Musings from a casserole

Cooked a lovely new dish last night, Lamb and green bean casserole. It has Greek influence, with cinnamon and fetta featuring in the dish. It's from this book, Apples for Jam:

We bought it the weekend my country brother visited, along with another one of her books, Venezia, a gorgeous cookbook, with its gold edged pages and black velvet place keeper. Splendiferous. It reminds me of our honeymoon there, last century (he he!) - two of our favourite dishes whilst in Venice are included: Squid Ink Linguine (me) and liver and onions (UV). UV is going to cook it for himself though, as I am no great fan of liver and in fact, offal is off my food radar (although I have to admit, I cooked Beef Wellington once, making the pate from scratch. So I have to qualify the previous statement: I will eat pate but that's about it when it comes to offal.)
It must have been a night for casseroles because Dad rang to report his best ever Uncle Charlie's Chicken. He felt this was in no small way related to the fact that he had cooked it in the french oven as opposed to an open baking dish. I'd showed him this method when he was down staying last week. Juicier and much more tasty figured greatly in his description of the meal so I'd say that's a resounding tick for cooking with the french oven.

UV and I ate our lamb and green bean dish while watching Merlin, the new offering featuring one of my faves, Tony Head. He's a swaggering Uther, very king-like and as always, brings something solid to the show. Even though it is a teenager's show, I like the way they are handling the story, the actors are good and they are keeping it fresh - plus the dragon alone would keep me watching (I happen to hold dragons in high regard).

Which in a round about way reminds me of my dream last night - Giles, or perhaps it was ASH himself, featured (how nice! - haven't had him in a dream before). I think I asked him about asking for someone's (?) approval. He said the person you should ask is yourself. This is not quite right but the gist. Just read a blog post that kind of echoes this thought -

The only thing we are going to be asked at the precious moment is why didn't you become you?
Elie Wiesel

Working on it ....