11 March - a warm salad and more chicken

Lunch today was a nice warm, tasty salad of potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, red pepper, a bit of chorizo and a poached egg.

I had the usual issue with cooking/shopping for one - I got yesterday's chicken thighs in a pack of four, so I was left with chicken again for supper. Trying to come up with something that would be quite different, I made some chicken and chickpea stew with spring greens. It's a Sophie Grigson recipe that involves putting some of the greens in the stew itself, then frying up a few leaves finely shredded to go on the top. It's a bit of a faff, but the crunchy topping is quite fun and less tricky with such a small amount.

12 February - curry twice

For lunch, I used the giant parsnip from the vegbox to make some Thai-spiced parsnip soup. It's always a good recipe (from Sophie Grigson), but today it came out just spot-on - just the right consistency, the right blend of flavours, the right amount of chilli hum.

It was curry again for dinner, but this time of an Indian leaning. I did Madhur Jaffrey's chicken in red pepper sauce, which is always delicious and to go with it tried out her Gujerati cabbage with carrots - strips of cabbage and grated carrot, lightly stir-fried with subtle spices (asafetida, black mustard seeds and just a few chilli flakes), lemon and fresh coriander - crunchy and delicious.

14 October - sweet potato soup and monkfish with cardamom and vanilla

I'm realising that I really overdid it with the root vegetables in last week's vegbox! For lunch today I cooked up some sweet potato and red lentil soup - another Sophie Grigson recipe from Vegetables.

• Sweat a large sweet potato peeled and cut into chunks, together with a chopped onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, some peeled and chopped fresh ginger, a star anise and a glug of sunflower oil over a low heat with the lid on.
• Add a blob of tomato puree, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon and about 75g red lentils, cover just under a litre of water and bring to the boil.
• Simmer until tender (20 mins or so), remove the star anise and blend.
• Return to the pan to reheat gently, season with salt and the juice of a lime.
• Serve with a blob of soured cream and a little fresh mint.

I'd been looking for a savoury recipe to use some of the vanilla we brought back from Madgascar. I found a recipe for monkfish with creamy vanilla and cardamom sauce on the Waitrose website. It was quite a faff and I ended up with not quite enough fish and a rather runny sauce that I wasn't completely convinced about. Oh well, you've got to try these things.

10 October - thai-spiced parsnip soup and cod with chorizo

With the first parsnips in this week's vegbox, it seemed like time for some Thai-spiced parsnip soup; a fabulous recipe from Sophie Grigson's Vegetables. It's a bowl of sweet, tangy, spicy creaminess - although today without quite as much kick as intended as I used one of the chillis from the garden which don't seem to have much heat to them. Still a great lunch nonetheless.

• Sweat together in a pan a couple of chopped parsnips, a chopped onion, some ginger, a couple of cloves of chopped garlic, a chopped red chilli and a bashed stick of lemongrass with a glug of oil for about 10 minutes.
• Add around 250-300ml vegetable stock and a tablespoon of Thai fish sauce and simmer for 10-15 mins.
• Take out the lemongrass, add 200-300ml coconut milk and liquidise.
• Gently reheat, add a good squeeze of lime juice and serve with a pile of freshly chopped mint and coriander.

For dinner, there were more root vegetables to eat up, so I started off with the idea of some mixed mash (potato and carrot). I didn't really fancy anything meaty, so I got a couple of chunky bits of cod and cooked them with some chopped chorizo and a few cherry tomatoes that were hanging around. It was quite a nice combination, but the tomatoes were a bit watery, so perhaps a proper rich tomato sauce might have been better. Nice chorizo-y juices though to mop up with the mash.