Today, a mincemeat casserole! I was originally aiming for a gratin, but Wikipedia informs me that mine does not qualify as a gratin because there is no sauce.

Ingredients:

Mincemeat (I used pork)

Mashed potatoes – I couldn’t find any Mr Mash in Giant, so I used the Goldhill pre-flavoured, just-add-water sachets of instant mash. I used 5 sachets, which is half the pack.

Cheese – cheddar and Parmesan. The Parmesan goes on top for a crispy crust.

Garlic, chopped

Salt, pepper and all-purpose seasoning

Instructions:

Fry the garlic, then add meat. I’m paranoid about food poisoning, so I cooked the meat until the juices came out, then left it to simmer in its own juices for a bit. Drain the liquid before putting it into the baking pan, though.

Add water to dehydrated potato powder. Stir.

Put mashed potatoes on top of meat in casserole dish. I used a foil cake pan, the loaf kind. I only have to feed 2 people.

Slice cheddar, put on top of potato layer. I originally wanted to use Emmenthal but it had gone bad. Anyway cheddar’s very versatile, and since the potatoes were flavoured, the cheese wasn’t too overpowering.

Put more mashed potatoes on top of cheddar layer.

Pour Parmesan powder on top for a crispy crust that smells like the cheesesticks from the bakery. I may have gone a bit overboard, however. The crust might have worked better if the top layer had been mozzarella, but oh well.

Put in oven for as long as you like until cheese is melted to your satisfaction. I heated it at 150 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes then another 5 minutes on 200 degrees Celsius to brown the top further.

The final product:

Delicious. I would have licked the remaining bits of mash off the foil, but I was full up.

The casserole

The delicious insides

I bought a new bottle of nail polish, and was so pleased with the results that I have deemed them worthy of a blog post.

The colour is Revlon’s Cherry Crush, #760. In the bottle, it’s a dark crimson-magenta. The colour is wonderfully opaque, just one coat does the trick. And there’s a lovely metallic finish as well, and I am a big fan of metallic finishes.

My toes look great with this colour. Red is usually a difficult colour to wear, because most women don’t pick the right shade to match their skin tone. That’s why you don’t see red lipstick a lot as a daytime colour, because it’s associated with glamour and dinner dresses and stuff like that. I say piffle to that, it’s just a matter of finding the right shade.

Scarlet is obviously out for many of us, because it’s such a strident and unnatural red. I have red t-shirts, but that’s about it. A red dress just screams slightly indecent things, in my opinion. Scarlet lipstick is probably just as bad, especially for the fair-skinned. A tawnier, more natural red probably matches better. By matching, I mean that a woman can wear it and you’d notice it, but it wouldn’t be the sole thing you see when you look at her. It just sort of blends in.

It’s the same thing with my toes. Every time I look at them, the nail colour simply looks right. It doesn’t scream or divert attention to itself as a colour, it works to complement my feet. And it makes them look so “complete” somehow. Like cherries on a cake.