Cooking With Friends.

I'm currently feeling super excited that I get to watch the seasons change from autumn to winter. This time last year I was in Thailand and I definitely missed all things autumn and winter; from bonfire night to drinking glasses of mulled winter punch on cold nights at home. The leaves are falling from the trees and the nights are drawing in and I'm loving spending evenings snuggled under a blanket reading by the fire at my sister in law's place.

When I've managed to pull myself out of my blanket cocoon I've been spending days in central London getting reunited with my old favourite food joints (and checking out some new ones), interviewing for the Christmas temp job of my dreams (cross your fingers for me friends!), and having a tonne of fun hanging out and eating with friends. Last week Randi and I made pizzas with the Miyoko's kitchen mozzarella I brought back from New York and whilst I didn't take any decent pictures you can trust me when I say that they were delicious. My favourite combo was pesto, potatoes, rosemary and mozzarella. So. Damn. Good.

My cooking adventures didn't stop there though, I hung out with Sal from Alien on Toast last weekend and we made both lasagne and lemon meringue pie. Two of my favourite foods ever. The lasagne was a true lazy person effort involving jarred béchamel, two blocks of Sainsbury's vegan cheese, and a homemade tomato sauce with sneaky hidden carrots and courgette. It was super good and I hope that we make it again someday. I didn't take a decent picture so here's a photo of my breakfast the next day. Yes, I am basically a genius!

The lemon meringue pie recipe we settled on was this one from the blog Seitan Beats your Meat, we chose it because you can always trust Kelly not to put a shitty recipe out there in the world. I'm kind of a renegade so of course I didn't read the recipe directions before I shopped for ingredients or before we started throwing things together in the kitchen so the 2 1/2 hour cooking time came as a bit of a shock especially as this was after "cooking" the pie crust (um, warming store bought pastry. Thanks Jus-rol!) and suddenly our lemon meringue pie dreams seemed doomed.

Thankfully Sal figured that we could just make marshmallow fluff and then whack it under the grill it to crisp up the peaks which was a genius idea. As soon as we were done with our lasagne and garlic bread feast we headed into the kitchen to start whipping the juice from a can of chickpeas with sugar, vanilla extract, and a little cream of tartar. We followed this recipe but because Sal doesn't have a stand mixer we used an electric hand mixer instead. Now I know that I am way behind on the aquafaba trend but holy wow, this stuff really does work. We were a little dubious at first but it whipped up into proper stiff peaks - I could even hold the bowl upside down over my head like they do on the telly! So cool.

Our slightly tart and perfectly sweet lemon meringue pie was freaking fantastic!

As you can see I just spooned the mallow fluff onto the top of the pie rather than getting involved with a piping bag but it still looks pretty great and honestly, I was kinda amazed at just how lemon meringue pie like our pie was given that we skipped a step and improvised a little, but I can't fault it at all. Writing this has made me want to make another one immediately and I can't wait to have some more fun with aquafaba soon.

Do you have a favourite aquafaba recipe? Link it in the comments!

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