It’s been an odd week. On Tuesday night I found myself rushing to A&E (that’s ER to you Amurikan folks) because the contact lens in my left eye had broken whilst I was removing my make-up for bed, and gotten stuck. Cue much panicking and being convinced that said remainder of contact lens was stuck at back of eye. Luckily the doctor down at the Great Western Eye Hospital sorted me out in five minutes (told me that lenses can’t slip round the back of the eye and I was being silly, dropped anaesthetic in eye, used what looked like a cotton bud to swab out the offending article, checked surface of eye for damage, gave me antibiotic drops) and we went home. The following day at work a very old, rather senile and incredibly deaf lady who’d been in two weeks previously came back in and proceeded to yell at me for forty-five minutes. Not because we’d done anything wrong, per se, but because she is old, senile and deaf, and had bought the wrong product, then was blaming us. The whole episode left me rather shook up (even though I managed to sort it out) and all I wanted to do afterwards was curl up in a ball and go to sleep.

So that’s been my week. A week not very conducive to cooking particularly elaborate meals, one more for simple. And besides, very often I like to throw meals together that require minimal effort. I very rarely blog these meals because they are so minimal effort that I just end up scoffing the whole lot down without photographing it, and without photography there may as well be no point to the recipe. At least not on a food blog where the main pleasure is gazing upon food porn, salivating and imagining eating it. Or something like that. But this one I just had to share.

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Time for entry #4 in my Food Project Competition, which (if you don’t know by now and you SHOULD know by now so haven’t you been paying attention?!) is running up until the end of August and details of which can be found here. Get thinking, get submitting and I look forward to eating!

Floatykatja over at Kudocities submitted her recipe for Linguine a la Vongole, and I have to say, it totally hit the spot. I mean, I like linguine. I like clams. I like tomatoes. I love garlic. How was this not going to be delicious?!

Momma Lee is my main taste tester at home, whenever I cook something she’s there with fork (or spoon, or knife, or fingers) in hand (ha, fingers in hand), ready to dig in and give me her best opinion. Momma Lee is also very critical of food, so when she says it’s tasty you know it’s pretty darn tasty.

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A few months ago I came back from my friend’s Hen Party in Berlin and fell really ill for about two weeks. I think it may possibly have been a strain of Swine Flu, or, at the very least, a pretty bad case of the flu. I completely lost my appetite, felt nauseous all the time, was running a high temperature, didn’t eat for a week and lost about a stone. To make things worse, my mom had to go to Hong Kong for a few days, which meant that I was looking after myself at home.

Thankfully, my lovely boyfriend had a few days off from work and came over to help look after me (and, of course, then got ill as well, but for those few days he was awesome!) and force some food down me. This was one of the dishes that he made me towards the end of the week when I could actually eat again (he also made me chicken noodle soup from scratch and the world’s most onion-y omelette: yay antioxidants!) and I’m not sure if it’s because I started getting better so I associate this dish with good memories, or because it was just so darn tasty, but I’ve been a little obsessed with it ever since. However, being me, I have bastardised it a little from David’s version, but I think it’s the kind of recipe where you can make it your own.

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