Airline food isn't great at the best of times, but the worst meal I've had on board was flying out of Hong Kong yesterday. Chicken and pasta was what I had -- the chicken had a soy sauce-based gravy and the pasta was orzo, the rice lookalike. When you fly coach, you never expect the meal to be fantastic but it should at least be edible. This was awful, even for someone who attended local boarding school for seven years and has eaten chicken with feathers still attached to the skin.

Having been away, my fridge didn't really have a lot, but there was some leftover cooked vermicelli, vegetable stock and tomato salsa. Just a little bit of each but with the baked patties in the freezer, they would make a nice pasta and meatballs for one.

There's no meat in the meatballs actually; they're made of cooked buckwheat (which is a fruit rather than a cereal), and if you toast them before cooking, they could pass off as meat (...if you really, really believe).

In the picture, the cooked patties are reheated in a sauce that's just a couple of tablespoons each of the stock and salsa, tossed through the vermicelli and topped with crushed potato chips.

I don't have an exact recipe -- I just threw a bunch of ingredients together -- and I'm really loath to provide one here but those of you who are skilled at cooking will be able to adapt it to your needs.

Buckwheat 'Meat'-balls
Makes about 12 patties

½ cup dried hulled buckwheat, toasted
½ cup toasted breadcrumbs
3-4 tbsp minced onion
2 tbsp chopped spring onions
2 tbsp chopped coriander
2 tbsp chopped chillies (any colour) or to taste
1 medium egg
Salt and pepper to taste
Plain flour
Tasteless oil (like sunflower. grapeseed or corn oil)

Cook the buckwheat. There are several ways to do this: you could cook it like pasta (in a lot of salted water, then drained) or like rice (the absorption method: twice the amount of water to buckwheat and cooked over low heat) or even in a rice cooker.

Let the cooked buckwheat cool slightly (or store it in the fridge), the mix all the ingredients except the flour. If it is too wet, add a little flour. Shape into small balls and place on an oven tray. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Turn on oven to 180°C. Drizzle the patties with oil and bake for about 30 minutes, turning them halfway through.

I was surfing around and came across allyoucaneatforfree -- which I will now regularly visit, I'm sure -- and saw a post that brought back memories. The writer provides an "I want this girl to like me" recipe, which reminded me of the time I cooked a chicken roulade, kind of like the one I posted on recently, to impress this guy I used to go out with a lifetime ago. This was long before I actually got into cooking and depended solely on recipes and more importantly, the pictures that went with them. The only cookbooks I had access to at the time were written in the 80s, and not wise to what would later be referred to as gastroporn, I thought the pictures in those books were the height of artful food photography. (Nowadays, we laugh at them as we do of those dresses with the pouffy sleeves.)

I remember there was tinned pineapple rolled inside the chicken, and I tried to make a sauce with the syrup that came with the fruit together with tomato puree and I don't know what else. It didn't taste right but I couldn't place my finger on it and kept adding more and more of the syrup and then more and more of the puree until there was nothing left and I convinced myself that everything was good.

Well, I finally served dinner, hoping my nice table arrangement would score me brownie points and watched the guy as he took his first mouthful. He didn't say anything as he took another bite and then I couldn't stand it any longer and asked, "Is it okay?"

"There's no taste," he said, rather too quickly.

Then it finally dawned on me -- I'd completely left out the salt.

Banana mochaccino

After using one banana for the brownies that I posted about in the previous blog, there was still one more in the fridge, all black and smelling faintly alcoholic.

Feeling I would need a pick-me-up at around 11am since I was going to deal with some rather unstimulating work that morning, I made myself a banana latte that my stainless steel water bottle would keep cold for a few hours. I should have added an ice cube or two though because I didn't drink it until after lunch and it was no longer as frosty.

BANANA MOCHACCINO 
1 serving

1 ripe banana
½ cup strong black coffee
¼ cup milk
1 tbsp cocoa powder
Sugar to taste
Ground cinnamon, to garnish

• Blend all the ingredients, pour out and dust with cinnamon. Shake container before drinking.

Note: When not at work ­­– or if you absolutely must ­­– splash in some Kahlúa!

PRINTABLE RECIPE