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!!

10 August - a packed lunch and more splodge

I'm teaching at the university for the next few weeks, so I'm not always at home for lunch. Today we had a lunchtime staff meeting, so I made myself a quick packed lunch last night to keep me going; a pot of salad - new potatoes, beans and tomatoes from the garden, some mozzarella, basil and olive oil.

Tris is away again for a few days and there's some of last night's vegetable splodge left over. I'm not very excited about having the same thing two nights in a row, but I know if I leave it in the fridge, I probably won't get round to eating it. At least it's quick after a busy day.

9 August - vegetable splodge!

It's a busy day and I'm a bit uninspired about dinner. I've got some nice cooking chorizo in the fridge that I bought the other day and a rather oversized courgette left in the vegbox, which somehow leads to a big pan of what I can only describe as 'vegetable splodge'! It's sort of 'ratatouille plus'; made up of onion, garlic, pepper, courgette, aubergine and tomatoes, plus some chorizo and a tin of cannellini beans. It's not very attractive, but it makes a tasty bowl of vegetably stew.

8 August - smoked haddock fishcakes

Lunch today is rather unoriginally chicken and sweetcorn soup, using much the same recipe as the creamy chicken stew from the other night, but this time without the leeks and with much more stock to make it, well, soupier!

For dinner, we have smoked haddock fishcakes. I simply poach a couple of smoked haddock fillets in milk with a couple of bay leaves, then mix up the flaked fish with some mashed potato and a bit of chopped parsley. I mould the mixture into 'cakes' (two each), dust them in flour and fry them carefully for a few minutes on each side. I make up some sauce from a bit of white wine bubbled with some more parsley, plus a splash of cream and some of the milk that the fish was poached in. It's not spectacular, but a tasty enough supper for a Monday night, with some fresh peas and carrots.

7 August - vegetable Thai green curry

There's so much veg floating around the kitchen today, it really has to be a vegetarian dinner. Lots of it seems to be green, which by a process of association leads me towards a green curry! I use a Nigel Slater paste as my base, mixing up in a blender:

• a stalk of lemongrass (centre bit chopped)
• a couple of cloves of garlic
• some galangal from a jar in the fridge
• a shallot
• half a green chilli
• a handful of fresh coriander
• a squeeze of lime juice
• a splash of fish sauce

I fry up a chopped courgette and a couple of spring onions, then add the paste, some veg stock and a small tin of coconut cream. Then in go some sugarsnap peas, green beans and some fresh sweetcorn (just to add a bit of yellow). It all comes out as a fairly tasty bowl of flavoursome green stuff and the sauce doesn't overwhelm the individual flavours of the veg.

6 August - creamy chicken with leeks and sweetcorn

Tris is down in London for the weekend, leaving me with a whole vegbox of stuff to get started on alone! After a brunch of scrambled eggs on toast with a few tomatoes from the garden lightly fried, this evening, I cooked up what was originally a soup recipe into a creamy chicken stew with leeks and fresh sweetcorn.

• I gently fry/sweat a small chopped onion, some chopped garlic and red chilli, with a sliced leek and a few bits of bacon.
• Then I add some chopped chicken just to brown, before pouring in a slurp of cider (still leftover from the other day), followed by about 150ml chicken stock.
• I cut the corn off a fresh corn cob, add this and simmer the whole lot for about 20 mins.
• Towards the end, I add a slurp of double cream and some chopped parsley.

It makes rather a generous plateful (I'm too used to cooking for two!), with some new potatoes to mash into the sauce.

5 August - more goats cheese and singapore noodles

We seem to have fridge full of bits of leftover cheese; goats cheese, halloumi and mozzarella! So for lunch today I used up the goats cheese with some of the roast peppers left over from last night, mixed with some chickpeas, tomatoes and basil.

Dinner was Singapore noodles based on Ching-He Huang's recipe in Chinese Food Made Easy.

• Tonight I fried a couple of chopped spring onions with some grated ginger and a tsp turmeric.
• I added a red pepper cut into strips, a carrot and some sugarsnap peas that came in today's vegbox.
• Then in went a few small chunks of bacon and a chicken breast cut into thins strips.
• Meanwhile I boiled some noodles, drained them and then added them to the wok with a few chilli flakes, 2 tbsp light soy sauce, 2 tbsp oyster sauce and a tbsp rice vinegar.

Tasty with just a hint of a chilli kick in the background.