26 March - lamb's lettuce and chilli

I've had some lamb's lettuce growing under fleece all winter, but with the recent burst of warmth and sun, it's really started flourishing, so I thought I'd better start picking some.

I mixed it into a hot salad of new potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, chorizo and a poached egg.

While I was away over the weekend, Tris had made up a big pot of chilli which meant that I didn't have to worry about shopping and cooking for this evening, which was really nice as I was completely wiped out after my week away and had a load of other stuff to sort out.

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.

10 February - jacket potato and salad and the Townhouse

Lunch was another jacket potato today, this time with a salad made up of bits in the fridge; beetroot, tomatoes, green beans, sweetcorn and a few slices of fried chorizo.

There's a restaurant just round the corner that's had at least four different incarnations in the four years we've lived here. The original restaurant was really good, but over the past few changes of hands, it's been just average rather than special. It changed again just recently, so we thought we'd better give it a try. It's now called the Townhouse and is going for up-market English, with a rather fancy menu full of unusual combinations and food in little stacks. We both had scallops with pea puree and black pudding to start. It could have been quite nice and it was all okay, but nothing very inspiring. Then for main, I had fillet of bream with pork belly and more black pudding. Again, it sounded like an interesting combination, but the meat and the fish were presented at different ends of the plate - the rather small, plain fish fillet on a pile of spring greens and the pork and black pudding as part of a potato stack. It felt a bit like eating two different meals on one plate, neither terribly exciting and they didn't particularly work together. I don't mind a bit of fancy cooking and presentation, but I think if you're going to present lots of small little bits of food, they've got to be really special and this just wasn't. Each of the elements might have got away with being solid, English cooking in nice big chunky portions (a la the Kensington Arms), but didn't really cut it here. Not sure we'll bother going back.

2 December - couscous salad and an orange supper

Cold's still in full force and tastebuds difficult to tempt. I tried to break through with a bit of chorizo in a warm couscous salad for lunch; giant couscous with chorizo, cherry tomatoes, beans and sweetcorn.

This morning's vegbox had a bit of a festive feel as I'd ordered a few bottles of bubbly along with the regular veg. They're all organic (a champagne, a prosecco and some rose sparkling) and have gone into the wine cellar ... okay the garage! ... ready for a bit of seasonal sparkle once my tastebuds are back. Will report back on what they're like ...

Tris was out this evening, so I bought myself a pork steak for supper. I simply fried it and made a bit of sauce to pour over (Marsala, parsley and butter) and had it with some braised cabbage with carraway seeds and mixed carrot and parsnip mash. It made a rather yellowy-orange plate of food, but lots of good, comforting flavours.

30 November - an omelette and tapas at the lido

I peeled and chopped too much potato for last night's curry, so I cooked the excess and used it for a lunchtime omelette along with some chorizo and cherry tomatoes.

A bit of a tickle in my throat yesterday has turned into a full-blown cold, but I still went out to meet a friend at the Lido for the evening. It perked me up no end to get out and have a bit of a chat and a giggle, but my tastebuds have gone on strike and I don't have much appetite, so picking on a bit of tapas was about as much as I could manage.

8 November - couscous salad and chicken noodle soup

Lunch recently seems to have alternated between something toast-based and pasta, so today I went for some couscous to mix things up. Yesterday I picked up a pack of little mini peppers in the supermarket, mostly because they looked neat. I roasted them this morning to mix in with the couscous and rather wished I'd just gone for a normal pepper because they were a bit too thin and tricky to peel. Mixed in with a bit of fried chopped chorizo and all it's nice paprika juices, they tasted fine though.

This morning I also cooked up the chicken carcass to make some stock, then used some of it this evening to make chicken noodle soup - dead quick and easy after being out early evening. What I chuck in the 'soup' varies, but today I used a chopped red chilli, which gave it quite a punch, some lemongrass, ginger and a star anise, together with some of the leftover chicken, some pak choi and the noodles, it was really tasty and warming, but fresh and light too.

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.

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.

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.

9 August - vegetable splodge!

It's a busy day and I'm a bit uninspired about dinner. I've got some nice cooking chorizo in the fridge that I bought the other day and a rather oversized courgette left in the vegbox, which somehow leads to a big pan of what I can only describe as 'vegetable splodge'! It's sort of 'ratatouille plus'; made up of onion, garlic, pepper, courgette, aubergine and tomatoes, plus some chorizo and a tin of cannellini beans. It's not very attractive, but it makes a tasty bowl of vegetably stew.

25 July - hot chicken salad and plum tart

Dinner tonight's a Spanish-inspired hot salad; red onion, butter beans, green beans, tomatoes, sweetcorn, new potatoes, a bit of chopped chorizo and some hot chicken.

We got some lovely English plums in Friday's vegbox that I didn't get round to cooking over the weekend, so I make them into a favourite tart - another Nigel Slater recipe, from Appetite, and one of the very few times I ever make pastry.

• For the pastry put 90g butter and 150g plain flour in a food processor and whizz to 'breadcrumbs'. Add an egg yolk, 2tbsp sugar and just enough water to make a dough. Wrap in clingfilm and pop in the fridge.
• Make a caramel with 50g butter and 4 tbsp flour in a small ovenproof frying pan. Push the plums, cut in half and stoned, cut-side-up into the caramel.

• Roll out the pastry and lay over the plums, roughly tucking in the edges. Bake at 190C for about 45 mins.
• Leave to cool a bit in the pan before turning out.

It's sweet and naughty and even better served with a bit of cream!

18 July - a warm tomato salad and chorizo & broad bean "paella"

There was another handful of tomatoes ready to pick today, so I used them in a favourite warm tomato and basil salad. I have to admit that the home-grown tomatoes have been slightly less impressive than the other veg, with slightly thick skins and not quite as flavoursome as I'd hoped. This treatment just softened them slightly and brought out their sweetness perfectly. I warmed a good pool of extra virgin olive oil in a small pan and gently fried a couple of chopped spring onions (I usually use a shallot, but didn't have any), with some thinly sliced garlic. Then I added a squeeze of lemon juice, a splash of vinegar (I used raspberry vinegar today) and a pinch of salt, followed by the tomatoes - chopped in half - and a few shredded basil leaves. Just stir them around for a minute or so and then tip onto a plate with a few new potatoes and some mozzarella - yum!

For dinner, I cooked up some chorizo and broad beans with paella rice. Just a chopped onion and a couple of cloves of sliced garlic fried gently with some sliced cooking chorizo so it releases its red-orange juices, then a cup of paella rice stirred in with a few threads of saffron. I gradually added chicken stock until the rice was cooked, adding a few peas and chopped green beans (literally just a couple from the garden), then a nice big pile of broad beans and some chopped parsley. Simple, tasty and comforting on another damp evening.

16 June - broad bean salad and miso salmon with noodles

Lunch today was both beautiful and tasty - a whole supermarket bag of broad beans, podded, briefly boiled then slipped out of their skins, with some chopped tomato, then some chorizo briefly fried with some sliced garlic and parsley, all mixed together with a bit of oil and vinegar. Great colours and a really good lunch with a few new potatoes on the side.

I've had a pot of leftover sweet white miso paste in the fridge since almost the start of this blog. So I did a bit of online searching and came up with a recipe for salmon marinated in miso paste on the BBC Food website. I'd put a couple of salmon fillets in to marinate in the miso paste (I had about 150g left), c. 100g sugar, 100ml sake and 100ml mirin yesterday evening. You take the fish out and wipe off the marinade (which seems a terrible waste, but it's done its job). Then you simply place it on an oiled baking tray and pop it in the oven (180C) for about 10 mins, turning it over halfway through.

When it comes out, it looks fairly unexciting, but the flavours have definitely worked their way in and make a really tasty, but not overwhelming dish. I served it with some udon noodles, a pile of fresh peas and asparagus and a slice of lime, which worked really well squeezed over the salmon and noodles.

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!

3 May - chicken soup and peppers with chickpeas

Don't you hate it when you burn your mouth on your first mouthful of something? Today I managed to burn my tongue on some soup before it was even out of the pan! It was actually quite a nice homemade chicken and mushroom soup; with stock made from the weekend's chicken bones, some of the leftover chicken, the last of the Portobello mushrooms and just a dash of cream. Rather spoilt though by singed tastebuds.

Dinner was one of those made-up dishes that's sort of a combination of bits of half-remembered recipes. I wanted to continue the (mostly) veggie theme and had a fancy for something with a Mediterranean/North African feel. So I roasted a couple of peppers, then fried up a red onion with some garlic, added a few slices of cooking chorizo (the non-veggie bit), a can of drained chickpeas and half a tin of chopped tomatoes. Then I peel and sliced the roasted peppers and added them at the end. I served it with some couscous and a dollop of Greek yoghurt mixed with some crushed garlic and fresh chopped herbs (mint, coriander and chives) and topped with a few lightly fried pine nuts. One of those really tasty, satisfying combinations that seemed to work really well.