Food experiment fail

Time to draw a veil over this week's food activities. I've had not one, not two but three complete wipeouts in the kitchen wasting food and gas.

The first mistake is pictured above and below, a riff on Mediterranean stuffed vegetables. There's not really all that much wrong with them except they are entirely and totally unappetising. I've made a curry and 2 pints of soup so far in order to avoid eating these excrescences and even when I decided to hide the evidence by eating the photo shoot I gave up half way through because I simply couldn't force another mouthful in.

Then there were the sections of pumpkin, roasted because I had the oven on anyway. They weren't quite soft enough, so I left them in for another hour. I now have pumpkin leather, possibly of use to Ray Mears as something to sharpen his blade on or even to light fires but hardly edible.

Finally, there is no way on earth I will reveal what I did to a poor defenceless aubergine in the interests of research because it might lead someone of unsound mind to try to repeat the experiment and I couldn't take the guilt for the resulting disaster. It's very rare that food in my kitchen goes straight from oven to compost bin but this was a prime example. It makes me gag even to think about it.

So there you have it. Maybe I'm not cut out to be a top chef after all.