28 March - crispy pork and noodles

It was a lovely sunny day, so lunch with a friend was outdoors at Browns. I had a rather chewy hot chicken sandwich, but it was okay with plenty of mayo and a few chips on the side, and it was just nice to be eating outdoors.

Tris was out this evening, so I used up the remaining cooked pork belly with some noodles, loosely based on a Jamie Oliver recipe. I stir-fried some spring onion, chilli and sliced red pepper, then added the shredded pork and a sprinkling of five-spice powder and fried until it went golden and crispy. Finally, I added some sliced pak choi and a splash of soy sauce and mixed it in with some noodles. The result was really delicious - all that lovely caramelised pork fat and spices - yum!

8 February - salmon with spinach and lentils

After a jacket potato with tuna and sweetcorn mayo for lunch, it was more fish for supper, with a couple of wild salmon fillets. To go with them I used a Jamie Oliver idea for spinach with puy lentils, herbs and a drizzle of yoghurt. It's always a good combination and with the hearty lentils, you don't need any other carbs.

21 January - fillet steak and thai dressing

We were in town at lunchtime today so stopped off in Carluccio's for a bite to eat. I didn't want anything too big, so I choose a starter - aubergine rolls - plus some potatoes on the side. The rolls were thin slices of aubergine stuffed with a mix of breadcrumbs, tomatoes, pine nuts and cheese, served warm with a tomato sauce - really nice and just the right amount.

We picked up a really expensive piece of beef fillet from Ruby & White this morning. I couldn't quite justify cooking the whole piece for dinner, so I chopped off about two-thirds and we had it with spicy, herby Thai dressing (from Jamie Oliver), on a bed of spinach, beans, carrot and red pepper and some roasted cubes of sweet potato. The steak was a bit rarer than even I normally like it and the dressing a little bit spicier, but it was still a really tasty combination and the steak was lush.

2 January - espresso cupcakes and pork with leeks and beans

I bucked the New Year's detox trend this afternoon, making up a batch of espresso cupcakes. The only downside was waiting for them to cool down enough to ice!

With an extra Bank Holiday, Tris cooked dinner. He'd found a Jamie Oliver recipe for fillet steak with creamy leeks and white beans. Unfortunately, with the butcher's closed and no fillet steak in Waitrose, we had to go for pork steaks instead. It was still a good combination though - really tasty and definitely one to try again when I can get some proper fillet steak from Ruby & White.

12 December - leek and parsnip soup and squash risotto

I was going to make leek and potato soup for lunch, but then I found a parsnip at the bottom of the fridge, so decided to substitute it for the potato. The resulting leek and parsnip soup wasn't bad, but it was a bit too thick and rather like semolina again!

I've had a beautiful bluey-green crown prince squash that came in the vegbox weeks ago sitting on the windowsill looking decorative (they last for ages!) and finally cooked it up this evening. I made squash risotto based on a Jamie Oliver recipe where you roast the squash with a spice rub (salt, chilli and cinnamon), then add it in chunks to a basic risotto. Today, I stirred in a bit of soft goats cheese at the end and topped it with crispy sage leaves - always good.

24 November - spicy beef and noodle salad

After a week of rather uninspired and disappointing food, tonight I definitely got my culinary mojo back. I still had a pomegranate in the fruit bowl and somehow fancied it in some kind of spicy salad. With some spicy beef noodles I had at a roadside cafe in Phnom Penh in mind, I got a fabulous piece of beef fillet from Ruby & White - probably a bit bigger than intended and definitely a bit more expensive - but it turned out to be well worth it. I made a noodle salad of rice noodles with carrot, cucumber and spinach and a spicy Thai dressing from Jamie Oliver (of olive oil, sesame oil, lime juice, fish sauce, brown sugar, ginger, garlic, red chilli and fresh coriander). I fried the beef fillet in one piece and served it sliced on top of the noodle salad with pomegranate seeds sprinkled over the top. The beef was spectacularly good, really tender and tasty and with the cool noodles, sweet pomegranate and spicy dressing, it was exactly the combination I was after ...

... in fact, it was plate-lickingly good!

28 August - baked mushrooms and supermarket salmon

We got more nice big mushrooms in the vegbox on Friday, so for lunch I cooked them up Jamie Oliver style, baked with garlic, thyme, oil and lemon. It's always a good recipe but today somehow the balance of flavours was just perfect. With a bit of parma ham and some saute potatoes, they made a yummy lunch.

After lunch though, I spent the rest of my Sunday working, so Tris cooked dinner again - a simple, supermarket "cheat" - salmon en croute from Waitrose. Despite getting stuck together in the packaging and being cooked upside-down, they didn't come out too badly.

16 August - being cooked for

Tuesdays are my busiest teaching day, so last night I made up a packed lunch; saffron rice salad with dill and broad beans. I was intending to have it with a splodge of yoghurt, but then discovered this morning there was none left in the fridge. I'd feared it might be a bit dry, but was actually spot on for a quick lunch break.

Tris was cooking this evening, quite nice to just sit down and have my dinner put in front of me for a change - salmon wrapped in proscuitto with spinach and lentils - a Jamie Oliver recipe and tasty as always.

14 August - cold pork, a baked potato and orange polenta biscuits

For lunch today I had the leftover pork from last night, which I think was even better cold as the sticky sweet-vinegary coating stood out without the other strong flavours. It went went with some vegetable couscous; with tomatoes, green beans and broad beans.

I really like a baked potato, but I rarely cook them because it seems such a waste to put the oven on for an hour plus just for a single potato (and we don't have a microwave). This afternoon I was baking biscuits though, so popped a potato in at the same time and didn't feel quite so guilty! I had it with a mix of leeks, bacon and mushrooms in a creamy sauce - basic food but tasty and comforting.

The biscuits were little orange polenta biscuits from a Jamie Oliver recipe. As I'm teaching at the moment, I often take a flask of tea with me to slurp through the day. My flask has a funny little compartment in the lid, just about 3cm across. I'd often thought that it'd be fun to slot a couple of tiny biscuits in to snack on. In the book, these looked just right, but I found that getting them to come out the right size was more of a challenge. The recipe was supposed to make 25 biscuits, but in the end it made double that number! I had to bake them in two batches as I only have one large baking tray. The first batch came out really too big, so I tried to make the second batch smaller. I ended up with a handful just small enough to fit in, put some in a tin and took the rest in to leave in the staffroom. They disappeared pretty quickly!

• Mix together 170g butter, 170g sugar, 255g polenta and 100g plain flour, followed by the zest of two oranges and 2 eggs. I did it all in a food mixer.
• Cover the mixture and put in the fridge for an hour.
• Spoon small teaspoons of mixture (a rather variable measure!!) onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper and bake for c.6mins at 190C.

Very easy and tasty.

17 July - jamie's italian

A branch of Jamie's Italian opened on Park Street in Bristol a while ago, but we've been avoiding going there because you can't book and there always seems to be a queue. But we thought that a rainy Sunday evening might be a good time to get in, so we took a big brolly and ventured out. We'd reckoned right and got a table straight away.

I'd been to the one in Bath a couple of times for lunch and really enjoyed it, so I was a bit disappointed as I looked through the menu and nothing jumped out. In fact, I really struggled to find anything I wanted to order at all. There was a lot of fish, of which I'm not a huge fan anyway and which I wasn't in the mood for tonight. Everything else seemed to involve chilli - in almost every dish, even including the vegetable side orders! I know Italians like a bit of punch to their food, but what's wrong with letting the natural flavours of the ingredients speak for themselves?

I started off with some crispy squid, which was nice - once I'd picked off the huge chunks of raw red chilli it was garnished with (and which wasn't mentioned on the menu - bit of a pet hate!). For my main, rather against my better judgement, I went for feather steak. The meat itself was pretty chewy and tasteless and it was only rescued by the sage garnish. It came with a tomato sauce which the waitress assured me was made of roasted tomatoes, but I'd be very surprised if the pile of sliced tomatoes I had were anything other than raw.

Tris had sausages and lentils which were much tastier, but would've been too peppery for my taste. As we chatted and tried to decide why we were unimpressed, we decided that perhaps had we popped in for lunch, it would've been fine - and we probably would've been been happy with different dishes - it just didn't quite cut it for a proper evening meal out.

5 July - squash risotto

The chicken and spinach pie was just as good second time around for lunch today. The beans are just starting to appear on the French beans on the terrace, but as with lots of veg, the first couple appear and then get quite large before there's enough to pick for a proper serving. So I picked my first three beans, blanched them very briefly and mixed them in with some tomatoes to make a bit of salad to go with the pie. As with the other home-grown veg, it's the wonderful silky texture that stands them apart from the stuff you get in the supermarket, or even the vegbox.

Although I love all the summery green veg, I fancy a change, so dinner tonight is butternut squash risotto - a bit out of season, I know. It's adapted from a recipe in Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie. I don't follow his rather long-winded way of making risotto, but the method of cooking the squash works really well.

• Crush a few shards of cinnamon (from the bottom of the jar) together with some salt and dried chilli flakes in a pestle and mortar. Cut a small butternut squash into quarters and remove the seeds. Coast the squash in olive oil, then rub in the salt and spice mix. Roast in a hot oven for 30-40 mins.
• Fry a chopped shallot gently in butter. Add a couple of large handfuls of risotto rice and stir to coat. Pour in a good glug of white wine and let it bubble for a minute or so.
• Add chicken stock a slurp at a time to the rice, letting it gently bubble and be absorbed. I'm not sure how much stock I use, I just keep going and testing the rice occasionally until it feels nearly cooked.
• Scoop out the flesh of the cooked squash into the rice, stir it in and finish off cooking. Taste and season - home-made stock is less salty than stock cubes.
• Stir in a small knob of butter and a handful of parmesan at the end.
• Serve with crispy fried sage leaves and a couple of slices of pancetta. The sage is so good, I must remember to do more next time!
  

25 June - courgette & feta salad and fillet steak with Thai dressing

The theme for today was definitely "home-grown"! My first courgette was a bit small and misshapen, but I wanted to pick it to encourage more to grow. It wasn't quite worth eating on its own, so for lunch, I mixed it in with some shop-bought golden courgettes. I sliced them thinly and griddled them to make a simple salad, dressed with a little lemon juice and scattered with chunks of feta cheese and toasted pine nuts.

For dinner I wanted to do a favourite dish of beef fillet with a Thai dressing from Jamie Oliver's The Return of the Naked Chef. After visits to several butchers, I couldn't get the right-sized piece of beef fillet to cook as one chunk as I usually do, so I had to go for a couple of chunky ready-cut fillet steaks. I find that supermarket steaks tend to be a bit tasteless, but these ones from Waitrose were actually pretty tasty. The Thai dressing has a long list of ingredients, but they just need all mixing together and the result is well worth the effort:

• 2-3 tbsp fresh lime juice
• 2-3 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 tbsp sesame oil
• 1/2 tbsp soy sauce
• pinch of brown sugar
• 1/2 tbsp grated fresh ginger
• 1/2 clove of garlic, thinly sliced
• some chopped red chilli (I only use about 1/3 a big one)
• lots of chopped coriander and mint

I made up a salad of freshly-picked spinach and the first of the home-grown mangetout (just very briefly blanched in boiling water), with some thinly-sliced, grilled red pepper.

I griddled the steaks for about 5 mins, then sliced each one, laid it on top of the salad and poured over the dressing. Served with a bowl of home-made chunky chips, it made a scrummy meal - such a wonderful combination of flavours and textures. And the spinach and mangetout really were completely different from those you buy in the shops, or even the stuff we get in the vegbox - just so much greener-tasting and absolutely melt-in-the- mouth tender!

29 May - fried haloumi & steak and mushrooms

There were various bits and pieces in the fridge, but it took me a while to decide how to combine them for lunch. In the end, I went for fried haloumi cheese based on a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe cut out from an old Guardian magazine - I used his haloumi coating and salad dressing which do complement each other perfectly. The haloumi is simply sliced and then coated in a mix of flour and paprika and fried very briefly - less than a couple of minutes each side - so simple, but the slight crispy coating really works. The salad dressing mixes a tsp of honey, the juice of half a lemon, a crushed garlic clove and some olive oil, whisked together. Our salad was some lamb's lettuce and pea shoots, cherry tomatoes, cucumber and sweetcorn. The salty haloumi and sharp lemony dressing taste fabulous together!

Dinner matched some portobello mushrooms from the vegbox with fillet steak - another great combination! The mushrooms were baked according to the Jamie Oliver recipe I did the other day, but without the goat's cheese this time. So the mushrooms are coated in a mix of thyme, garlic, chilli, lemon juice and olive oil, with a few more slices of garlic stuck into the top, dotted with butter and baked for 15 mins. Served with simply fried fillet steak, some spinach and potatoes.

1 May - Portobello mushrooms & simple pasta

Lunch today was a variation on a Jamie Oliver recipe for Portobello mushrooms. I mushed up a clove of garlic, some thyme leaves and a bit of chopped red chilli together with some olive oil and lemon juice. Then brushed this all over a couple of big Portobello mushrooms, dotted a tiny bit of butter on the top and put them in a hot oven (2ooC) for about 10 minutes. I then added a couple of thick slices of goat's cheese on top and popped them back in for another 5 minutes to melt the cheese. The result, as always, was absolutely delicious with a handful of new potatoes to soak up the juices - a real favourite!

Dinner was a simple bowl of pasta - linguine with shallots, pancetta, asparagus, a squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkling of parmesan - I think my first 'repeat' dish so far.

19 April - using up; salad & a pie

My last day in Brighton meant trying to use up the contents of the fridge. Lunch was a salad of spinach, cherry tomatoes, the rest of the goats cheese, the last few chunks of pancetta and a few new potatoes. Then this evening, I had more spinach and some green beans to use up, but nothing to go with them. So I gave in to something pre-prepared - a pork and cider pie from a Jamie Oliver shop - yes, he gets everywhere! Actually pretty good, washed down with some really nice pear cider.

Now I've just got to decide what to do with the last few bits of food in the kitchen. I hate throwing things away, but some things just aren't going to travel. I won't feel too bad about binning the rest of the rather unexciting French dressing and I don't think butter's going to fare too well on a warm day.