Rarely I can find a recipe which is healthy, easy to cook, tasty and filling at the same time. This is one of them. I am recently cooking more pasta, and this dish especially shines with freshly made one. Yum! You can add more than one clove of garlic. I have replaced “Parma ham” with “Prosciutto crudo”.

The recipe page (Telegraph)
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Waitrose is my favourite places to shop. Just after we moved into the UK, their shop in Oxford stood different to other shops. This picture I took this from my local Waitrose in Wimbledon. It’s still my favourite place to buy groceries.

I like to spend time there and enjoy good typography and design, friendly relaxed staff, great quality, free coffee and magazines. One of the things I love about the place is the lack of cheap toys which are strategically placed to grab kids’ attention. Waitrose has more profitable margins than Lidl so they can afford to focus on long-term profitability, instead compensating with shady schemes like temporary sales which create a fake sense of urgency, rotating stocks of overpriced low-quality toys and irrelevant goods, specifically placed to waste your time. Did I mention £1 egg machines and candy dispensers? Waitrose still doesn’t have these, and that’s why I prefer shopping there, especially with kids. Their shop has a great design, toilets are placed at a comfortable distance, for example. It’s never overcrowded, there are never long queues, and the staff is friendly and helpful. They also have by far the best-tasting bakery, sushi and dinner kits. Almond croissants are legendary.

There are some cracks in the facade showing. I am glad to see the coffee is back, but I couldn’t notice the appearance of kids’ magazines with cheap toys attached to them. And it’s a big warning sign. Looking at this chart from the Telegraph, Waitrose is not doing well financially as well, and it makes me sad.

I also shop at other supermarkets. I don’t go to Waitrose because of the cheap prices, for that there’s Lidl. The current marketing push on the essentials is not a winning strategy for Waitrose. They need to embrace what made them different in the first place and try to stay different. I will be rooting for them.

Good inexpensive and filling dish, easy to cook and very tasty. You can add prawn or seafood if you fancy but it is great with just chorizo, and you need just a little bit. I have found it on Tesco’s website and cooked it twice already. The ingredients were easy to find in any shop in the UK, in my case it was Morrisons.

Download the PDF as a backup in case page goes down.

Last night’s dinner was a disaster. I wanted to share this because failure is equally important to success.

• Even though this is a receipt from Waitrose, Sichuan pepper and sriracha for the sauce couldn’t be found.
• Tofu was cut too small.
• Tofu was kept in the oven which made them dry, even though the oven was switched off.
• Tofu bites needed to be turned half-through.
• The receipt has 250g brown sugar, which is a lot, it’s not for everyone.
• Added all the sauce at once, it was too much, basically a soup. Be careful with the sauce!
• The calories value are small.

A lesson for me is not to be seduced by a beautiful picture, but to evaluate the ingredients and value of the dish. I won’t be cooking this again.

My first attempt to try something from Waitrose Food magazine (free with their membership card). This dish is healthy and easy to make. I got 4 portions which covered 2 dinners. It’s on a side of light dinner.

As you can see I should’ve chosen a larger wok and forgotten about the sesame seeds, which I had. I also forgot to add seasoning, which is mentioned in the receipt.