21 October - venison and quince

After being out all morning, I was quite late getting home for lunch and feeling distinctly peckish. As ever when you're hungry, my impression of my appetite was a bit out of kilter, so I bought myself a Pieminster chicken pie on my way home and cooked up some leeks to have with it while I waited for it to heat up. Almost as soon as I'd got started on it, I realised I wasn't actually that hungry and struggled to plough my way through the rather too peppery pie!

For dinner I got a couple of venison steaks from Ruby & White and picked up a quince too to have with them. Thankfully, this time, the quince was fine and I made some nice quince and rosemary compote which went really nicely with the venison - just cooking up the peeled and cubed quince with some water and sugar and adding some chopped rosemary at the end. Unfortunately, I didn't do so well with a potato and wild mushroom gratin. I had a few wild mushrooms to use up and I came across a recipe from WFI that looked really nice. I don't know if I got the quantity of cream wrong, or just had the oven too hot, but it came out completely dried out and really quite unappetising. It's always frustrating when you've gone to a lot of trouble with special ingredients and it doesn't come out as expected. Thankfully, at least the venison and quince was good.

9 October - kedgeree and lamb with quince/apple

After an early start watching the F1 and World Cup rugby, we had an early lunch of kedgeree using the bit of smoked mackerel in the fridge from my lunch in the week. I used my usual kedgeree recipe, but substituted leeks instead of spinach. It amazes me how you can cook the same dish time and again, but each time it comes out slightly differently - today, it was just spot on and absolutely delicious, a perfect brunch with a couple of boiled eggs on the top.

For dinner, I'd planned to try out another Guardian recipe, this time from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for hot lamb and quince salad - using the quince I'd picked up the other day. Sadly, after the lamb had been sitting in its marinade all afternoon, I cut open the quince to find it was all brown and horrible! With the lamb half ready, I decided to plough ahead and to use an apple instead of the quince. Rather than having it as a salad, I wanted it as a main dish with some roasted new potatoes and cavalo nero from the garden. The recipe turned out to be a bit long-winded, messy and stressful as it seemed to involve lots of stuff going on at the same time and juggling lots of dishes and pans. I'd been a bit pissed off about the quince and by the time I'd got the food on the plates, I was feeling a bit hot and hassled. Was it worth it? Well, the lamb was quite nice and I might use a similar marinade again, but the rest of the faff probably wasn't worth the effort. The homegrown cavalo nero was great though!