i am experiencing such an acute case of shoe and stocking envy i can't even read the rest of the post. i know there's a fabulous purple pepper somewhere, but i must. have. those. shoes. and. tights.

Hi Meg! Great to see you back again, and congratulations on the Dublin postdoc! The polenta with smoky tomato sauce sounds particularly good (I've recently discovered that polenta is actually quite nice when you add lots of cheese).... The tights are quite spectacular too!

I am glad someone else shares my feelings about those shoes and stockings, Santos! I have been in a good mood ever since I bought them.

Thanks, Angela! I eat quite a bit of polenta in winter, especially now that I make it in the oven and there's no stirring to make it all seem too hard. One of the reasons I like it with the smoky sauce is because the sauce is flavoursome enough that I don't have to grate the entire block of parmesan into the polenta to give a bit of flavour. Although I once made polenta with both a gigantic piece of blue cheese and a largish one of parmesan and it was certainly a thing of beauty, if extremely heart-attacky.