Ragu and ricotta pasta bake, a winter salad, a pickle and hazelnut cake

What should we cook this weekend?! How about this wintery, delicious menu?

The menus we make together at our monthly cooking classes are always fairly simple and star one or two recipes I love to share and really hope people take home, make again (and again) and make their own. For June, those two recipes were the ragu and fresh pasta below, and then the bringing of them together in the above dish - a sort-of lasagne with plenty of crispy lasagna bits poking up, a blanket of fresh ricotta and just so much big flavour.

I hope you try one or all of these recipes. I think this menu would be a winner on a cold wintery day - the house all warm, the table set with candles, nice napkins and a bowl of mandarins in the middle for colour and dessert and all afternoon to sit back, eat, and have a nice time.

Isn’t that what we all need right now? Take care, stay warm (if you are, as we are, in the middle of a very cold couple of weeks) and thank you as always for supporting this little corner of the internet.

Sophie x

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Pickled fennel and focaccia
Sausage ragu lasagne
Winter salad
Hazelnut torte with double cream

Pickled Fennel and Focaccia

Ok, so the idea here is to have a big slab of golden, crunchy, still warm focaccia, cut it up into small pieces and serve it with a soft cheese and sharp pickle to smear and dollop on top.

This is, I think, a sensational and easy way to start any meal. And of course, you don’t have to make focaccia (though I promise it’s easy; see the very end of this post for my recipe). You could even just toast nice sourdough bread and create a sort of ‘bruschetta’ platter. And of course, you could buy rather than make the pickles too. Either way, we want warm, crusty bread, soft, mellow cheese and sharp, crunchy pickles.

Quick Pickled Fennel

A super easy and delicious little pickle—you could swap the fennel here and replace it with radish, carrot, pretty much any vegetable you fancy.

Makes: about 1 big jar