A round-up and a recipe... stick around for the recipe!

OK, so Londoners are idiots who deserve what they get, just like Australians did for 11 years. Have fun suckers! Just why you think an old Etonian with no civic governance experience, a distaste for your eclectic population and a shady agenda is 'the right guy' is beyond me. Maybe your brains have just been fried by too much reality TV. Listen up - the smiling man with the fluffy blond hair and the bicycle is not a contestant on Big Brother, he is your mayor. You used to have Ken Livingstone, whose tenure will be looked back on as a golden age. You now have a clueless conservative clown. Suck. it. up.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In brighter news, I have perfected a cannelloni dish that will fry your brain in an entirely pleasant way. I'm so proud of it that I'm going to post it here.

Sue's ricotta-less cannelloni goes something like this:

Cut open a capsicum, lay it flat and chargrill it.

Fry a little garlic in a saucepan with a generous glug of olive oil. Blend in about a tablespoon of flour (the idea is to make a bechamel sauce, but I’m going to explain the whole process to you so as not to alienate non-cooks – cos if you can’t make a bechamel sauce, that is what you are) and slowly add about a cup of milk, stirring as you go.

I then crumbled some blue cheese into the sauce (don’t be scared of it, it adds piquancy – if you are scared, however, substitute some good cheddar or maybe parmesan. If you’re not scared, all three is best). I am a heathen and I don’t like the traditional ricotta – it’s too bland. Then I threw in a bag of baby spinach leaves.

Stuff the cannelloni shells (about 8-10 of them in all, it’s pretty tedious work) with the spinach sauce mixture. Arrange the soldiers in a baking dish, scattering pinenuts over them and studding them with bocconcini. Take the roasted capsicum, slough off the charcoaled skin and layer it over the top of the cannelloni. Then drown it all in some napolitana sauce (I will not make the call about how you source the sauce, as it were, but leave it up to you. If you cannot be arsed skinning tomatoes from your garden and ripping up fresh basil and oregano in a flurry of rustic endeavour after the hard labour of stuffing the cannelloni, I will pass no judgement – and the dish will only be a degree less lovely than it would otherwise have been if you just crack that jar of shop sauce and chuck its contents carelessly over the top. Sugar and preservatives don’t taste that bad.)

Now pop a couple more bocconcinis on the top and some parmesan and bake the bejesus out of it (45 minutes on medium heat? I dunno. I’m not one for measurements of any kind - just ensure the cheese is molten and the pasta can be stabbed without too much resistance) and serve with garden salad.

For some of you this is cooking 101. But there’s no harm in me sharing it.