Ginger cheesecake

The perfect pudding for Valentine's Day. You hated the ginger, but decided that cheesecake in general was rather nice.

I can't claim credit for the recipe - I pinched it from a little booklet that came with Olive.

Makes enough for 8 greedy people. You'll need

10-15 ginger biscuits, smashed to pieces
25g melted butter
600g cream cheese (I used Quark, which is virtually fat-free)
1 tablespoon flour
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100g caster sugar
284ml soured cream
100g crystallised ginger, finely chopped (you could also use the stem ginger in syrup, I guess, as long as you drained it really really well)

Stick the oven on at about 180 degrees C. You'll need a 20cm tin - preferably one of those springform ones, where the sides come apart. Grease it well.

Mangle the biscuits with a rolling pin, until they look like breadcrumbs. Mix with the melted butter, press into the base of the tin, and bake in the oven for 5 minutes.

Sling the cream cheese in a mixing bowl, and add the flour, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract and half the soured cream. Beat everything together until it's smooth - you loved this bit.

Chuck in the chopped crystallised ginger, and stir. Pour everything into the tin, and smooth it out carefully. Bake in the oven for 30-35 minutes - take the cheesecake out near the end, and give it a little shake. If it's still wobbly in the centre, bung it back in for another 5 minutes.

Once you're happy with it, pour over the rest of the soured cream, and stick back in the oven for 5 minutes. Bring it out, and then leave to cool in the tin.

You might want to sprinkle a little icing sugar over the top, if you're being truly decadent. But otherwise just dig in.

Salmon with lemon and ginger

Another of the "oh, stick it all together in a foil parcel and it'll taste fabulous" recipes. Very useful, epsecially when you're in the middle of watching Shaun the Sheep, and want something quick to bung in the oven for tea.

You'll need:

a couple of pieces of salmon
a couple of inches of ginger
half a lemon, sliced into small chunks
lots of black pepper

Take two large squares of foil, and plonk each piece of salmon in the middle of one, skin down. Squeeze a little lemon juice over the top from the lemon chunks, and scatter them non-artistically around and over each fish. Peel and finely slice the ginger, and place on top of the salmon. Finish off with a good screw of black pepper.

Close the parcel so no steam can escape, and stick in the oven (at about 180 degrees) for around 20 minutes or so - it all depends on how thick your slices of salmon are. Once they're pale pink, you're onto a winner.

We ate this with noodles, stir fried with broccoli, onion and carrot. Chopsticks were quite popular...