4 April - a kitchen gardener's tantrum

I had a bit of a kitchen gardener's tantrum this morning, when I went out onto the terrace to find that a cat had poohed in my tray of lamb's lettuce, digging up most of the lovely little plants in the process of trying to cover it up! Of all the places it could've chosen ...

After initially throwing my hands up in despair, I steeled myself to rescue at least some of the lamb's lettuce and after giving it a really good wash, added it to a warm salad of roasted squash and mushrooms.

Supper was a slightly odd combination of tuna steaks with some lime mayo, French-style peas - cooked with butter and lettuce - and a few saute potatoes. Not a classic, but actually not too bad.

16 March - a new scrubber and wild food

Today's new addition to the kitchen was a new vegetable scrubber. I'd been using a very cool wooden and bristle brush that I got while in Berlin a few years ago, but it was really on its last legs. I've gone for something completely different this time, with a much more modern plastic version. It doesn't look quite so classy next to the sink, but when I tried it out on a lunchtime carrot, it came up clean and shiny in no time, which I guess is the real test! It was a variation on a student staple for lunch, tuna and pasta, bit with some grated carrot, sweetcorn and a honey and mustard dressing.

We were booked for dinner at the Pump House - a bit of a late birthday dinner for Tris. We'd eaten in the bar before, but it was our first time in the restaurant and it didn't disappoint. They focus on local, wild and foraged food with a modern twist and clearly know what they're doing. I started off with baked duck egg with wild garlic, wood blewits and brioche - the wild mushrooms were fabulously woody and made a simple egg something special. Then we both went for venison - actually roast saddle of Mendip fallow deer - served on a stained glass window style plate of different sauces - a green wild garlic sauce and an orangey meribelle plum one, then there was spicy red cabbage on the side. The venison was rare, tender and tasty and the whole dish worked really well ... yum!

9 March - a jacket potato and leftover chilli

I got some baking potatoes in today's vegbox, so lunch was a good old-fashioned jacket potato with tuna mayo and a big pile of salad on the side - can't be beaten!

Tris has gone away for the weekend, so it was a solo supper of some of the leftover chilli con carne, this time with sweetcorn fritters. The chilli was possibly even better for being a few days old and the fritters were yummy as usual.

16 February - a jacket potato and a take-out burger

From the bottom of the fridge today I managed to conjure a baked potato and a very basic Nicoise to go with it for lunch - just tomatoes and green beans with a tin of tuna on top.

By the evening, the fridge really was bare, so we got take-out burgers from the Burger Joint round the corner. Not at all bad and nice and easy.

8 February - salmon with spinach and lentils

After a jacket potato with tuna and sweetcorn mayo for lunch, it was more fish for supper, with a couple of wild salmon fillets. To go with them I used a Jamie Oliver idea for spinach with puy lentils, herbs and a drizzle of yoghurt. It's always a good combination and with the hearty lentils, you don't need any other carbs.

16 December - waiting in and going out

Today I was waiting in for a delivery - which frustratingly, never arrived!! - and having been down in London yesterday, there was nothing much in the fridge for lunch. The best I could come up with was the old student cupboard standby - tuna and sweetcorn mayo with pasta.

Tris had managed to get us a rare Friday night booking at Prosecco, a great local Italian, with lovely food and a really nice atmosphere. We started, of course, with a glass of Italian bubbly and I had bruschetta with roasted wild mushrooms and parmesan - delicious! We both went for venison fillet for our main - and although it was quite good, it was a bit too peppered for me which meant I ended up leaving the sauce that came with it, which was a shame. It was served with polenta chips and the most fantastic crispy cavalo nero - I'm not sure exactly how it was cooked, but it was in whole long leaves, but had the kind of taste of Chinese "crispy seaweed" - salty and sweet and very moreish!

22 November - uninspired

After spending an uninspired five minutes hovering in front of the supermarket fresh soup section trying to choose something for lunch, when I got my pot of soup home, I didn't really fancy it. I decided to fall back on tuna and sweetcorn mayo with pasta, but once the pasta was cooking and I'd opened the tin of tuna, I realised the jar of mayo I had in the fridge was one I'd decided I didn't really like because it was too vinegary and not very creamy... extra sweetcorn just about covered up the taste.

Equally uninspired about dinner, I went for fishfingers with mixed carrot and potato mash and some homemade beans (a tin of cannellini beans with some onion, garlic, tomato and herbs). All rather orange and okay, but it didn't really hit the spot.

20 October - chowder and coffee cupcakes

Today was rather a domestic affair - gardening and baking cakes! I decided it was finally time to take down the beans and had fun on a chilly but sunny afternoon unwinding the plants from their canes.

Since I had a particularly yummy piece of "cappucino cake" a few weeks ago, I've been craving coffee cake and as I haven't come across any again, I decided to bake my own. I didn't want a big slab of coffee and walnut cake, but little light, coffee fairycakes. I did a bit of searching online and came across a promising-looking recipe on a blog: Afternoon Tea Total. I got the ingredients together and was a bit suspicious when it said to mix the small amount of butter into not just the sugar, but the flour too. As suggested, I started trying to mix the butter into the huge pile of dry stuff using an electric whisk and created a fantastic flour cloud! I ploughed on undaunted though and eventually it did all come together and looked just like ordinary cake mix. The cakes came out pretty well, if a little crunchy on the top (cooked a bit too long/too hot?) and the butter icing was fantastic. Just what I needed with my afternoon cup of tea.

I'd planned to have a jacket potato with tuna and sweetcorn mayonnaise for lunch, but to my immense disappointment, when I opened the cupboard there was no sweetcorn ... so it was just plain old tuna mayo in my jacket.

Perhaps to make up for the lack of lunchtime sweetcorn, I made a smoked cod and sweetcorn chowder for supper ... after a trip to Sainsbury's obviously. I rather seem to have missed the sweetcorn season this year, I think it must've peaked while we were away. The chowder wasn't bad, although I'm not doing very well at cooking for one and I made far too much. I really didn't want more leftovers to eat though, so I ended up having seconds and felt a bit sick by the time I'd polished it all off!

23 July - a packed lunch and pork with mustard sauce

Today we went out to the Forest of Dean for a bit of fresh air and countryside. We were quite late getting up, so rather than go looking for a pub lunch, we took a good old-fashioned packed lunch with us; tuna and sweetcorn mayo sandwiches in nice soft sliced bread with a packet of crisps - to be squashed into the sandwiches - and a flask of tea ... great! A lovely day and some fantastic forest walking too - although a less-than-flattering photo!

As we were back relatively late, dinner was straightforward meat and two veg, well, three actually; pork steaks with a creamy mustard sauce (a la Nigel Slater) with a big pile of green beans, carrots and broad beans.

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.

17 April - a working lunch & dressing from a bottle

Another busy day of networking saw a working lunch at a Thai restaurant; promising corn fritters to start followed by some rather uninspiring sweet and sour chicken. Then there were several coffees in the sunshine on Brighton seafront, followed by early evening drinks and canapes at the Brighton Museum.

By the time I got back to the apartment to collapse this evening, I wasn't quite sure whether I wanted more food or not. So it was a simple supper of fresh tuna nicoise. Sadly, I had to give in to French dressing from a bottle. Although I've got my little bottle of olive oil for the week, buying a whole bottle of vinegar for just a dribble really didn't seem worth it!