13 February - mackerel salad and pork hotpot

Lunch today was a bit of an experimental winter salad; smoked mackerel with new potatoes, leeks and sweetcorn. It wasn't one of my best, but not bad.

To use up the leftover pork chop, I came up with a pork and cider hotpot, partly inspired by a WFI recipe, using the slow cooker. I softened some onions in a pan, then browned the pork,chopped into chunks. I put the onion and pork in the slow cooker with 250ml dry cider, some chestnut mushrooms and a bit of yellow pepper, plus some thyme and a bay leaf. Then I popped it in the oven for a couple of hours (at 180C). It was the first time I'd used the slow cooker without using one of the recipes that came with it and I was a bit nervous when I lifted the lid. It initially looked like it'd dried out quite a bit and I quickly added another slurp of cider, but later realised, it probably just needed a stir. With a spoonful of mustard stirred in at the end, it came out quite well and was really tasty with some mash to soak up the juices and some kale on the side.

11 February - huge pork steaks

We got potatoes, parsnips and a huge bag of red Russian kale in the vegbox on Friday, which seemed to suggest a meat with mash and veg type dinner. I was out all day at a screen-printing workshop, so I asked Tris to get some pork steaks at Ruby & White. He suffered the same issue that I've come across there lately and came home with two absolutely huge steaks, half a plateful each! As we're trying to cut down, I decided to use just one of them and cut it in half - it still made a couple of very presentable little pieces. I was a bit knackered when I got in, so I just simply fried the pork to have with some rosemary jelly, mixed mash and the kale just wilted in a bit of butter and a squeeze of lemon juice.

11 January - easy lamb

I'd intended to cook fish pie, but as I was in Waitrose looking at the fish, nothing really took my fancy and I didn't feel like all that fish pie faff. So when I spotted their lamb in mint and balsamic crust in the same chiller cabinet, I decided to opt for the easy pre-prepared option instead! We had the lamb with kale and mixed mash (potato, parsnip and jerusalem artichoke) and it was as good as usual.

22 August - pork chops and homegrown kale

I planted some black kale, cavolo nero, from seed some time ago and the little kale plants have been growing healthily on the roof terrace.

The little plants were getting a bit crowded though, so I pulled up a few little plants in order to thin them out. I decided to cook up the young leaves for dinner. I blanched them for barely a minute, but they reduced to almost nothing. I still tossed them with a little oil and garlic and served them with some pork chops and a blob of rosemary jelly. Looking forward to some more substantial kale later ...