Roast pork belly with honey and mustard parsnips, carrots, onions and roast garlic cloves; red cabbage with bacon

This has got to be one of the most delicious meals I've ever cooked. It was quite improbably, unusually, disgustingly delicious. Everything caramelised, sticky and gooey, the crunch of the red cabbage and the saltiness of the bacon (they really know how to do bacon in Germany) and the garlickyness of the garlic cloves and the sweetness of the onions, parsnips and carrots - and the crackling! Oh, my, the crackling!

For pudding, as an afterthought, I whacked together an apple tart using some leftover ready made pastry that had been sitting in the fridge for weeks and a couple of ageing apples that had been in the fruit bowl for almost as long. Served with vanilla ice cream, it was delicious.

And because it's Hallowe'en, we made our pumpkin, which ended up looking more gruesomely ghoul-like than intended when the red candle inside started dripping blood-coloured wax all the way down to the floor:

Fish, fish fish!

First of all I want to share with you the stunning fish soup that Sam made a few nights ago (recipe from Robuchon):

We ate this with toasted gruyère on baguette slices:

Then there was the amazing meditteranean baked fish with vegetables, also by Sam, also from Robuchon (he's getting really into this Robuchon book - I'm all for it!):

And last night I made a Moroccan fish tagine, flavoured with paprika, garlic, cumin and lemon and cooked with carrots, onions, tomatoes, potatoes and peppers.

So all in all it's been a pretty fishy couple of weeks - no bad thing, if you ask me.

Pea, lettuce and lovage soup; beetroot and walnut salad with garlic yogurt dressing; tomato and chilli jam - and Scrabble...

There have been so many great meals lately that I've built up something of a backlog. First there was the tomato and chilli jam that I cooked the other day - the first successful chutney I've ever made, sweet as heaven and spicy as hell, and I already couldn't imagine cheese, not to mention life, without it:

Then there was the delicious pea, lettuce and lovage soup that Sam made last night, with lovage from our herb garden and stock from the other night's chicken:

Which was followed by a beetroot and walnut salad with a dressing made from yogurt, lemon juice, garlic and chives:

We ended that meal with a wonderfully fungal Tomme de Savoie, complemented by figs and the tomato and chilli jam. Or rather, we thought that was the end - until I hit on the idea of making a dessert out of the surplus lemon icing from the carrot cake I'd made for our tea party with the neighbours on Sunday (just mascarpone, lemon and sugar, so really a lemon mousse), topped with crumbled up homemade ginger biscuits, also leftover from said tea party:

It was one of those evenings where the food had been so good that I couldn't bear for it to end. Afterwards we played a game of Scrabble (our first in German), which is still on hold halfway through because we were too tired to finish it before bed (I'm currently winning by a long way, having cleared my rack on my very first go with 'reintun', simultaneously making 're' off the end of Sam's 'Wege' for a whopping 62 points...)

Tonight Sam was working and a girlfriend of mine came over - she brought pork medallions, which we grilled and served with a garlic, mustard and cream sauce, and bacon (the Germans don't half do good pork products), which we fried up with red cabbage and chestnuts - delicious.