Then it was my birthday towards the end of the second week, and I was away from home for a couple of days, then had friends to stay and we mostly went out to eat. A bit of proper cooking at the beginning of the week: spinach and potato curry; a kind of lamb, leek and mushroom fricassee. Oh, and on Sunday one of my friends showed me how to make Irish potato cakes, so I’ll hopefully be doing those again. After all the pigging out and drinking I didn’t really need much to eat Sunday evening, so just had a tub of sweet potato soup from the freezer.

Will hopefully get back to normal this week!

Tuesday: bit of an experiment; venison kidney and bacon in tomato and paprika cream sauce with peas and rice. The kidneys also came from the farmers market, something I’ve never tried before. OK, but didn’t light my fire.

Wednesday: baked potato day; with some baked flat mushrooms (topped with bacon bits), and topped of course with lots of butter and cheese. Yummy.

Thursday: sweet potato soup. Based on this Waitrose recipe, especially the idea of topping it with fried haloumi. Interesting alternative to the recipes that use bacon as a topping. (Didn’t bother with the ‘chilli-infused olive oil’ or the ‘Waitrose Five Seed mix’, however. And I used fresh sweet potatoes.) A couple of extra portions went into the freezer.

There are things in the world that really can’t go far wrong; turning sweet potatoes into soup is one of them.

Friday: sort-of moussaka. Not the real thing because I didn’t feel like making white sauce (also, no milk). I layered lamb mince (cooked with onions, tomatoes, cinnamon, thyme and oregano) with fried sliced aubergines and potatoes, and topped it with cheese and creme fraiche mixed with a little warm water (plain yogurt would work too). If I’d thought of it earlier, some feta would have been nice. Still pretty tasty though. Some leftovers, but not really enough to freeze; microwaved for lunch on Sunday.

Saturday: egg fried rice with stirfried cabbage. Some ginger, garlic and a sachet of miso soup went in for flavouring.

Sunday: tried quinoa for the first time - a simple pilaf-type recipe, with tomatoes, purple sprouting broccoli and fried haloumi. It was pretty good.

Tuesday: I was late back from work, so a quick dinner. Scrambled eggs with bacon, with fried mushrooms, onions and cherry tomatoes, and bread on the side. Not terribly healthy, especially as it seemed a nice idea to fry the mushrooms in butter. Mmmmm.

Wednesday: SAUSAGE AND MASH!! Yay! The sausages were particularly good ones from the farmers market (smoked, and very high meat content judging by the texture). The mash contained a lot of butter, cream and a dollop of creamy goats cheese. Mmmm…. Beetroot and purple broccoli on the side (these both microwave remarkably well. Specially since I feared the beetroot was well past it). Plus onion gravy.

Thursday: roasted mixed veg and tofu, with a mildly spicy tomato sauce. I personally think that boiling is about the worst way to cook most winter root vegetables (carrots, parsnips, turnips, etc). Roast them and they come out with much better flavour and texture. And it’s so easy. Chop ‘em up, chuck ‘em in a roasting tray with a bit of olive oil, put ‘em in an oven for about 3/4 of an hour (turn them over once. The tofu only needs 20-25 minutes). The tomato sauce was the last tub in the freezer. Will have to do something about that.

Friday: Back to the Freezer for a tub of curried lamb mince. Have a feeling the recipe came from the internet, but don’t know exactly where now (which will be annoying when I want to do it again). Jolly nice though - definitely included such things as coriander, cumin, cardamom, garam masala. Added chopped aubergine and tomato for some fresh veg. With that and cooking some rice, took about 20 minutes in total.

Saturday: Creamy tomato sauce with spinach and (bought) tricolore gnocchi, and some parmesan on top. Quite good, but I’ll probably stick to plain gnocchi in future.

Sunday: Pork and sweet potato stew. Very good indeed. It turned out a wee bit sweet (perhaps in scaling down I didn’t use enough mustard) so I added a little red wine vinegar, which did the trick.

Tuesday: Lamb steak, tomatoes, baby aubergines, lentils, and nice flavour mix borrowed from this lamb tagine recipe; with couscous, plus threw in some leftover beetroot from yesterday’s dinner. Pink couscous, pretty! Cooking time: preparing, stirring, etc, about half an hour; a little over an hour from start to finish. Yummy.

Wednesday: Potato, chorizo and spinach soup. Simple recipe largely relying on the chorizo for flavour (additional flavouring: onion, butter, mustard seeds and a little stock concentrate); total cooking time no more than 40 minutes, including 10-15 minutes peeling, chopping, etc. Very good comfort food. (Could probably do a veggie version with a bit of extra flavouring - maybe some cheese.)

Thursday: Baked sweet potato and portobello mushroom, with tomato sauce (one I made earlier, out of the freezer) with aduki beans (also from the freezer - a fantastic idea). Total cooking time varies depending on the size of the sweet potato, but usually about an hour total, of which I spend maybe 5 minutes actually doing stuff. (Put potato in oven, smothered in olive oil; half an hour or so later put mushroom in oven, ditto; tomato sauce and beans go in microwave. It’s barely cooking at all.) Always nice, if not exactly mindblowing.

Friday: Spicy pork and tomato stew (adapted this recipe - great flavours, definitely worth doing the full-scale version in the future), with rice. Added some fennel, and used up the tinned tomatoes from Tuesday evening. Preparation took about 25 minutes, total cooking about 50 minutes. Damn good.

There’s some taleggio cheese in the fridge that needs to be used up soon. Hmmm…

Saturday: Risotto with wet (fresh) garlic and taleggio. Risotto is one of my favourite comfort foods (the weather has turned miserable and cold over the last week…), although nothing compares to mashed potato in that department. My favourite risotto in recent months has been sweet potato (taking over from fennel), but this works pretty well. NB, however: when I’ve used wet garlic in risotto previously, I’ve roasted it. This time I tried simply using it raw, as in this recipe (because I feel bad about putting the oven on just to roast a head of garlic, for crissakes…), but I don’t think it was as nice. Roasting the garlic first makes it sweeter and milder and although you then need a bit more of it, I think it gives a better flavour. Could have used parmesan rather than taleggio, but the latter gave it a creamier texture. (Rather like savoury rice pudding.)

Sunday: Farmers’ Market Day!! Which always leads to a dilemma: which of the bulging packs of dead animal to eat tonight?! I went for something I’ve only ever seen at this farmers market: venison liver. It’s gorgeous, and cheap. You don’t need to do much to it, but I have a bad habit of overcooking liver if I fry it, so this is what I do: brown each side for a couple of minute in the frying pan with a little oil, then take it out; put in some red wine or marsala or some such and reduce slightly, add a little liquid and flavouring (I usually go for something sweet like redcurrant jelly + something savoury like stock concentrate or soy sauce); then I put the liver back in the liquid to gently poach for a few more minutes, till it’s just a little pink in the middle (you don’t need much liquid - the liver is never completely submerged). Then I take it out for the last time and bung a spoonful or two of cream or creme fraiche into the sauce to make it creamy and unhealthy. Served with potatoes and purple sprouting broccoli (’tis the p.s.b. season - rejoice!), but rice, salad, etc, might work instead.

There is now a crazy amount of top-quality meat in the freezer, neatly divided into portions for use over the coming weeks. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without my freezer.

2. I pick up a lot of online recipes and sometimes can’t track them down afterwards - I’d like to be able to find the good ones easily again. (And have some memory of what I did to them, since I rarely follow a recipe exactly.)

3. To show that it doesn’t take vast amounts of time, skill or fancy ingredients to produce tasty and interesting food.

The makers of Lloyd Grossman sauces have commissioned a survey which yields this depressing information: foodwise, most of us have around four staple meals, and that is pretty much all we cook. This means that we eat on average 2,960 portions of spaghetti bolognese in a lifetime, which is the equivalent of eating it every day for eight years. Other British staples that loom large are sausage and mash, chicken tikka masala and chilli con carne.

I appear to be doing better than that, anyway. The food diary for the last few days:

Wednesday: bought pizza (roast vegetables type thing). It was a busy evening. But you know, I do this maybe twice a month. It’s a treat for me.

Thursday: grilled fresh tuna; some kind of spinach and tomatoes mix (maybe like this; with spaghetti

Friday: this involved chorizo, tomatoes, penne (and possibly pesto) though I can’t remember what else or exactly how it went together

Saturday: spinach curry with haloumi (because I didn’t have any paneer and it seemed worth a try, and it was actually pretty good); with rice

Sunday: braised oxtail and carrots (plus 2 portions -> freezer); with potato

Courgette and Tomato Salsa
raw courgette salad

Update: Damn good stuff.

They’re my favourite online supplier of spices; not only do they make some divine spice mixes, they use lightweight packaging that’s ideal for sending through the post and doesn’t take up much space.

I’m particularly fond of lamb curry made with their Zanzibar curry powder…

Update: And so it did. I cheated though, and turned it into a meat dish by adding the chopped up meat from a chicken drumstick, roasted in the oven with the garlic. (And I deglazed the juicy gunk from the bottom of the roasting tin and added that to the risotto as well.)