6 July - homegrown tomatoes and chicken noodle soup

I've been holding out until a proper handful of tomatoes were ready to pick and today I harvested six cherry tomatoes (a mix of red and yellow), which definitely constituted a handful! So they went in a salad for lunch with some beetroot, new potatoes, goats cheese, bacon and pine nuts.

For dinner I used up the last of the cold chicken together with a decent picking of mangetout with some noodles in a soupy broth made from the rest of the stock, flavoured with chilli, lemongrass, ginger, soy sauce and Thai fish sauce. Tris was late home from work again, so it was made in two batches. I'm definitely not going to keep this up for much longer!

5 July - squash risotto

The chicken and spinach pie was just as good second time around for lunch today. The beans are just starting to appear on the French beans on the terrace, but as with lots of veg, the first couple appear and then get quite large before there's enough to pick for a proper serving. So I picked my first three beans, blanched them very briefly and mixed them in with some tomatoes to make a bit of salad to go with the pie. As with the other home-grown veg, it's the wonderful silky texture that stands them apart from the stuff you get in the supermarket, or even the vegbox.

Although I love all the summery green veg, I fancy a change, so dinner tonight is butternut squash risotto - a bit out of season, I know. It's adapted from a recipe in Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie. I don't follow his rather long-winded way of making risotto, but the method of cooking the squash works really well.

• Crush a few shards of cinnamon (from the bottom of the jar) together with some salt and dried chilli flakes in a pestle and mortar. Cut a small butternut squash into quarters and remove the seeds. Coast the squash in olive oil, then rub in the salt and spice mix. Roast in a hot oven for 30-40 mins.
• Fry a chopped shallot gently in butter. Add a couple of large handfuls of risotto rice and stir to coat. Pour in a good glug of white wine and let it bubble for a minute or so.
• Add chicken stock a slurp at a time to the rice, letting it gently bubble and be absorbed. I'm not sure how much stock I use, I just keep going and testing the rice occasionally until it feels nearly cooked.
• Scoop out the flesh of the cooked squash into the rice, stir it in and finish off cooking. Taste and season - home-made stock is less salty than stock cubes.
• Stir in a small knob of butter and a handful of parmesan at the end.
• Serve with crispy fried sage leaves and a couple of slices of pancetta. The sage is so good, I must remember to do more next time!
  

4 July - chicken and spinach pie

Last night I stripped the rest of the chicken off the bones and this morning I pile the carcass into a big pan with an onion, a couple of carrots and some parsley to make stock. It bubbles away for an hour or so, the smell wafting up through the house. I wouldn't normally have the same thing two nights running, but I decide to use up the leftover chicken straightaway in a pie. It's another hot day and a traditional pie doesn't feel quite right, but I find a recipe for an interesting Moroccan inspired chicken and spinach pie using filo pastry on the Waitrose website which I can adapt. I've never cooked with filo pastry before, so I decide to give it a try.

• Line a spring-form tin with the filo pastry, brushing a sheet at a time with melted butter, then draping it into the tin, leaving the edges hanging over the sides. The pastry I've got is in long sheets which you cut in half to make squares. I put in a few sheets as squares, then a couple of full length pieces that I can use to wrap over the top and make a lid.
• Wilt a whole bag of spinach in a large frying pan, add a knob of butter and some of the cold chicken. Stir in a small teaspoon of ground cinnamon, some grated nutmeg and a handful each of raisins and pine nuts, to give it that Moroccan flavour.
• Put the filling into the pastry and fold over the pastry to cover, bunching it up in the middle into folds. Then bake at 180C for about 20-25 mins.

It looks fantastic when it comes out the oven and I leave it, as instructed, for about ten minues before I attempt to take it out of the tin. Served with some broad bean and tomato salad and a few potatoes, it makes a really nice, summery dinner. I was a bit worried that it'd be dry with any sauce, but the spinach and raisins keep it moist.

3 July - roast chicken with lemon, sage and garlic

I didn't consciously plan to cook a Sunday roast, but roast chicken is a a regular favourite and it makes sense to cook it when you've got a bit of time to potter around. It was a fabulously sunny afternoon, spent mostly out on the terrace doing some gardening and DIY, so it was nice to have a meal that I could pop in the oven then just wander in occasionally to check. I usually do variations on the same theme with roast chicken; sometimes I use butter, sometimes olive oil and the herbs vary too thyme and sage both work well though.

• I mix some chopped sage with some slightly softened butter and a bit of finely grated lemon zest. I smear it all over the chicken and pop it in a roasting tray. I slice a lemon in half, put half inside the chicken, then squeeze the other half over the top and throw the shell in the tin.
• I roast it for an hour and a bit (depending on the size), in a hot oven (c.200C) basting occasionally and adding a few whole, unpeeled cloves of garlic about half an hour before the end. If you put them in from the start, they just go brown and shrivelled.
• When it's cooked, I take the chicken out and leave to stand covered in foil, while I make the sauce. I put the pan on the hob and add a glass of white wine, stirring up the sticky bits from the bottom, and squeezing the lemon shell and garlic.

The moist white chicken with the sharp, rich sauce is great as usual. Today we have it with more home-grown mangetout and some carrots, plus some new potatoes to mash into the juices - yum!

2 July - Clifton Kitchen

We were out this evening for a friend's birthday at a local restaurant that we haven't tried before, the Clifton Kitchen. It's actually the site of Keith Floyd's first restaurant in Clifton. It's a tiny little place, rather tucked away and although it's gone under a couple of different incarnations since we've been in Bristol, we've never got round to going there. As a big group, we had more-or-less the whole of the little basement room to ourselves, which was nice and the food started off well. I had a nicely-presented boiled duck egg with tenderstem broccoli soldiers; fun and tasty too.

Sadly, my roast lamb came in a particularly peppery sauce. I struggled through most of it, but ended up leaving the last bit as the peppery taste built and built. It's one of those things I've sort of got used to being a pepper-hater. I try to remember to ask for no pepper on things that I know often have it sprinkled over the top (like eggy brunch dishes) or if I spot it liberally added to other diner's plates. But you just can't predict when it's going to be in a sauce. I wouldn't have let it put me off the restaurant (it's not their fault I don't like pepper!), but Tris's sole was rather uninspiring too - a bit plain with just a few capers for flavouring and no veg to speak of. Would we go back? With so many good restaurants about, we probably wouldn't make a special effort to revisit.

1 July - peach and mozzarella salad and a pork chop

The peaches still don't feel wonderfully ripe, but are at least a bit softer, so I go for that peach and mozzarella salad. I try a slightly sweeter dressing this time; oil with raspberry vinegar (home made by popping a handful of fresh raspberries into a small bottle of white wine vinegar), which works better. It looks so lovely, I can't resist another picture and it tastes pretty good too, even with slightly crunchy peaches.

Tris is out for the evening, so I have an easy pork chop with some creamy mushroom sauce and a big pile of fresh veg; homegrown mangetout and peas, broad beans and new potatoes from today's organic vegbox. Still can't get over how amazing the homegrown mangetout taste!

30 June - Moroccan chicken and couscous

The parsley is growing by the day, so today's dinner started off as wanting to use some herbs. After a bit of browsing, I came across a recipe in a little cookbook from Bordeaux Quay, a local restaurant and cookery school. It's described as Moroccan chicken tagine, although I'm not sure it's really a tagine, more chicken with a Moroccan sauce. It didn't actually include any parsley, but I reckoned it would probably go quite well!

It's another dish that starts with a paste made of a list of ingredients whizzed up in a blender. The paste is called chermoula:

• 1 tbsp fresh coriander
• 1 lrg clove garlic
• 1/4 tsp ground cumin
• c. 1/3 chopped red chilli
• pinch of saffron
• 50ml extra virgin olive oil
• juice 1/2 lemon
• 1/4 tsp paprika
• pinch salt

1. You brown two chicken breasts in a little olive oil on both sides (just a couple of mins) and remove.
2. Fry a chopped onion gently in the same pan. The recipe asked for celery (yeuck!) and carrot, but I used a leftover golden courgette, diced, instead.
3. Chop the skin of 1/2 small preserved lemon (you really don't need more as it's quite a strong flavour) and add about half to the pan, together with 1 tbsp of the chermoula paste, 2 chopped tomatoes and 250ml chicken stock.
4. Return the chicken to the pan and leave to simmer for about 20 mins.
5. Finally, stir in a good handful of chopped coriander, parsley and mint, the rest of the chermoula and preserved lemon.

Served on top of a pile of couscous mixed with some more chopped herbs, it was really delicious - great flavours; fresh and zingy - definitely one to come back to.