23 March - Carluccio's and a picnic tea

It was my last day at the conference and after coming out of my last session around midday, I decided to walk back into the city centre from the conference centre along the river. The sun was shining and it was a lovely walk, but by the time I got back into town, my feet were getting achy and I was distinctly hungry! So rather than trog around looking for somewhere to eat, I headed straight to an easy favourite; Carluccio's. I had a really nice saffron risotto with Italian sausage - sounds an odd combination, but went down really well with a nice glass of wine :)

I couldn't be bothered with another microwave dinner, so just had a bit of a picnic supper; walnut bread, humus, beetroot salad and crisps while I caught up on some bits and pieces of work.

20 March - a skinny burger and a long evening

It was the first day of the conference today and after a morning of sessions and meetings, I realised that I had two publishers' "do's" to go to in the evening and decided to take a tactical afternoon break. Typical conference evening do's tend to involve drinks and a few tiny nibbles, so I used my break to have a good solid lunch to carry me through the rest of the day. The conference centre food options were pretty limited so I headed back into Glasgow city centre and just went for one of the first restaurants I came across - Darcy's in the Prince's Square shopping centre. I went for a "skinny burger" - not as healthy as it sounds, just a burger served without a bun, perfect for me as I never eat the bun anyway. It came with chips and salad and I had a side order of beetroot and humus to go with it. The burger was a little bit 'plastic' and unexciting, but the chips were good and the beetroot (roast with thyme, I think) was really delicious. So all round it did the job pretty well. I'd arrived fairly late and by the time I'd finished, it was getting on for 3pm, by which time it seemed that most of the staff had knocked off!! I'd intended to follow up with a coffee, but after nearly 20 mins of trying to get someone's attention, I gave up and had to go up to the bar to ask for my bill - needless to say, I didn't leave a tip!

As predicted, my evening of schmoozing involved drinks but little in the way of nibbles, so I was glad I'd stocked up earlier. By the time I headed back to the apartment around midnight, it was too late to think about eating, but I did pick up some eggs from a late-night corner shop ready for a decent breakfast to satisfy my grumbling stomach when I woke up!

9 March - a jacket potato and leftover chilli

I got some baking potatoes in today's vegbox, so lunch was a good old-fashioned jacket potato with tuna mayo and a big pile of salad on the side - can't be beaten!

Tris has gone away for the weekend, so it was a solo supper of some of the leftover chilli con carne, this time with sweetcorn fritters. The chilli was possibly even better for being a few days old and the fritters were yummy as usual.

28 January - montpellier chapter, cheltenham

We'd planned a grand day out to give us something to look forward to amongst the January greyness. We got the train to Cheltenham and had booked for lunch at a trendy hotel, the Montpellier Chapter. The restaurant, which has Simon Hopkinson as an advisor, got a good write-up in the Guardian, so we had high hopes for a cool, buzzy atmosphere and some good food. When we arrived at 12.30 though, there were only two other couples in an otherwise completely empty restaurant and we were all stuck in a corridor-type area rather than in the main body of the restaurant, which looked like it was set up for a big group. I was a bit disappointed to be sat in a rather unappealing corner in a draught, but expected that things would perk up when 'the others' arrived, possibly for one. I had some nice scallops to start, although the orange zest in the topping was a bit over-powering for my liking. By the time our mains arrived, the other couples had left and I'd overheard from one of the waitresses that they were actually gearing up for a big group for afternoon tea later in the day - leaving us as the lone diners in the corner of a completely empty restaurant - chilly, soulless and distinctly uncomfortable!! Our main was very good, we both had pork fillet and pork belly with creamy mash, red cabbage and apple sauce - all very well cooked and delicious. We chatted a bit to the waitress at the end of the meal and she apologised that we hadn't caught them on the best of days. I guess it was just bad luck and there wasn't an awful lot they could have done about it - except perhaps seated us in a slightly comfier spot. Thankfully, we had a great afternoon's shopping afterwards though and a good stop for tea and cake at the Swallow Bakery before we headed home.

In the evening, we didn't really need a proper meal, so I made up a few tapas-style dishes to pick on instead - warm tomato and basil salad, beetroot with toasted walnuts and some fried potatoes topped with chorizo and sliced red pepper.

7 January - prego and a hot chicken salad

It actually wasn't raining for a change, so we headed out for a bit of fresh air and walked up to the Downs, then on to Prego for Saturday lunch, an Italian place we'd talked about trying, but which is usually just a bit out of walking distance. We were a bit thrown by the menu initially - we'd both had in mind something light, maybe a salad, and everything was looking a bit big and heavy. We both went for pasta though and by the time it arrived, happily tucked in. I had ravioli filled with ricotta and served with beetroot tops and hazelnuts - really delicious and fantastic subtle flavours. Whilst the food was excellent though, the place was so full of families with young children, it felt like trying to eat in the middle of a nursery! I'm not sure if the restaurant is actively family-friendly (it did have a kids menu) or whether we were just unlucky with our timing, but with small kids screaming, often in stereo, as soon as we'd finished our food, we just asked for the bill to escape and went somewhere a bit more peaceful for our post-lunch coffee.

As we didn't get our salad at lunchtime, I cooked a hot chicken salad for supper instead. I marinated some strips of chicken in yoghurt mixed with some ras al hanout for a while, then cooked it on a hot griddle pan. With it we had roast beetroot and butternut squash on a big pile of spinach (to make it a salad!) and I drizzled over a dressing made of more yoghurt mixed with lemon juice and a bit of cumin. The chicken rather stuck to the griddle pan, but once I'd got it off, it tasted really good and with the dressing, it all went together really well. I also roasted a whole garlic while the oven was on which we had on the side - a bit messy to get out of their skins, but wonderfully soft and sweet.

18 December - omelette and roast veg

When I asked Tris what he fancied for lunch today, he suggested an omelette. It was a chunky, sort of Spanishy affair, with some cold boiled potatoes, red pepper and a couple of mushrooms, plus six eggs and a handful of parsley - still going on the terrace. I cooked it in a big frying pan then popped it under the grill to finish off and it came out looking good and went down nicely with a good dollop of homemade sweet chilli and tomato jam.

We were out socialising early evening, but after working all weekend, I was knackered, so I came home early. Having expected to eat out, I hadn't really got anything in, so supper was cobbled together from leftovers. I still had some rather sad-looking roasted squash and beetroot, which I heated up in the oven together with some fresh red onion and garlic. I piled the veg on top of some couscous and scattered over a few bits of goats cheese and fresh coriander and the result was really quite good.

13 December - squash salad and the Pump House

Last night, I roasted the whole squash, but only used half in the risotto. I also roasted some beetroot while the oven was on. So lunch today was squash and beetroot salad with a couple of slices of parma ham and few new potatoes. Great colours on the plate and really tasty too.

This evening, my creative writing group met up for meal at the Pump House. I went for hake - on the principle of choosing something I wouldn't cook at home. I wasn't totally convinced about it as a fish - a little bit chewy and not very flavoursome - but it came with a big pile of chard, smooth mash and creamy white beans, which made it still a very good meal. After we'd eaten, we read out our "homework" based around the theme of an office Christmas party. My piece was entitled "sprouts"!

8 December - a bacon sandwich and a leek and bacon tart

Lunch today was a good old bacon and avocado sandwich with some proper smoky bacon from Ruby & White - mmm!

Perhaps inspired by yesterday's successful baking, I decided to use the leeks still sitting in the vegbox in a tart. It was sort of a made up recipe, roughly as follows:

• I made up some basic pastry and lined a tart tin - chilled it for a bit, then baked it blind for about 15 mins @ 200C.
• I sweated a couple of chopped leeks, then mixed them in a bowl with c.100g soft goats cheese, c.50ml double cream, one whole egg and one egg yolk, plus a bit of chopped fried bacon.
• I poured the mixture in the pastry case and put the whole lot back in the oven for about half an hour at 180C.

We had the tart with a salad of spinach and beetroot - tasty and warming, but not too heavy.

5 December - a mushroom stew

A regular combination for lunch today of fresh beetroot (roast while cooking yesterday's pork) with goats cheese and a baked potato.

There were some huge Portobello mushrooms in Friday's vegbox, so I got some lovely wild mushrooms and a few chestnut mushrooms to go with them in a warming stew. The pale purple wild mushrooms looked so beautiful, it almost seemed criminal to cook them up!

The recipe is sort of a combination of Yotam Ottolenghi's warm mushroom salad and a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall mushroom stew - with most of the ingredients of the former, but the stock/sauce of the latter. We had it with mixed potato and parsnip mash for which I tried out the rather faffy HFW method (cooking the parsnips in milk which you then use in the final mash) - don't think the result's any better than my usual boil-it-all-together-and-mash-it technique. With a blob of creme fraiche on the top, it all tasted great though - a great winter warmer supper.

15 November - a baked potato and a massive chunk of pork belly

There were still some cooked beetroot in the fridge from last week. They were a bit shrivelled-looking, but once peeled and chopped and mixed with a bit of oil vinegar and mint, they made quite nice a little pile of lunchtime salad. A jacket potato with a dollop of soured cream and some bacon bits made the whole thing into a proper meal.

This evening, we were out for dinner with some friends at Aqua. I was drawn to the porchetta on the menu, so forewent a starter in anticipation of a big meaty main. It's a good job I did, because the piece of pork belly that arrived almost filled the plate and served on a pile of very rich beans, it proved to be incredibly filling. The meat was delicious and tender, but I rather wished afterwards I hadn't eaten it all as I ended up feeling overfull and slightly nauseous! A good strong espresso was definitely needed afterwards.

10 November - chicken and leek pie

I got some lovely fresh beetroot yesterday, both regular purple and golden, so I roasted them to have warm on some bruschetta for lunch with some soft goats cheese and sprinkling of mint - looked great and tasted lovely.

I cooked up the remains of the roast chicken with some leeks in a creamy tarragon sauce and made some pastry to make a pie for dinner. It was a bit of struggle to find the right size pie dish, so it ended up in rather a deep oven dish which looked great when it came out the oven, but was a bit of a struggle to get out! Half a pie on each plate looked a bit comical, but tasted great.

19 October - another beetroot salad and orzo with mushrooms

The salad leaves were looking distinctly sad and starting to go a bit slimy, so it was another salad for lunch, this time a variation on a favourite that involves new potatoes, chorizo and a poached egg. Today's other ingredient was the last of the beetroot, a surprisingly good combination.

I caught a bit of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the telly the other night, talking about his quest to eat only vegetables again. His arguments do strike a chord, but Ruby & White, our lovely local butcher's, keeps luring me in and all my veggie intentions go out the window! Having spent the past couple of days eating up the meat in the fridge, tonight I was determined to have something veggie. As I was looking through HFW's new veg cookbook in a bookshop the other day, a recipe for orzo with mushrooms caught my eye, so I jotted it down quickly on the back of a receipt ... on the principle of "try before you buy"! Yesterday, I managed to pick up some lovely wild mushrooms, so I mixed them with a handful of chestnut mushrooms and fried them up in butter, added some garlic, a tsp of balsamic vinegar, a splash of white wine and some double cream. Then I mixed the mushroom suace with some cooked orzo (rice-shaped pasta) and sprinkled some parsley over the top.

I know it sounds a bit silly, buit the result was possibly a bit too mushroomy! I don't know if I got the quantity of mushrooms right, but there seemed to be a lot for the amount of pasta and as the wild mushrooms had a really strong flavour, it was perhaps a bit much. It was a good recipe though and definitely one I'll try again. The orzo made a nice change too, kind of a midway between risotto and pasta.

18 October - pork and chorizo stew

There are some salad leaves and beetroot in the fridge bought to go with the weekend's burgers, so lunch today is a salad made up of beetroot, grilled red peppers and goats cheese.

I'm still working my way through the meaty leftovers and tonight it's a bit of pork cut off the joint we had roasted (because it was a bit too big). I cook it up with some chorizo, the other half of the red pepper, onion, tomato and chickpeas, plus a few flavourings (garlic, thyme, saffron and parsley) and cook it long and slow to make a tasty, comforting stew. It's actually a "recipe" I came up with last winter based on the list of ingredients on the back of a "stew pot" at the supermarket that appealed but struck me as overpriced!

16 October - underdone burgers and leftover pork

For lunch today I cooked some homemade burgers - fried them for a few minutes each side, then popped them under the grill topped with mozzarella. I put them on the plate with a nice big pile of salad (lambs lettuce, pea shoots and beetroot). When I cut into mine though, I realised it was really underdone - not just 'rare', but completely cold and raw inside. Although it was really fresh mince, it was too underdone to be appetising, so I had to scrape the burgers off the plates and pop them in the oven for a bit to cook through. They came out a bit better, but I'd rather gone off the whole thing by then.

Tris headed off to London this afternoon for a week with work, so I had my first lone supper of a week of cooking for one. There was a chunk of cold roast pork from yesterday and some cabbage. For a bit of a change, I decided to braise the cabbage - cooking it long and slow in a bit of chicken stock with a knob of butter, tightly covered for almost an hour. It came out wonderfully nutty-tasting and made a lovely warming supper with the pork and the leftover gravy poured over the top.

7 September - Moroccan chicken

I had a fantastically tasty salad for lunch today; new potatoes, fried chorizo, homegrown tomatoes and beans, some fresh cooked beetroot, a few strips of roasted pepper and a poached egg. The red chorizo-flavoured oil, mingled with the oozy egg yolk and the purple beetrooty juices all came together in a perfect, vivid puddle in the bottom of the dish to mash the potatoes into!

We had lemony Moroccan chicken for dinner with couscous and some cubes of roasted squash. Tasty, but again a bit rushed and it could've been cooked a bit longer.

2 August - courgette and goats cheese tart

After finishing a big batch of work late afternoon, I had a bit of time to potter about in the kitchen, so I made a courgette and goats cheese tart from For Every Season. It's actually a combination of two of the recipes in the book. The courgette and goats cheese recipe contained both cream and creme fraiche, but I settled on just eggs and cream for my filling, as per another tart recipe. The pastry was super-easy to make, although quite tricky to handle as it was so crumbly, it completely collapsed on first attempt and I had to squidge it back together and try again.

• Whizz 110g plain flour with 55g cold butter (cut into chunks) and a pinch of salt together in a blender until like breadcrumbs. Then dribble in a tbsp of good olive oil through the hole in the top. It forms a lovely shiny ball. Wrap in clingfilm and pop in the fridge.
• Line a smallish flan case with the pastry and bake blind (filled with baking beans on a piece of greaseproof paper) for 15 mins at 180C. Remove the beans and cook for another 5 mins.
• For the filling, mix together 2 eggs, 2 egg yolks and 150ml double cream.
• Fry 2 small sliced courgettes in olive oil and add to the filling mix.
• Pour the filling carefully into the pastry case (I actually had a bit too much, so maybe one less egg and a bit less cream). Crumble 50g goats cheese over the top.
• Bake for 25 mins, sprinkling a few pine nuts over the top 10 mins before the end.

It came out looking fantastic. We had it with a salad of beetroot, broad beans, peas, mint and peashoots - back out on the terrace on another lovely summery evening. The crumbly pastry was just wonderful, well worth the challenge of getting it from board to tin!

6 July - homegrown tomatoes and chicken noodle soup

I've been holding out until a proper handful of tomatoes were ready to pick and today I harvested six cherry tomatoes (a mix of red and yellow), which definitely constituted a handful! So they went in a salad for lunch with some beetroot, new potatoes, goats cheese, bacon and pine nuts.

For dinner I used up the last of the cold chicken together with a decent picking of mangetout with some noodles in a soupy broth made from the rest of the stock, flavoured with chilli, lemongrass, ginger, soy sauce and Thai fish sauce. Tris was late home from work again, so it was made in two batches. I'm definitely not going to keep this up for much longer!

24 June - a customised burger

A busy day didn't allow time for any food shopping. Lunch was made up of some of the cold meat from yesterday, the remaining corn on the cob that was in the fridge and a few new potatoes. I couldn't magic anything more out of the fridge for dinner, so we decided to go for take-away. We got burgers from a really good little place round the corner called the Burger Joint. You get to choose what you want in the way of filling and sauces to go with one of their decent, chunky burgers, plus chips, of course. Today somehow none of the many options seemed to appeal to me though, so I went for a lamb burger with nothing on it and customised it at home with some spinach, beetroot and melted goat's cheese ... mmmm!

13 June - homegrown spinach

Back home, after a good long sleep in my own bed, today's been all about the veg! I had a good pile of asparagus for lunch with a bit of parma ham and some new potatoes. While I've been away, apparently there's been a mix of sun and rain which has made some of the veg on the terrace go mental, especially the spinach:

So this evening, we had a chicken and chorizo salad with freshly picked spinach leaves as a base, plus some cherry tomatoes, blanched green beans and beetroot. I cooked a chicken breast in the oven (just one between two), then gently caramelised a red onion in a frying pan, added some sliced cooking chorizo and a bit of sliced garlic. Once the chorizo was browned, I tipped in a splash of balsamic vinegar to make a lovely hot dressing to pour over the salad and sliced chicken. The whole thing was served with some saute new potatoes on the side. I could almost feel all that green goodness flowing back through my veins!

14 May - slow-roast lamb

With the FA Cup Final to watch on the telly this afternoon, it was the ideal time to do slow-roast lamb - popped in the oven at half-time, it was perfectly cooked for 8. This is a favourite recipe, originally from Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine.

• Slice two large onions and scatter in the bottom of an oven-proof dish. Add a whole bulb of garlic, split into cloves, but unpeeled, 50ml red wine vinegar, 150ml red wine, 50ml olive oil, a heaped teaspoon of rose harissa paste and some salt.
• Nestle a shoulder of lamb (c.700g today) on top of this mix and add water until the lamb's about 80% covered. Bring it just to the boil on the hob, then put in the oven at 180C for about half an hour.
• Turn the oven down to 150C and leave to cook for around 4 hours.

The resulting lamb is meltingly tender and falling to pieces on the bottom, but with a lovely crunchy crust on the top. The onions and garlic become really tender and jammy, but need straining out of the remaining liquid with a slotted spoon. I dollop the onion mix onto plates and top with a chunk of lamb (a mix of soft and crunchy bits), then serve it with some couscous, roast beetroot and pepper, and a splodge of minty yoghurt (just Greek yoghurt with chopped mint). It's a fabulous combination of flavours and textures and today was washed down with a bottle of bubbly to celebrate Man City's cup win!