18 March - a Mexican brunch and chicken stew

I had a bit of a Mexican-Irish brunch today! It consisted of some fresh spicy tomato sauce, tinned refried beans, a poached egg, some yoghurt, but all on top of an Irish soda farl! Not bad, but the soda farl didn't really go ...

Tris was out for the day, so I made myself a quick and easy supper using leftover roast chicken. I cooked up an onion, some chestnut mushrooms, then added the chicken in some chicken stock (made from the chicken bones, of course) and a bit of cream. It could have been a pasta sauce or a pie filling, but I served it with some garlicky mash and called it a stew!

19 December - meatballs

There were some rather unripe, out-of-season tomatoes to be eaten up, so I whizzed them up and made them into a sauce to go with some meatballs. I used beef mince with some garlic, parsley, breadcrumbs, parmesan, pine nuts and egg - fried up then bubbled in the sauce and served with linguine.

11 August - meatballs and spaghetti

I had a colleague round for dinner this evening, for meatballs and spaghetti. It's a recipe I found in a WFI magazine a couple of years ago and it always goes down really well - it creates great smells and tastes good too, but without being too fancy.

For the sauce:

• Put a tin of tomatoes, a small chopped onion, a couple of garlic cloves, a splash of olive oil and some torn up basil in a saucepan. Bubble away for as long as possible (an hour if you can), cool, then liquidise.

For the meatballs:

• Mix together about 200g beef mince, 50g fresh breadcrumbs, 40g grated parmesan, some chopped garlic, parsley, a handful of pine nuts and an egg. Shape the mixture into balls - I did 8 from these quantities, so four each.
• Fry the meatballs in olive oil for about ten mins, then plop them into the tomato sauce to finish cooking for another 15-20 mins, along with some more fresh basil if you want and a spoon of the frying oil (this really adds to the flavour!), while you cook the spaghetti.

It's not the most elegant of dishes, but it went down well over an evening of chat. No photos because I was being sociable rather than putting a plate by the window in search of natural light!!