Kebabs

Sam made this one! Grilled lamb kebabs with big Turkish chillies, onions and courgettes, served with couscous and homemade baba ganoush on the side. Very delicious it was too.

As promised, the mighty fish!

I told the fishmonger I wanted a sea bream to feed two, and he must have seen me coming because he sold me this 2kg monster which was more than even Sam and I could eat at one sitting (thought we did our best). I slashed its sides and stuffed them with garlic, ginger and what I thought was coriander (it actually turned out to be parsley but no great harm was done). Then I laid it in foil on a bed of sliced carrots and spring onions, sloshed some sesame oil, soy sauce and Shao Shing (alliteration unintentional) Chinese wine over it, closed the foil parcel, and baked it in the oven. It took a whole hour before it was cooked, by which time the rice was cold, but it didn't matter. Utterly delicious.

Bacon, onion and taleggio tart

A warming winter number. (Now I sound like Nigel Slater.)

Lamb tagine with almonds and sweet potato mash

I've been going through something of a Moroccan phase lately. Have been cooking my way through a few of the recipes from Fiona Dunlop's Medina Kitchen, a gorgeous North African cookbook I snapped up for a pittance in Borders just before it went bust. There was a chicken tagine with lemon and olives, a chickpea soup with harissa, and now this meltingly sweet lamb dish. I love the way they mix sweet and savoury flavours - I substituted dates for the recommended prunes, which worked pretty well (although you had to have a sweet tooth, which I do). It's one of the world's greatest cuisines, if you ask me.

Cream of pumpkin soup in the pumpkin

Speaks for itself, really. Poured in cream, mushrooms, black pepper and gruyère, then roasted it in the oven for half an hour. Just the thing to warm up a solitary late autumn evening.

It's been so long!

I haven't updated my food blog for ages, because I'd been building up a backlog of photos for ages and then my camera card mistakenly got wiped. Bummer. But here are a few of the things I've been making recently. First, last night's delectable plum tart (recipe from Roast Figs Sugar Snow, which is quite possibly the most beautiful cookbook I own):

Time for a dinner break now (sea bass baked in foil Chinese-style with spring onions, carrots, garlic and ginger - photos to follow!)

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: