Coniglio alla griglia

I've had rehearsals until 8pm most nights this week and Sam has had less work on than usual. Result: I've had a row of incredible dinners cooked for me! Indeed, as I write, delicious odours of frying plaice are titillating my nostrils. This is a luxury I could get used to (although I'd better not...)

The highlight so far was last night's barbecued rabbit. Sam marinated it in garlic, rosemary and lemon (he's more into classic flavours, I'm more into exotic ones, so we balance out well). Then he cooked it on the barbecue and served it with a 'salad' of white beans with barbecued red peppers (you grill them until soft, then put them into a clingfilmed bowl to steam, then remove the blackened skins), and some rocket leaves simply dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (I recently got fed up of crap quality oil and vinegar, and invested in the real thing from the Italian deli). For a starter we had barbecued asparagus with pancetta - simple and bursting with flavour. (For all its faults, Germany doesn't half produce good bacon - knocks spots off anything you can get in Britain.) For dessert we had fresh peaches, juicy and sweet, the first of the summer.

Chicken fattee!

This was something really, really special. We had my dear friends Pierre and Eric to stay for the weekend, big foodies both, and we decided to spend their last evening cooking this amazing Lebanese recipe from my new cookbook, Casa Moro. You roast a chicken with lemon and cloves, butcher it into the 8 pieces, then layer it up on a platter with rice (jazzed up with fried onions, spices and chickpeas), tomato sauce cooked with a cinnamon stick, fried aubergine, garlicky yogurt, toasted pine nuts and coriander. The result is a grand ceremonial feast.

We followed it with an orange and cardamom-scented pistachio tart, also from Casa Moro, served with vanilla ice cream. This probably wouldn't have been the first recipe I would have chosen from the book, but Pierre was mad keen, and he was right. A buttery pastry case is spread with a gooey, fragrant pistachio paste flavoured with orange and cardamom, then baked til it forms a delectable crust. Hard work shelling all those pistachios, but eminently worth it.

There's nothing like an evening spent in the company of true friends. I can't wait to see Pierre and Eric again.

Pan fried salmon with new potatoes, peas and broad beans with pecorino, and wild garlic mayonnaise

Another winning idea from Skye Gyngell (except the wild garlic mayonnaise, which was my idea). We got some wild garlic (what the Germans call Baerlauch) in our organic vegetable box and decided this was the thing to do with it. To be honest, I wasn't wildly keen on the mayonnaise - it tasted strongly olive oily in a bit of a nasty way (maybe I used crap olive oil). But the rest was pretty sensational - especially the pea and bean salad with pecorino from the Italian deli, which is one of my favourite summer side dishes.

Meringues with rhubarb and strawberry compote

Nigella's meringue recipe from Feast, served with stewed strawberries and rhubarb. A lovely summery dessert after a barbecue (which didn't get photographed, but I can tell you that the three different marinades of chimichurri, harissa, and rosemary/lemon/garlic were pretty stupendous). Would have been even better with vanilla ice cream but you can't get any in our crap local Rewe.

Skye's cream of spinach and nutmeg soup

(The actual colour was a far brighter, more intense mossy green.)

Good old Skye. This is classic French cooking - simple, but crafted with such care and attention to fine detail. Basically all you do is cook a load of spinach until it just wilts, fry some diced shallots in butter, then blend it all up with chicken stock and pour in some creme fraiche (still can't be arsed with the accents I'm afraid - just too aufwendig on a computer keyboard) and grated nutmeg. It's actually more time-consuming than it sounds, as are most things involving a blender I find, but well worth the effort.

Rigatoni with roast tomato sauce

Roast some cherry tomatoes with olive oil and balsamic vinegar for an hour or more on 160 or so. Then pour into drained rigatoni with a sprinkling of fresh thyme and plenty of parmesan and basil. Bob's your uncle.

Octopus curry

Based on the recipe for 'Ad Hoc fish curry' in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Fish Book, the bible of fish cookery as far as I'm concerned and much more besides. Mind you, the recipe is disappointingly anglicised - calls for 'curry powder' instead of any specific spices. So we didn't really follow it. Instead, we made a Thai-style spice paste, with garlic, ginger, shallots, coriander seed, cumin and green chilli, fried that for a minute with some onions, then poured in a bit of Thai fish sauce, a handful of lime leaves, coconut milk and fish stock (one we'd made earlier with the remains of a delicious pan-fried mackerel and a couple of massive salmon heads courtesy of Fischparadies). Once it had come to a simmer we put in our octopus along with a diced fillet of tilapia. A mere 3 minutes later it was ready to eat, on jasmine rice with a squeeze of lime juice and a sprinkling of coriander. Perfumed and wonderful.

Potato and smoked trout gratin

Three whole months since I've updated my food blog! Well, after all, there's more to life than food. But, to misquote the back of my shampoo bottle, it's a good place to start. Just now I made this potato gratin with smoked trout:

We'd just got back from a short trip away and there wasn't much food in the house, but we had potatoes, a packet of cream, and some smoked trout. So I sliced the potatoes the thickness of one pound coins and layered them up with pieces of trout in a baking dish, then poured over a mixture of cream, milk, creme fraiche (sorry, I JUST can't be bothered to go into character map and do the accents today), grainy mustard, salt and pepper, and grated some leftover manchego cheese over the top. I baked it in the oven at 190 degrees for an hour, then served it with green beans.

I was inspired by a recipe in Nigel Slater's 'Real Food' which calls for smoked mackerel, which I think would have been even better. (I also happen to know that a potato gratin is amazing with anchovies. Sounds weird, tastes great - trust me.) As we ate it on the balcony, a thunderstorm started, which made for a pretty atmospheric meal.