Vegetable and Chick Pea Curry with Dahl

The second Saturday of June.  It's a red letter.  It should be marked in all of your diaries.  If you make the effort to go to Leeds Carnival every year or wouldn't dream of missing Unity Day then let me introduce you to Beeston Festival.  Now in its 18th year, Beeston Festival takes over Cross Flatts Park for a day and puts on one of the best free shows in Leeds.

A dedicated committee of volunteers works throughout the year to put on the festival.  Four entertainment areas, children's and young people's activities, a bazaar with 80 stalls, a fun fair and a greenhouse made of recycled pop bottles don't just organise themselves you know.  As the Safety Officer for the festival, I was on site from 6:30 this morning and didn't leave until 7pm.  I can't take credit for the longest shift, that honour belongs to Jeremy Morton.

There is also great food on offer from your barbecue and jerk chicken to Indian and Caribbean curries.  I managed to inhale a burger whilst keeping an eye on all things Health and Safety, but by the end of the event I was knackered and ready for food.

I was met at home with the amazing smell of two curries bubbling away on the stove.  Z had found some leftover vegetable and chick pea curry in the freezer from earlier in the year.  She accompanied it with fresh dahl and ice cold beer.  The beer was generic lager, so nothing to write home about, but the daal was fantastic.  I think lentils are fast becoming my favourite part of any Indian meal.

With a full stomach and rested limbs I can now look back on the day.  We didn't have the glorious weather that normally accompanies Beeston Festival, but it wasn't a wash out either.  Every face I saw as I was moving around the park was clearly having a good time, and that's what matters.

Pork and Nettle Sausages with Wild Rocket Lentils

Last year, on Father's Day, Z and R clubbed together and bought me the River Cottage Baby and Toddler Cookbook.  This was meant to not only inspire us but to also guide us through the potential trauma of weaning.  It started off well, we thumbed through the pages, realised that what we were doing wasn't that bad and moved on.  The book, as with most of our cookbooks, hit the shelves after a couple of weeks.

To give it its due, it is a well written book.  It's full of useful tips and moves through the seasons.  It also moves through the stages of a child's development into cooking for the family.  I suppose it was only a matter of time, as with all of the cookery books that we own, that we would open its pages again and this is precisely what Z did earlier this week.

What she found was a recipe for lentils with watercress and onions.  We currently have an over abundance of wild rocket so a substitution was instantly on the cards.  The lentils were cooked in pork stock, with a crushed clove of garlic mixed through it, until the stock had been absorbed into the lentils.  They were then finished off with fried onions and fresh chopped rocket from the garden.

R had a portion of the lentils for his tea* and we had the rest of them for our evening meal.  We had bought some pork and nettle sausages from Swillington Farm at the last Kirkstall Deli market out of curiosity.  We simply grilled these and served them alongside the lentils.  I don't know what I was expecting from sausages with nettles in.  Perhaps a little more bite but you could tell they were made from fantastic pork.  The one thing we will be taking from tonight's meal is, we will be cooking lentils much more often.

*well it is a baby and toddler cookbook recipe.