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!

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!

5 December - a mushroom stew

A regular combination for lunch today of fresh beetroot (roast while cooking yesterday's pork) with goats cheese and a baked potato.

There were some huge Portobello mushrooms in Friday's vegbox, so I got some lovely wild mushrooms and a few chestnut mushrooms to go with them in a warming stew. The pale purple wild mushrooms looked so beautiful, it almost seemed criminal to cook them up!

The recipe is sort of a combination of Yotam Ottolenghi's warm mushroom salad and a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall mushroom stew - with most of the ingredients of the former, but the stock/sauce of the latter. We had it with mixed potato and parsnip mash for which I tried out the rather faffy HFW method (cooking the parsnips in milk which you then use in the final mash) - don't think the result's any better than my usual boil-it-all-together-and-mash-it technique. With a blob of creme fraiche on the top, it all tasted great though - a great winter warmer supper.

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.