13 November - leek and potato soup and beef goulash

There were a couple of leeks hanging around in the fridge, so I made up some simple leek and potato soup for lunch. I gently sweated the chopped leeks in butter with a couple of whole cloves of garlic, then added a finely diced potato and some chicken stock and let it simmer for about 15 mins. I whizzed up about half the soup, returned it to the pan, added a splodge of cream and seasoned with salt and nutmeg. I served it with a bit of crispy streaky bacon and chives on top and some lovely toast rubbed with garlic and a drizzle of olive oil. The soup was good and the garlicky toast even better!

With a fancy for something warming, I made some goulash for dinner. I used a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe from the Guardian, adding a bit of parsnip as well as the potato, which worked really well, absorbing all those lovely flavours. I was a bit late putting it on and rather skimped on the timing, so the meat wasn't quite as tender as it could have been, still really tasty though with a dollop of soured cream on the top mingling with the sauce to make it rich and creamy.

As we'd only had a smallish dish of goulash without lots of carbs, there was room for some rhubarb crumble with fresh vanilla custard - an excuse to use some more of the vanilla we brought back from Madagascar. As is often the case, a quickly knocked up crumble turned out to be spot-on and the pale creamy custard was so much better than shop-bought stuff.

14 October - sweet potato soup and monkfish with cardamom and vanilla

I'm realising that I really overdid it with the root vegetables in last week's vegbox! For lunch today I cooked up some sweet potato and red lentil soup - another Sophie Grigson recipe from Vegetables.

• Sweat a large sweet potato peeled and cut into chunks, together with a chopped onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, some peeled and chopped fresh ginger, a star anise and a glug of sunflower oil over a low heat with the lid on.
• Add a blob of tomato puree, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon and about 75g red lentils, cover just under a litre of water and bring to the boil.
• Simmer until tender (20 mins or so), remove the star anise and blend.
• Return to the pan to reheat gently, season with salt and the juice of a lime.
• Serve with a blob of soured cream and a little fresh mint.

I'd been looking for a savoury recipe to use some of the vanilla we brought back from Madgascar. I found a recipe for monkfish with creamy vanilla and cardamom sauce on the Waitrose website. It was quite a faff and I ended up with not quite enough fish and a rather runny sauce that I wasn't completely convinced about. Oh well, you've got to try these things.

6 October - a jacket potato and a hot lamb salad

It's feeling distinctly autumnal now, so a nice hot jacket potato seemed perfect for lunch. I made an avocado left from the other night into a basic guacamole to dollop on the top and topped it with some bacon - proper bacon, that is, from the butchers, so there were nice crispy rinds to chew on too.

I'd bought a couple of big chunks of lamb neck fillet to make up another batch of curry for my Dad, but I had a bit more than I needed, so I cut off a length to have for dinner. I marinated it in some yoghurt with chopped mint and a squeeze of lemon juice, then grilled it and sliced it on top of a hot salad of spinach leaves, roasted cherry tomatoes and roasted red onion. I made up a yoghurty dressing to drizzle on the top (yoghurt mixed with some tahini). A really nice combination.

For pudding, I tried out a Nigel Slater recipe from the weekend's Guardian, some fresh figs baked with a drizzle of honey, then some ricotta mixed with yoghurt, icing sugar and fresh vanilla (that we brought back from Madagascar) dolloped on the top.

Madagascar - 16 Sept - 1 Oct

Well, Madagascar was amazing - stunning landscapes, fantastic wildlife, fascinating people ... and the food wasn't bad either! It's a very poor country and the average Malagasy lives mainly on rice, often flavoured with a broth made of vegetables or perhaps a bit of meat. On our first day we got a taste of ro mazava, the national dish; a broth of zebu meat (although ours was mostly bone and gristle!) and very bitter greens, served with a big pile of rice. It wasn't a very promising start, but thankfully, things improved significantly.

The trip was mostly full-board and the hotels we were staying in were surprisingly good. The food varied enormously, but it was mostly French-influenced (the former colonial power) but using local ingredients. Probably the predominant ingredient through the first half of the trip was zebu - the local horned cattle that you see absolutely everywhere and which are very important in Malagasy culture:

I think perhaps the best example I had, and possibly the best meal of the trip, was at a restaurant in the little town of Ambalavao where we stopped for lunch on the long drive south. I ordered zebu fillet and chips and the steak that arrived, topped with crispy fried ginger, was one of the tastiest, most tender steaks I think I've ever had - simple, but absolutely delicious!


As we reached the south coast, the meat gave way to seafood, staying at a fantastic beach hotel - Anakao Ocean Lodge - where the Italian owner took charge of deciding how the day's catch was to be cooked. We had three courses for both lunch and dinner and the entrees and mains were always fresh seafood, imaginatively cooked and served, and always delicious! We had everything from warm potato and octopus salad, to fish fillet with vanilla sauce, to a melt-in-the-mouth fish carpaccio.

A pirogue - a traditional Malagasy fishing boat

All round, a great culinary adventure and we came back with a big bundle of Madagascan vanilla to play with too.