Again, not a precise receipe, just a jotting. This is good with chilli or burritos.

Fry some basmati rice in some vegetable oil. Add some garlic, a bit of onion if you like, and a teaspoon of cumin and cook for a minute or two. Then add water or chicken stock – at least twice the volume of liquid compared to the rice, some chopped red pepper or chillis and tomatoes if you like – I squeeze is a slug of tomato ketchup at this point. Cover and simmer gently until cooked.

This isn’t really a recipe, just a notion. We do like a roast dinner (though John Pienaar might be putting paid to 50% of my roast dinners… another story…) but everyone likes something different. My wife and daughter like salmon, the boys like steak and I fancied duck for a change. Tired of chicken.

So this week I roasted some potatoes and carrots in a little vegetable oil and stuck a couple of duck legs in the oven too. I did them in a Nigel Slater duck salad style: rubbed the skin with Chinese five spice and seasoned with salt & pepper and roasted at 200C for an hour. I crisped the skin up a bit by injecting the fat back in with a metal baster. I then added the rendered fat into the potatoes for extra yumminess.

Steamed some green veg. Cooked a couple of slabs of salmon in the same oven, with olive oil, salt, pepper & dill. Quickly pan fried the steak with a bit of garlic and some bloody ‘artisanal’ bread left over from the farmers’ market. Sliced the steak and the duck and everyone helped themselves. Didn’t bother with gravy – there was a dollop of mayonnaise for anyone who fancied it.

Net result: much less bother than a normal roast chicken with gravy, and the boys are now hooked on roast duck. It was delicious, and so easy. Nice one, Nigel.

These were easy to make and a big hit.

• 100g softened unsalted butter
• 100g golden caster sugar
• 100g light muscavado sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 175g plain flour
• half a teaspoon of baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 140g white chocolate

Preheat the oven to 190 C.

Beat the sugars and butter together until creamy. Add the egg and vanilla essence and mix. Sift in flour, baking powder and salt and mix again. Smash the chocolate into small chunks and mix in.

Dollop lumps of mixture onto non-stick greaseproof paper and bake for about 11 minutes. We did 2 batches. Put the cookies on a wire rack to cool and eat while crispy on the outside and gloopy inside. Yum.

Adapted from Annabel Karmel’s cranberry & white chocolate cookie recipe in BBC Good Food magazine, Christmas 2001.

A (female) friend of mine points out that only men like Sophie Dahl, whom she describes as over-doing the ’simpering blonde’ thing. Like that’s a bad thing.

Anyhoo, this pudding is as camp as a summer’s day, if not Christmas. Tilly decorated the top with whipped cream, sprinkles and marshmallows.

• Packet of jelly – Sainsbury’s Basics jelly is 9p a packet I think
• Smallest available tin of evaporated milk
• Stuff to go on top – whipped cream, sprinkles, marshmallows, fruit etc.

Make the jelly up – dissolve the cubes in half a pint of boiling water, then make up to a pint using evaporated milk rather than water. Set in fridge and when ready, go mad on top. Eat in a tree house on a quiet, plane-free sunny day.

This is adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s vegetable paella recipe, using what we had to hand. It was a big hit. Well, I call anything the children eat 4 portions of a hit, especially as William decided picking the vegetables out was too much bother, and it was so tasty, so he just ate the lot. Well, not the prawns, but I’m not complaining.

Served 2 adults and 3 children.

• Olive oil
• Large onion, finely chopped
• 1 or 2 long red peppers cut into long, thin slices
• 1 fennel bulb, sliced
• 4 chopped garlic cloves
• 4 bay leaves
• half teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• half teaspoon cayenne pepper (I overdid this, which may have been the secret of its success).
• some saffron threads
• 400g or 450g rice – I used risotto rice
• 200ml sherry
• 500ml or more of stock – I used chicken stock
• salt and pepper
• a few handfuls of frozen peas
• 23 mini plum tomatoes, halved (should have been 24, but I went with 23… again maybe the secret of its success…)
• small tin of pitted black olives
• packet of prawns
• parsley

Heat the oil in a big, flat pan and gently fry the onion for 5 minutes.
Add the peppers and fennel, fry for 6 more minutes on a medium heat.
Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute.
Add the spices (aside from the saffron) and the rice and cook on a medium-high heat for 2 minutes. Chuck in the sherry and the saffron. Inhale deeply.
Boil for a minute and add the stock and a good pinch of Maldon sea salt.
Turn the heat right down and simmer for 20 minutes, adding extra water or stock if needed. During this time add the olives, prawns, peas and tomatoes. When cooked chuck some parsley on top.

A few weeks ago I had a longing for Eggs Benedict. I tried to make them the proper way, making my own Hollandaise sauce. It was a lot of bother and it didn’t work. I had wanted to recreate the delicious moment I first tasted this most divine of breakfasts, with Claire Bolderson in The Heathman Hotel in Portland, Oregon. I just ended up with a gloopy, curdled mess.

Anyway, I had the yearning again today and, thanks to the combined wisdom of half a dozen different web pages, made my own version of what I now call Mollandaise Sauce – mock Hollandaise.

Serves 2.

• 2 English Muffins – only here we just call them muffins.
• 2 large free-range eggs
• teaspoon white wine vinegar
• teaspoon or more of Dijon mustard
• juice of half a lemon
• jar of mayonnaise
• 2 rashers of bacon (optional)

Lightly toast the muffins and grill the bacon if you are a carnivore.

Make a bain marie – put a bowl over a pan of boiling water and put several dollops of mayonnaise in the bowl. Stir as it heats up and slowly add a teaspoon or two of Dijon mustard, a few teaspoons of water and the same amount of lemon juice.

Poach 2 eggs in hot water with a splash of white wine vinegar. When cooked, remove the eggs with a slotted spoon, pat dry and place on a muffin. Spoon over the Mollandaise sauce. Add bacon. Enjoy!

Henry gave it 8 out of 10 – not quite as good as my eggy bread with bacon and maple syrup, but he did enjoy it. Me? I was almost there… back in the restaurant of the Heathman Hotel…

…well simple if you have marsala and decent chicken stock to hand. Luckily I had the former as we are Nigella sluts and I had the latter as we had roast chicken yesterday and I cannot roast a chicken without making stock.

This is a simplified version of Nigella’s Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon pie. I wanted to use left-over cooked chicken instead of cooking fresh, so this is what I used:

• Bowl full of cooked chicken meat – about 500g
• 4 rashers of bacon
• half a box of chestnut mushrooms
• 2 tablespoons of Marsala wine
• 500ml of hot chicken stock
• roll of ready-made shortcrust pastry (though in hindsight I wish I’d made my own)
• splash of olive oil
• 1 clove of garlic
• 3 spoons of plain flour
• dried mixed herbs

Preheat oven to 200 degrees C or a little hotter. Put a glug of olive oil in a pan. Slice a clove of garlic in half and push it round the pan while the oil warms up. Chuck the garlic away before it burns. Cut the bacon into little strips and fry. When it begins to catch, toss in the sliced mushrooms.

Chop the chicken into small chunks and chuck in the pan along with a couple of teaspoons of dried mixed herbs – she said to use thyme, but I never ever have enough thyme. Sprinkle over a few dessert spoons of plain white four. When the mushrooms are cooked, add the marsala and the hot chicken stock. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 or 10 minutes until thickening.

Put the mixture in a dish and cover with pastry. I put the children’s initials on top with the left-over pastry for a bit of fun, but this proved to be a very good move. Tilly had earlier in the afternoon declared that chicken pie was “disgusting” and she wouldn’t eat it – but of course she just had to have the piece with the letter T on, and she ate loads.

Bake for half an hour. Serve with new potatoes, peas and sweetcorn. Delicious. It all went. Nothing left for Mr Freezer.

The trick here is to use the cheapest jaffa cakes you can get – generic, basic supermarket ones – and the best vanilla ice cream you can find. We made this with Kelly’s Cornish clotted cream ice cream.

Ingredients:

• Jaffa Cakes
• Vanilla ice cream

Method:

Put the jaffa cakes in the freezer for an hour or so. Take the ice cream out of the freezer to soften, and stir to make what my children call ‘ice cream cream’. Remove jaffa cakes when frozen and smash with a rolling pin. Fold the jaffa cake bits into the ice cream.

I would have included a photo but it didn’t last long enough to take one.

Me and the children made these tonight. Fantastic. They took it in turns to help me cook and take photos… (photos to follow!)

We made veggie ones and steak ones. Both use the sneaky salsa (below) though this time we left out the ketchup and used lime juice instead of lemon.

Veggie burrito filling:
Get a carton of black beans from Sainsbury’s. Fry an onion, garlic and finely chopped fresh red chilli until the onion is translucent. Add the beans with the juice. Simmer for 20 mins. I can’t begin to explain how tasty these simple ingredients are – this is culinary alchemy of which Frank Bath would be proud (Georgina knows what this means even if no-one else does!)

Carnivore burrito filling:
Fry a chopped onion. Thinly slice steak, garlic, fresh chilli and chuck them in, fry until brown. Add a dash of Worcester sauce, Tabasco sauce and a pinch of cayenne pepper.

Assemblage
Warm some soft tortilla wraps in a dry pan. Add sliced lettuce, your filling of choice, grated cheese, sneaky salsa, sour cream, rice, whatever you fancy. Enjoy. We did.

I knocked this tasty salsa up mostly from things grown on our allotment (hence the smug bit).

• Tomatoes
• A red onion
• Fat clove of garlic
• Squeeze of lemon or lime juice
• pinch of salt
• Slug of tomato ketchup
• Slug of olive oil
• Fresh coriander (we keep a bunch in the freezer)

Gently whizz in a blender or chop finely by hand. Serve with tortilla chips. And cold beer. Yum.