174: Inspiration for a lamb chop, p83, and 175: A carrot salad, p308

Oooh, I wasn't expecting this for the lamb chop recipe - only really properly realised it was a salad when I was reading through the rest of the recipe whilst the lamb was marinating. Just using soy and garlic for the marinade worked brilliantly, the lamb was lovely and tender and soaked it all up, and mixed with the spicy, hot, sour, sweet leaves, was delicious.

The carrot salad sounded like it would also be rather dull, but turned out to be really rather nice! Again, don't much like eating nuts raw but slightly toasted in a dry frying pan something happens to them which suddenly makes a big improvement... The dry peanuts, plus the lemon and walnut oil, stop the grated carrot making the salad end up a sodden orange lump. Not really enough for a main meal but a good side dish or maybe even a starter?

130: A salad of red mullet with lime and ginger, p246

Delicious! What a weekend for food! Along with the clams, I also purchased two red mullet from Sandy's. Quite pricey, and with four red mullet recipes in the book to get through, lets hope red mullet doesn't have a short season...

I was a bit nervous about this one, and probably will be about all the red mullet recipes actually, it being pricey and me not having cooked it before - it's a bit worrying, trying not to ruin it! However, this was easy peasy, and the fish took 2-3 mins on each side in a pan before it was cooked just so - was very pleased! The 'salad' comprised a cooked up Vietnamese style mixture of thinly sliced carrot and onion, with allsorts of lovely flavours - the lime juice, chilli, white wine vinegar, ginger and star anise being particularly notable. It went beautifully with the fish, which was meaty enough to hold it's own against the salad, yet delicate at the same time. And again, T, who I expected to leave most of the salad (not liking carrot or onion much, in any form), cleaned his plate!

120: Braised oxtail with mustard and mash, p63

A little visceral, this one...  Hunting down an oxtail, I found one rather quickly in Waitrose, who apparently have a range of 'forgotten cuts' - well done them! A bargain too, under a couple of quid for a whole oxtail. People seem to be incredibly squeamish about the idea though - the number of 'eughs!' and 'yuck, really??' responses I got when I mentioned I was making this, you'd have thought I was cooking a rat. Stupidly anticipating an oxtail to be long thick lump of meat, at the meat counter I was momentarily taken aback by the fact that the 'oxtail' sign was sitting on a little pile of neat, medallion-like rounds, before realising that they were all different sizes, about 1/2 inch through to 3 inches in diameter - and are of course each of the vertebrae of the tail, already chopped apart and ready to cook... doh!

An easy stew to throw together, and with the addition of a whole bottle of wine (no stock!) and the mustards, really meaty and rich and scrummy. After 2 1/2 hours, the meat was falling off the bones, and the next day, as per the recipe, I finished it off and served it with creamy mashed potato. The meat was lovely, but a little thin on the ground, and a little slimy still for T's liking, so maybe a bit longer in the oven to reduce the collagen down a bit more might have been a good idea.

112: Ham and butter beans, p321

An autumnal dish for the first day of August! Hmm, a hearty, meaty stew didn't really suit the weather today, but hey, I fancied it, and had all the bits... plus it will make for easy lunches at work this week. I halved the quantities and still had enough for four, the butter beans were from a tin, not dried, so a little shortcut there... and boiling bacon was replaced with a gammon joint. The resulting stew was scrummy, but I should have used two tins of butter beans to balance out the salty spiciness of the chorizo and gammon. I'm not sure about serving a slice of the fat with each serving - the slice of fat browned up at the start of the recipe but didn't exactly go crispy, and remained rather slimy - not very appetising!

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... :)

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.

93: A soup of roasted summer vegetables, p220

This looked little it might be a bit of a meh soup, as Nigel says getting 'rid of a whole heap of vegetables', but roasting the veggies in the oven first, like the tomato soup last week, really made a spectacular difference to the depth of flavour - and surprisingly, the fennel, which I don't really like, added a further depth, and the broth with the soup is almost meaty it's so rich. There's nothing about blending the soup at all in the recipe, so I slightly mashed the roasted tomatoes, which had collapsed in the roasting tray but still stayed in two large tomatoey lumps. Yum. And a good way to use up that cabbage of guilt...

62: A crisp salad for a cold day, p343

Have been slacking again, I'm afraid - a long family weekend, a conference abroad for much of a week, and returning home to find there's no food in the flat, let alone Nigel-style food, makes for a poor show. Must step things up again! (Ignoring the fact that the next two weekends are chocka too... weeknights it is then!). Order has been restored, with the arrival of half of the contents of Tescos being delivered yesterday, including such goodies as lamb steaks, lamb chops, a chicken, pork spare ribs, chorizo, new (green) garlic, kaffir lime leaves, taleggio cheese, etc, ready for some serious Nige'ing (To Nige: I Nige, You Nige, He/She/It Niges).

This was a bit of a cop-out, but I needed lunch to take in for work... Simple enough salad, crisp as the title would suggest, and cold day provided (where has May gone???) although I felt this could have been optional... It was fine for a lunch but didn't knock my socks off (more chilli needed, I think...), and although the very gingery and shalloty dressing was rather nice I'm sure it hung around a little more than was perhaps welcome...

I must also confess, I had the missing ingredient problem again. Halfway through preparation (more than halfway actually) I found that the coriander plant had died and gone to the compost heap in the sky some weeks ago, and what was masquerading as coriander on the windowsill, tucked behind the flat leaf parsley, was infact... another pot of flat leaf parsley. Why have I got two pots of flat leaf parsley? More importantly, what kind of dufus can't distinguish between flat leaf parsley and coriander?? Me, clearly. Embarrassed. But a quick google made me feel better, apparently they can look VERY similar... :(

So we ditched the coriander and imagined fresh coriander sprinkled on top whilst eating it. I did consider walking into town during lunch to get some coriander... but ditched the idea. Maybe it would have lifted the end result from being a fine lunch to something scrummy. Maybe... but for now it was just a good leftover user-upper.

56: Bean shoot salad with corianer and mint, p378

Jeepers!! I only used one chilli instead of two, and left it all for 5mins, not 15mins, and this was darned fiery!! Served with garlicky chilli prawn linguine, this made enough for at least four as a side dish. Can't think of an enormous amount to say... crunchy, tasty, but not the most substantial or filling of dishes so don't think I'd make this as a main course on it's own.

45: Chickpea and sweet potato curry, p102

Not the most appealing selection of ingredients, and definitely one to make T's toes curl... but this turned into a really rather tasty dish. This is one of the great things about this challenge - it's making me make recipes I wouldn't normally do, and surprising me with things like this. Who'd have thought (apart from an ardent curry-loving vegetarian...) that this would be greater than the sum of its parts?

I should have reduced the quantities, supposed to fed four as a main, with the other curry made tonight this served all four of us and left a good four lunches-worth for laters... Although perhaps the leftovers weren't a bad thing...

30: A herb and barley broth to bring you back to health, p41

Don't really need to be brought back to health, but hey, can't beat a bit of broth... uses up lots of veggies too, which is useful because I slightly over-bought in Tescos yesterday and the fridge is overflowing...

Essentially stew without the meat, very similar in delicate sweet taste to the lamb stew earlier this month. I'm not sure that the specially-purchased goose fat really adds that much, but c'est la vie...

23: White bean and tarragon soup, p158

A bit of a meh recipe for us, 'too beany' according to T, who doesn't like beans. Unless they are of the baked variety. Too tarragony for me, and I think I prefer soups with beans to be chunky rather than blended, as I don't like the texture of the resulting liquid after blending, too coarse and thick for me, like eating pureed watery potato... or beans... Hey ho, used up the last of the limp but still green and tarragony tarragon at last, and a lonely looking carrot that's been kicking around for a bit.

4: Stew, p10

Not the most exciting of recipe titles, 'Stew', but an opportunity to buy meat over the counter for the first time, woohoo! After lurking in the vicinity of the meat counter, and spying nothing labelled 'neck of lamb chops' - only 'neck of lamb fillet', and 'lamb chops' (which I knew were definitely not from the neck region) - I finally gave in and told the chap I wanted 'neck of lamb chops' for a recipe, and was that possible? He said this would definitely be the neck of lamb fillet, which looked rather nice, but we had some discussion over what volume '8 thick ones' entailed... either one fillet chopped into 8 thick medallions, or eight fillets... deciding that the latter would be a huge amount of meat for a meal described as 'enough for 4', I went for the former - even though T didn't think one fillet was enough for two - on the basis that stew is essentially a means of bulking out a relatively small amount of meat :) Have I mentioned what a carnivore my husband is? He's not looking forward to the many vegetarian dishes in the Diaries...

Pot barley was substituted with pearl barley - it's a slippery slope, and I feel bad for making substitutions already... but hey, it's what's a bit of husk between friends?

Only just squeezed the ingredients into my Denby casserole dish, but just about managed, and used the chicken stock I lovingly made with yesterday's roast chicken carcass this morning (tub of picked chicken in fridge waiting for 'chicken broth with noodles, lemon and mint' in a day or two, and maybe 'chicken salad with watercress, almonds and orange' too if there's enough). Brought to the boil on the hob, froth skimmed off, disc of greaseproof paper on top, and then popped in the oven for a couple of hours whilst T's parents visit and take us out for a chinese up the road. It's a hard life...

Recipe says to leave it overnight, skim off the fat, and reheat slowly before serving.

Next day: a success! Definitely enough to feed four, and a lovely thick, meaty stew. Inspite of it's heartiness, it has a surprisingly delicate, slightly sweet, slightly spicy taste, even after spending nearer three hours in the oven as dinner out went on until rather late... And plenty of leftovers for lunch tomorrow and Thursday, hurrah!

3: Roast chicken with cheese mash and garlic gravy, p342

An easy peasy one now, although the difficulty is stopping myself roasting the chicken with the little bits and bobs I'd normally do - like rub the butter under the skin instead of on top, mixed with a little orange or lemon zest and juice and some chilli flakes, and popping the remains of the zested fruit up the bird's whatnots... I like Nigel's idea of popping the chicken upside down for the first 45mins, and the garlic halves tucked in the roasting tin are smelling gorgeous.

Because the recipe includes cheesy mash, I've skipped roasting potatoes around the chicken as well, fearing potato overload. Although I'd prefer roasties,  the 'with cheese mash' does seem to be an integral part of the recipe, so I'm sticking to that.

I've halved the quantities since it's only me and T eating. Ooooh, lots of lovely leftover chicken!! Very pleased about that - I usually only roast a bird when we've got guests so there's only usually enough left to do a chicken risotto and the carcass to make a great vat of stock. I may have to start doing roast chicken for two more often...

I love roast chicken. It can't possibly go wrong :)

...and it didn't, as predicted. Super crispy skin, meat cooked to perfection, and scrummy mash. Halfway through I realised I'd made a bit of a booboo, supermarket chickens (even the better quality ones) don't come with giblets so couldn't make the gravy with them, damn damn damn. So I snipped the wingtips off the chicken quickly, and brewed them up as per the recipe before adding them to the roasting tin (when the chicken was ready, and removed). Good save, I think.

Served up with a good serving of our family's classic 'Mozzie's Acid Leeks'. Nice bit of vitamin C to cut through those cheesy tatties. And a glass or two of a chardonnay-chenin blanc-viognier blend. Note my utterly in-expert carving...