11 July - fresh tuna with salsa verde and homegrown beans

The veg on the roof terrace are still flourishing; the mangetout are, I think, coming to an end now, so I picked what will probably be the last decent picking, with a few starting to get a bit overlarge and misshapen. The beans are coming along though and even though the dwarf French bean plants have never really got going, they're still managing to produce some decent-sized beans on really pathetically weedy plants! The climbing beans look much healthier, now reaching up to the top of their canes and producing their first handful of beans too.

To go with the veg, I had in mind some kind of fish with a variation on salsa verde, to use up some more of the parsley, which is starting to take over. Again, I wasn't very inspired by the fish on offer, so ended up with a couple of tuna steaks, which wasn't really what I had in mind, but actually worked okay. For the salsa verde, I whizzed together in a blender:

• a large bunch of flat-leaf parsley
• a small handful of mint
• a good tsp smooth Dijon mustard
• a couple of anchovy fillets
• a good glug of extra virgin olive oil
• juice of half a lemon

Very green and tangy dolloped over the tuna steaks.

30 June - Moroccan chicken and couscous

The parsley is growing by the day, so today's dinner started off as wanting to use some herbs. After a bit of browsing, I came across a recipe in a little cookbook from Bordeaux Quay, a local restaurant and cookery school. It's described as Moroccan chicken tagine, although I'm not sure it's really a tagine, more chicken with a Moroccan sauce. It didn't actually include any parsley, but I reckoned it would probably go quite well!

It's another dish that starts with a paste made of a list of ingredients whizzed up in a blender. The paste is called chermoula:

• 1 tbsp fresh coriander
• 1 lrg clove garlic
• 1/4 tsp ground cumin
• c. 1/3 chopped red chilli
• pinch of saffron
• 50ml extra virgin olive oil
• juice 1/2 lemon
• 1/4 tsp paprika
• pinch salt

1. You brown two chicken breasts in a little olive oil on both sides (just a couple of mins) and remove.
2. Fry a chopped onion gently in the same pan. The recipe asked for celery (yeuck!) and carrot, but I used a leftover golden courgette, diced, instead.
3. Chop the skin of 1/2 small preserved lemon (you really don't need more as it's quite a strong flavour) and add about half to the pan, together with 1 tbsp of the chermoula paste, 2 chopped tomatoes and 250ml chicken stock.
4. Return the chicken to the pan and leave to simmer for about 20 mins.
5. Finally, stir in a good handful of chopped coriander, parsley and mint, the rest of the chermoula and preserved lemon.

Served on top of a pile of couscous mixed with some more chopped herbs, it was really delicious - great flavours; fresh and zingy - definitely one to come back to.

21 June - Herman, parsley and harissa chicken

Today's been a bit of a marathon cooking day. A couple of weeks ago, we were given 'Herman' by a friend ... Let me explain. He arrived as a rather unpromising pot of brown, yeasty-smelling gunk together with some instructions. Over the course of about 10 days, we had to stir him as he gradually expanded, then at various points, we had to feed him. This involved stirring in quantities of milk, flour and sugar. Finally by today, he had expanded to fill a large mixing bowl and it was time to divide him up. The idea is to divide the mix into 5 and give four of the new little Herman's away to friends to start the whole process over again. You then use the fifth pot of mixture to make a cake by adding more ingredients (more flour, sugar, eggs, oil, flavourings, nuts and apple).

I've never been particularly good at baking and don't really own proper cake tins, so I poured the resulting mix into a loaf tin and popped it in the oven. After an hour (as per the instructions), it was still distinctly sticky in the middle so I left it a bit longer. When it finally came out, it was a probably a bit crunchier round the edges than it should've been. It didn't look wildly promising, but actually a slice with a cup of tea wasn't too bad. No idea who we're going to pass the remaining 'Hermans' onto though!

Next I cooked up some bulgar wheat. Along with the spinach, the parsley on the terrace is getting a bit out of control and the most obvious use for it was some tabbouleh. I'm not actually a big fan of too much parsley myself, but Tris loves it, so I made him up a big bowl to take to work for his lunch. I then had a bit of the plain bulgar wheat with some salad and the leftover, cold lamb for my lunch.
By the time it got to thinking about dinner, I was a bit out of culinary inspiration, so I turned to my usual favourite, Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries. For 21st June, he has a recipe for harissa chicken, which quite appealed, so I went with it. You mix up some yoghurt with harissa paste and a bit of olive oil, then use it to coat some chicken thigh fillets. Then you simply grill them and sprinkle over some mint. Very simple, but it came out great with a big pile of green veg (peas, broad beans and asparagus).