111: A really good spaghetti Bolognese, p21

Service resumed after a particularly busy week or so of conferencing and camping, and a lack of proper home cooking!

And a nice easy comfort food dish to ease us back in, and use up some of the contents of the overflowing fridge (post-Tescos delivery... how do I always overestimate the amount of fridge/freezer storage space we've got and have to cram it all in and/or use lots up within a couple of days of delivery??).

Almost the same as my usual basic plus throw-in-whatever-I-think-of-off-the top-of-my-head spag bol, but for one crucial difference - the addition of a large amount of cream near the end... The result was very different to usual! I'm not entirely sure it was for the good... Very tasty (cream tends to have that effect), but not quite spag bol to me - which should be really meaty and tomatoey and rich and strong, with the addition of lots of red wine, beef stock cubes, worcestershire sauce, etc. T liked it a lot (possibly more than mine??!!) but although it was nice, it tasted more like the contents of a lasagna to me - with the bechamel mixed up with the mince. An interesting experiment though, and as ever good to try different ideas... :)

110: Chocolate almond cake, p99

An emergency pudding required for a picnic at Glyndebourne... and this leapt out of the book at me. Even though we were out of dark chocolate... It's hubbie's fault that we need an emergency pudding, so he went out to get dark chocolate with the instructions to get 200g fine quality, c.70%+ dark chocolate. He came back with dark cooking chocolate (54% cocoa), which was at least better than the galaxy dark he came back with at some point in the past... Poor hub. He slunk off embarrassed when I pointed out the difference. But he got everything else on the shopping list spot on!

The egg white whisking fest continues - 5 eggs this time, separated, whites whisked to stiff peaks (I'm getting good at this!). I must have used over a dozen eggs so far this week...

Difficult to fold the heavy gloopy choc/butter/egg yolk/flour/coffee mix into the light, fluffy egg whites but managed without knocking all of the air out...

Took c.10-15mins longer than the cooking time in the book, before the knife stopped coming out covered in cake mix, and on removal the top of the cake broke slightly, showing that the top had risen slightly above the rest of the cake, and had formed a little crisp layer. Yummy.

Cake survived the car journey to Glyndebourne, and with the leftover mascarpone cream from yesterday, slightly flatter now the egg whites had lost a lot of their froth, went down very well. A very rich, fudgy chocolate cake, with only a couple of embarrassingly albino bits where I clearly hadn't mixed the egg whites in well enough...

109: Gooseberries with mascarpone cream, p187

Oooh, a surprise! These gooseberries came from the allotment of another reader - thanks! - and were hand picked by her lovely hubby and biked over to Waterloo just in time for the opening night of The Railway Children at the old Eurostar terminal (actually on the tracks!), to which we'd all been invited. What a sweetheart! I don't think I've ever prepared/cooked with gooseberries before... funny little things, like incredibly full water balloons, looking like for all intents and purposes that they are about to burst rather explosively, their translucent skins bulging ominously, and their veins stretched tight in their perfect little spheres. They looked like more like cartoon gooseberries than what I'd imagined real ones would. But soooo tart they are! Ouch! I wasn't actually looking forward to serving them - not a dish to savour when you've got a mouth ulcer... But gentle stewing with a bit of sugar worked a treat - no water added, the little balloons started to collapse and released plenty for them to bubble away in - and served with the sweet, soft mascarpone cream, they really weren't too sour at all. The mascarpone cream was definitely better than the fromage blanc earlier in the week - the mascarpone, egg yolks and vanilla giving the cream a delicious richness, and the whipped egg whites added in at the end resulting in a little, sweet froth. Lovely jubbly. Made to much of course, really should have halved the recipe again. Silly me... Might take the leftovers into work, wonder if the cream will be completely flat and inedible by tomorrow morning?

108: Grilled pork steaks with vermouth and fennel, p380

Yummy tasty garlicky rosemary-y marinade this, nice and thick, and made the pork steaks deliciously juicy and tasty after 5-10mins on the griddle pan. Definitely a marinade to use again. Fennel was interesting... as stated previously, I don't really like fennel, but clearly Nigel does... however, softening it in butter and then braising it in vermouth got rid of the overwhelmingly aniseedy taste I don't like, and gave it a lovely soft taste instead, but at the same time retaining quite a lot of crunch and texture. Not bad at all :)

107: Raspberry ricotta pancakes, p330

Meh, these are annoying... a variation on these pancakes from earlier in the year, this time with fresh raspberries from one of the readers of this blog, they are a lot of faff for a pudding which we'd probably both prefer made with normal crepe style pancakes, instead of all this whipping egg whites and folding it all together carefully so as not to lose all the air... They are a nightmare to turn over in the frying pan as well - too early and they just mush, too late and they are blackened. Grr! Tasty, but the ricotta gives a slightly odd grainy texture which isn't my favourite. Nah, luckily no more of these pancake recipes in the book.

106: Vietnamese beef salad, p191

Fiery!! A hot, sweet and sour salad to knock your socks off on a Tuesday evening. Yummy though. Wasn't sure about the choice of cut, sirloin is quite thick, but it did mean it stayed deliciously pink inside when griddled. Not so sure about the lime leaves - I couldn't get fresh leaves, and thought a jar of finely chopped lime leaves in water would do, but they were pretty tough and although they added the right flavour, also added the feeling that somehow lots of bits of dried grass cuttings had got into the salad. Ho hum.

105: Strawberries with fromage blanc, p185

Strawberries and cream! But a very long winded way to prepare cream... Very nice cream, light and airy, and kinda fluffy, but I'm not sure all the whipping of cream, whipping of egg whites, and folding was entirely worth it, other than to try. Oddly the consistency slightly (and heretically) reminded me of that 80s fav, spray cream... Oh no!! Good to try, and to make once, but I'm not sure I'd bother again :)

Strawberries very gratefully received from one of my reader's allotment - and some of the best strawberries I've ever tasted too. Thanks!

104: Grilled monkfish with rosemary, served with garlic mayo, p251

I've never cooked monkfish - and judging from the price of it, it's not really a surprise - £12.75 for a good sized fillet (which was plenty for the two of us, esp with how meaty monkfish is), I was terrified that I was going to inadvertently render it inedible... But no, Nige saw us through again, and marinaded for a couple of hours and then grilled for 5mins on either side didn't destroy it at all. Even the extra 5mins wait in the warm oven whilst the new potatoes finished cooking (grr!!) didn't seem to do it any harm. Lovely jubbly. The lemon in the marinade part cooked the fish on the outside, and was deliciously fishy and garlicky and lemony. Yum.

And another first, homemade mayonnaise. Blimey - it's easy! Hah, maybe that's beginner's luck and I'm now forever more cursed wrt mayo-making... Starts to make your wrist hurt, whisking away, whilst dripping the oil in bit by bit, but then all of a sudden it's thickened and just gets better and better. Magic! I didn't use all the oil at all though, I made half of the recipe as it was just the two of us, so measured out 150ml oil, but can only have used 50-75ml in total - the mayo was the right consistency and thickness (and volume!) by this point, and it seemed like it might be tempting fate to go any further. Or would have left us with an enormous amount of fresh mayo to use up quickly... The recipe was actually for garlic mayo, so had a couple of cloves of garlic crushed and mixed in. Jeepers - we're now both experiencing serious garlic repetitions... hope that they fade overnight...

103: Fresh borlotti beans with olive oil and focaccia, p293

A very quick supper, and lunch for tomorrow, but sooooo garlicky! I cheated too, tinned borlotti beans not fresh, which prob makes quite a difference. Oops. Bad me. But good though :)

That's all I can think to write. It's beans. With garlic and oil. And rocket.

**Note added after original post: And the garlic repeated on me for days...**

102: Broad bean and dill 'hummus', p198

Meh! More broad beans... and dill too, ick. But a simple little recipe, which would no doubt please lovers of broad beans. And dill. I didn't take the beans out of their outer inner coatings (if you know what I mean...) this time, since they were going to be blitzed anyway, maybe I should have, but then the total final volume of bean would have plummeted even further, having podded them already. Grr broad beans. Nice big fat pod, two weeny beans inside. Not convinced they are an economical foodstuff. Or even a foodstuff. The resulting 'hummus' (too close to humus for my liking...) or hummous was quite a good consistency though, and the idea was nice, I may bear this recipe (or variants on it) in mind for visiting vegetarians. Surely they like broad beans? And dill?

101: Frozen yoghurt with roast rhubarb, p12

 It's rhubarb time... which means my mother will be thrusting one of those super-size carrier bags from M&S or Argos into our paws at the end of each visit, filled with ridiculously long sticks of ruby red rhubarb from the garden. Sticks so long they won't fit in the fridge, and so many that if we cut them in half to fit them in the fridge, they'll take up all the space in there. The usual trick of popping them in the bag on the floor next to the washing machine usually ends up in a puddle of slowly blackening sludge developing, so it's easier if we just cook the stuff and 'fridgerate/freeze the results.

But damn, can I find vanilla yoghurt smoothies anywhere?? I scour the area for those little bottles of vanilla bean Innocent smoothies, which are clearly the ones that are being referred to in the recipe (no product placement there!), or anything similar, and can't find any. Clearly must have gone out of fashion... who knew? So I give up and make a substitution with some fancy thick vanilla yoghurts instead. The rhubarb next to the washing machine is starting to sludge...

Roasting the rhubarb instead of stewing it on the hob was good, and easier than stirring away, trying not to let it burn onto the pan, could just be left until it was done. Easypeasy. Will definitely use this method and the honey and orange additions again.

We don't have room in our freezer for the bowl of our icecream maker at the moment, and last time we used it - it didn't turn out too well... so I tried the alternative method of freeze-stir-freeze-stir etc etc. Hmm. This didn't turn out too well either... unless it was supposed to be more of a granita than a frozen icecream/yoghurt? It wouldn't scoop, so we had shavings of the vanilla yoghurt granita on the warm roasted rhubarb, and it was rather good - just like a summery version of rhubarb and custard. Yummy!

100: Chicken with vermouth, tarragon and cream, p143

Recipe 100!! I WILL finish this challenge this year...

A nice creamy, herby sauce, made super creamy by the addition of lots and lots of cream... Yum! Lots of tarragon, and finally used the tarragon vinegar I made back in January again. Phew, just the remaining 90% of the bottle to get through... Took longer than 15-20mins to cook the chicken thighs through, nearer 30-40mins, and the sauce got very thick and started to brown, but hey, it all tasted darned good. Served with new potatoes and steamed baby spinach.

99: Steamed sea bass with ginger and cucumber, p180

Not a whole seabass, as per the recipe, and not for one person - but two seabass fillets for a light lunch for two of us. And it was scrummy! More clean simple asian flavours, with the nam pla, soy, lime and coriander, served with jersey potatoes, very Nigel... And very simple. Never having cooked seabass before, one thing this book is definitely doing is teaching me to cook fish I wouldn't normally cook, which is quite fun. Yummy.

97: Grilled chicken with garlic and lemon butter, p262, and 98: (A lunch of) baked tomatoes, p221

And I'm over HALFWAY!!! :)

184 recipes - 98 done! And it's only just July - phew!

The recipe specified poussin, irrespective of the title, and poussin is what I got! Albeit one poussin instead of four, only me home for dinner this evening.

Ooooh, poussin! A revelation! So sweet, and succulent. 30mins under a fairly low grill and it was perfectly done. Scrummy. Probably didn't need the herby lemon butter, as it was plenty moist enough (grilled with the skin on, oil in the marinade), but that was good too. Spatchcocking was easy ('ask your butcher to do it' Nigel?) - easy peasy couple of snips with a poussin, didn't need to have got the poultry shears out.

And the tomatoes were scrummy - very simple, and very similar to these ones from last month, just with parmesan (or Grana Padano...) on top. Like the rosemary too.