Key Lime (Cheesecake) Pie

Key Lime Pie was invented by American settlers of Florida to use what they had to hand - fresh-laid eggs, tinned condensed milk and fresh key limes. The original pie filling used nothing more than this and relied on the acidity of the lime juice to coagulate the eggs and milk alone.

In these days when we get our eggs from the supermarket of an unknown age, modern recipes lightly cook the pie in order to ensure the raw egg yolks are pasteurised.

This variation bulks out the condensed milk filling with some cream cheese, which makes it a little less sweet, and a bit more cheesecake-like.

Ham Risotto in the Rice Cooker

I make a lot of Asian-inspired rice cooker dishes, but tonight I fancied a more European flavour to my rice.

Rice cookers can be subverted into cooking a risotto. The trick lies in how a rice cooker works. A basic rice cooker heats the carefully measured water and rice mixture until the water evaporates, at which point the temperature rises above 100C and the rice cooker switches off.

To cook a risotto, you need to add more water than the rice needs to cook through, and manually switch off the rice cooker when the rice has finished cooking.

Best of all - with the rice cooker risotto method, there is no need to stand over the pan constantly stirring and adding liquid!

Cucumber Lime Cheesecake

The Cucumber Lime Jam with Vanilla that I made a couple of weeks ago tasted like it would go well with cheesecake.

So I adapted a recipe for an uncooked marmalade cheesecake from my copy of the Marks&Spencer Cheesecakes book to incorporate the jam.