30 May - a rescued hollandaise and lamb with mint sauce

I had a fancy for a proper bank holiday brunch, so made up a batch of hollandaise sauce to go with poached eggs on toast and asparagus. Making hollandaise can always be a bit stressful, but using Nigel Slater's Appetite recipe as my guide, I usually get through. I use the yolk of one egg in a Pyrex bowl over a pan of gently boiling water, then whisk in about 60g cold butter, a few cubes at a time until it's all melted into a thick yellow sauce. I add a squeeze of lemon juice and a bit of salt and cover until needed. The problem usually comes when the eggs are cooked and the toast toasted ... when I go back to uncover and stir my sauce, it can, as it did today, split into a nasty-looking, curdled mess. Nigel's solution of adding a splash of cold water and whisking again, worked a treat as always! Unfortunately, all that rich sauce and eggs seems to have given me indigestion for the rest of the day ... probably serves me right!

Dinner started off with the jar of homemade mint sauce still in the fridge from the week before last, which I thought I ought to use up, so it called for lamb, again. I quickly sealed a couple of chunky, Welsh rump steaks in a frying pan, then popped them in the oven for about 8 minutes to cook through. I did some braised, French-style veg - a leek, some fresh peas and broad beans, softened gently in some butter with a sliced clove of garlic and some chopped mint, then I added a slurp of white wine and let them cook gently, covered for about 15 mins. Together with some new potatoes - briefly boiled, then squashed and roasted with some sea salt and chopped rosemary - and of course, the mint sauce. Spot on. Sorry, it's a bit of a blurry photo, but I was eager to dig in!

19 May - slow-roast lamb ... again!

Tonight was Book Club - a gathering of friends to chat, eat, drink and exchange a few books. We usually decide on a food theme and all cook something, and today's was 'seasonal spring food', so I offered to do lamb to go with everyone else's spring veggies. Because the food has to be transported round to a friend's house, it's easier not to go for something that has to be cooked and served straight away, which made nice pink, rare lamb tricky. So I went for the slow-roast option again, but this time with lots of herbs and garlic. The herbs on the terrace have been going mad recently, so I was happy to give them a bit of a prune to provide a big pile of rosemary, thyme and oregano to sit my shoulder of lamb on. I threw in a bulb of garlic, some white wine, a bit of olive oil and then topped up with water to about halfway up the lamb. It went in the oven for half an hour at 180C to brown the top of the meat, then down to 150C for about 4 hours, basting regularly and topping up the water when it boiled down too far.

Keeping with the home-grown herbs theme, I also made up some fresh mint sauce; a big pile of chopped mint, mixed with a couple of spoons of sugar and some boiling water to dissolve it, then 3 tbsp white wine vinegar when it's cooled.

The smell all afternoon from all those herbs was wonderful and the lovely tender, aromatic lamb went down really well with the book club girls. It was even better served with some great veggies, including Ros's delicious peas with cabbage and spring onions, braised French-style - have to give that one a go myself.