Can’t believe my stay in the Philippines is coming to an end already. And what a miserable blogger I’ve been! Been so busy everyday, getting home past midnight, every night, and then getting up at 6:30 to do it all again…crazy!

I’ve got a big weekend coming up—dinner party with friends on Saturday, dinner party with family on Sunday—so I started cooking today. Fired up my parents’ third refrigerator and dedicated it to the weekend’s culinary creations.

I started out by roasting a lot of garlic flowers.

Cut the tops off whole garlic heads, arrange the heads upside-down in a tray, and brush virgin olive oil generously over the cut ends, letting it seep into the papery flowers. Roast for 5-8 mins at 180° C or until golden-brown.

Then I mashed the cloves with some dried basil, and incorporated the chunky paste into a chewy French-style bread dough, formed into 3 large free-form loaves.

I also made up three trays of vegetarian lasagna (another three tomorrow). I’ve been making my lasagna the same way since I was 18…I guess you could say it is one of my ‘signature’ dishes. I just try to use the best ingredients I can find, and to make as much of it as I can, from scratch. I don’t make the mozarella or romano cheeses, though I wish I could. But I do make my own lasagna noodles, and poached, peeled, and seeded tomato puree.

With all these flavours floating around the house all day, you may wonder what I had for lunch (and dinner) today? I had a cup of uncooked rolled oats, soaked until soft in water. Seriously. *slightly crazy laugh*

You know how the Irish have the saying “The shoemaker’s wife and the blacksmith’s horse often go unshod”? There were faint echoes of that in the kitchen today!