Make the most of your gifts!

March 23rd - Home alone and the cooking for the past few days has been scrambled egg x1, bagel and cream cheese x1, soup x1....but in the fridge sits a gift.....from the 'Purveyor of High Quality Meats'......aka my brother-in-law of D. Comrie & Sons.........some black pudding!  I never used to like black pudding but was given some Stornoway black pudding as a Christmas present from my boss at work and I became a convert. In fact I have even been known to buy some black pudding from.....the opposition, although I ended up confessing to the deadly crime!  Has anyone noticed that there are not a lot of recipes out there for black pudding and the only thing in my cookbooks was black pudding in pastry, which sounds great but not when you are trying to lose a few pounds.  I saw a recipe online for Black Pudding Stuffed Mushrooms and thought that might be a nice combo so I gently fried some spring onions, button mushrooms and mushroom stalks before adding a few breadcrumbs and the black pudding.  It looked a bit dry at this point so I added in a couple of teaspoons of cream cheese and some fresh thyme and piled this on top of a large mushroom.  I stuck the lot in the oven.  It started to look a bit burnt on the top so I grated on some nutty gruyere and heres the result......

I'll definitely try this again.  And the moral of this tale...always make the most of your gifts...culinary or otherwise!