This one is a real mongrel.  You’ve probably heard of Nigella Lawson’s gammon cooked in coke – it’s utterly delicious, and I make it often (we’re big fans of buying a large gammon and having it for our lunches during the week).

Rummaging in the shed last weekend, we found 12 bottles of ginger beer that we’d forgotten about, and they were past their sell-by date.  “I wonder”, I thought … So we tried boiling the gammon in ginger beer, with a stick of cinnamon added, and it was absolutely delicious.

This, of course, left me with a lot of gingery ham stock, so we fished all the rather tired vegetables out of the fridge and chopped them up – a squash, a courgette, some celery, carrots, and a potato.  Cut them into small dice, fried them down a bit, added the stock and half a mug of green lentils.

It has turned out a bit too celery-ish, but other than that, it’s really nice – quite sweet, from the sugar in the ginger beer, but none the worse for that.