How to make *amazing* jacket potatoes...

... if you like your potatoes soft and fluffy on the outside, and super crispy on the outside, that is :) No soft and wrinkly potatoes skins to be found here.

You might be wondering what the point is in writing a blog post like this, since jacket potatoes are easy right? Right, it's easy to make a jacket potato that tastes nice (it's also quite easy to mess up jacket potatoes and have some under cooked thing, but that's another story). But I'm talking about a jacket potato that tastes amazing.

The secret to making amazing jacket potatoes:

1. Time/Patience - this recipe does not involve any sort of microwave shortcut!
2. Oil (yes, I know it makes the meal less healthy but I don't care, oil really crisps up the outside nicely)
3. Kitchen foil to wrap, to avoid the skin getting too burnt (though I have cooked without when desperate)

This is not a 'get back from work and rustle up a meal quickly' kind of recipe. This is a 'I have a couple of hours before I need to eat' kind of recipe. Having said that, it involves the bare minimum of effort. Once you do the prep and put the potatoes in the oven, you pretty much leave them be. The recipe instructions may look long but only because I'm making them very precise.

Jacket potatoes are a perfect Sunday-kicking-around-the-house meal. Top with whatever you fancy, though my personal favourite is baked beans with cheese, and some mayonnaise and Encona hot pepper sauce on the side. Yum!

Feta Cheese Summer Frittata

This is my first attempt at making a frittata, and it turned out really well. I used feta cheese in this, but any cheese you fancy will do; goats cheese would also work well, I think.

For best results, you want to use a dish which can be used on the hob as well as in the oven (such as a cast iron ceramic dish), and I've written the instructions with this in mind. Don't panic if you don't though, as I actually didn't have one to hand when I cooked this, so I fried everything in a pan and transferred it to an oven dish. It turned out fine, but the bottom of the frittata was not as well set as I would have liked.

Goats Cheese, Courgette (Zucchini) and Cherry Tomato Pasta

This month will see a drop in the frequency of my blog posts as I wait for my house purchase to go through and live in temporary accommodation for the foreseeable future, but I'm hoping to be back on track with one blog post a week by the time August rolls around...

This is a relatively straightforward and quick pasta recipe; the vegetables are cooked at the same time as the pasta is cooking, so the whole thing only takes around half an hour. Soft goats cheese which has the consistency of cream cheese is best for this as it coats the pasta more evenly than goats cheese with a rind.