In the end I used

• two small onions
• a handful of spring onions
• a dozen-or-so thin slices of chorizo
• a tin of plum tomatoes
• about a pint of weak vegetable stock
• a courgette
• six slices of black pudding

The whole thing was built up in a sturdy pan in fairly short time as I was heading out the door shortly. I cooked the onions down a fair bit; not quite to the stage where they’d be suitable for onion soup but more caramelised than I usually have them. The spring onions and chorizo went in for a few minutes and then the liquid, tomatoes and courgette, cut into thick coins and then halved. The plum tomatoes were a good find, as they rarely seem much use and we always end up with more in the cupboard than is really necessary.

I brought everything to the boil while I quartered each slice of black pudding. Then I just dropped all the slices of pudding in, the lid went on and I turned the heat off completely. I came back to the house two hours later to the most amazing smell. :-) I gave it some gentle heat to move things along and made some rice alongside. Helen was late home from Glasgow that night and I think this was the best welcome home!

Leftovers the next day were eked out with a garlicky peppers concoction. I don’t think salad is the right word but I don’t know what is. It was very lovely though.

 The internet said make arancini, so I did. I used what I had to hand for the fillings: cheese, prawns and peas. A bit eclectic but I was running short for time. You’ve got to have non-stick hands to do this properly — make a little hemisphere of rice and fill it with whatever you choose, before capping off the end with more rice to make a beautiful ball. Obviously the aim is to get as much filling in there as possible which is pretty difficult.

My attempts were quite heavy on rice and light on  filling. They get breadcrumbed and deep fried, which gave me a chance to use my new candy thermometer. This will come in handy for later experiments.

 The result was tasty and the cheese worked very well, but it needs more practise!

I tried again this week, because I still had many of the ingredients prepped — I had roughly chopped 100g of dark chocolate and cut some greaseproof paper to size and, well, I wasn’t going to be defeated by shortbread. Using Delia’s methods for the shortbread and the original recipe’s method for everything else worked quite well:

It’s basically just two colours of shortbread, one made plain and the other using a bit of cocoa instead of part of the flour. You lie one on the other, sprinkle the inside with shards of chocolate and roll it like a swiss roll before slicing.

In future I would try for a tighter coil and smaller chunks of chocolate. In fact, chocolate chip-sized lumps wouldn’t be too small, and would make it easier to roll the dough and cut it too. I would also try to bake them longer. I went over the allotted time but they’re still a wee bit blond and slightly chewy in the middle.

I pulled out The River Cottage Meat Book and chose Beef in Stout, because it could be made ahead of time, with minimal active involvement, and it is just the kind of dish I’ve always wanted to make.

Up to a certain point, Leith provided everything I needed. Although I was refused the beer at Co-op for looking under-age. I didn’t have any ID because my driving licence was away to get the address changed. This is Murphy’s Law, but I’m not bitter. I just went elsewhere. Helen had to pick up some lardons on her way back from the library but everything else was available locally.

The inclusion of two types of mushrooms — whole button mushrooms and thick slices of open cup mushrooms — really lifted the whole meal for me. I also made some simple mash to go with the stew, and home made bread too. We had beer from Bath Ales, and Helen even got the guilts about not doing any cooking, so did a Nigella sticky chocolate brownie pudding.

I halved nearly all the quantities for the stew recipe (originally for 8 to 10) but it still managed to make about 9 servings. (The recipe in the link has been halved already, and is a fairly accurate picture of what I put in the pot.) We eked the final leftovers out by adding boiling water and noodles, to make a beef and mushroom soup.

I will definitely be doing this dish again, especially if we need to serve a full table of people this winter. Fantastic warming meal.

• Swedish Salmon
• Sweet and Sour Cucumber Salad
• Warm Potato Salad

The Christmas day plan is one meal with my parents and another with Helen’s parents. The first meal of the day is officially a “champagne breakfast” but, out of two attempts in two years, we have never made it to their house before 11am. This year we didn’t eat until after one…

I started making this before going to bed the night before, and we drove to our home town the next morning, with a poached salmon and a cool bag filled with foreign Nigella ingredients. The salmon poaching is really easy, though you’ll need a large container if you want to cook a whole salmon at once. We had one side of a small salmon which was more than ample for four. You bring your water to the boil and then simmer the salmon in its flavoured water for ten minutes, before leaving it.

Overnight it cools down and the next morning it tastes moist and delicious. Draining a salmon of cold water is not a pleasant job but you get a lovely meal in return.

The salads were miss and hit respectively. Cutting a cucumber so finely that all the crunch disappears is not the right approach to take. You just end up with limp wet tissues, and no amount of interesting dressing will make up for it. Hot new potato with seedy mustard, on the other hand, is suitable for nearly all occasions. Take it to the races! Eat it for breakfast! At the cinema! Lovely stuff.

• Green Apple Martini
• Ginger Pom
• The Instant Canapé: Quick Crostini with Avocado and Green Pea Hummus
• Tuna and Crab & Avocado Wraps
• Butterfly Cakes

The plan was to have a short, sharp event – two hours of little nibbles and heady drinks, then a round of butterfly cakes for a finale. That even left time for people to hit the town afterward, should they be up for that kind of thing.

The two cocktails were pretty good, though requiring ingredients that were unusual enough that the local off-licence couldn’t meet our demands. But Peckham’s has quite a serious selection of interesting liqueurs.

By contrast the wraps were pretty disastrous. No matter how clever it sounds, wrapping things in tortillas is a recipe for tears well before bed-time. Not to mention how ridiculously over-filled the wraps would have been if we’d followed the recipe exactly. I was liberally applying cocktails sticks through all angles of rolled tortilla in an effort to hold them together but they looked pretty ridiculous. And fell apart the instant they left the serving plate.

The pumpernickel crostini were elegant and simple, though not to my taste. I’m not a great fan of rye bread, and there’s nothing more seriously rye than pumpernickel. I also made a batch of breadsticks, trying out another couple of recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough: sesame and aniseed breadsticks, and olive, parmesan and herb breadsticks. I’m not a great fan of olives either, but these latter were really good. Naturally they were the more difficult of the two to make but I guess that’s why you put in the extra effort, eh?

I don’t want to dwell too much on the party itself. In short, we had too many cancellations. But I hope our guests left with happy thoughts, as they got butterfly cakes with coloured cream just before we wrapped up for the night.

Alas, even the cakes were not a complete success. Would you believe that a significant number weren’t even cooked when they came out of the oven? Helen turned round after ten seconds and found a bunch of them had collapsed inwards like some kind of exuberant diamond mining operation had started up.

We might have to pay some proper attention to the temperature of our oven if the cakes really were so underdone. I’m not sure what we’d need to do to measure the temperature in the oven that won’t – as the guys at Kamikaze Cookery managed to do – melt the thermometer.

I hope our guests don’t think too badly of us. The drink was mixed in a good way, the food was mixed in a bad way, and maybe the invited friends felt a bit awkward. But the one thing everyone agreed was the Pama (that’s a pomegranate liqueur, m’lud) is the bees knees. Get some.

At the business end I’ve cut up squid for calamari and now I’ve cooked a whole fish and filleted it once cooked. That was exciting.

• Saké Sea Bass with Wilted Greens

The fish itself was amazing. You can see from the photos that it was a big beastie, with dorsal fins that you could fan out in a most fascinating fashion. Unlike the original Billy Bass this one was not in the mood for singing – but then maybe sea bass aren’t singers?

The fishmonger gutted Billy here and I filled up the insides with shredded spring onion. Doused in soya and saké and popped in his little silver pastie, er, foil pouch.

(The saké will apparently be used for another recipe soon, though I can’t remember which one. I was greatly troubled at point of purchase – do I go for the ordinary-looking bottle or the swankier bottle of dry saké? Would dry be bad? They were 5p difference but in the end I went for the plain bottle with the plain contents.)

Once cooked in the oven I had to remove the skin. I had no idea what to do but Helen suggested “start at the tail”. This was definitely the way to do it – otherwise I would still be there, peeling off a scale at a time. I wasn’t able to completely remove all the bones because the fishmonger had cut some of the ribs away from the spine when he filleted it. Fish bones are a real pain, but that’s the price you pay for such lovely meat.

And it was very tasty, though quite plain as Nigella admits in the blurb. Given the choice I would add something extra to the side when making this dish. Her wilted greens were too wilted to really make much impression, I thought. So, what do I have to carve up next?

• Grilled Cheese
• Sandwich Slaw

Grilled cheese, it turns out, is a cheese toastie – if you’re from the United States. (I always thought it was another funny term for cheese on toast, like roasted cheese.) Strangely, there’s no grilling involved in making grilled cheese. Wikipedia also attests that slaw, as a term for coleslaw, is used in the southern US. So this is quite an American dish – in as much as a cheese toastie ever could be.

We normally make our coleslaw with a grater, but this recipe asked for slices, so that’s what I did. But it really wasn’t the Express way.  If you tackle this one, just use the damn grater. Frying them on the griddle was fun work, with the sandwiches weighted down with tins of beans in a frying pan. I think we waited slightly too long to turn them, or maybe the griddle was just too hot, because the sandwich had an even well-done-toast colour rather than elegant stripes.

In future I would make this on a bigger scale: big slices of bread, lots of cheese and tomato, and just keep making them until one or other diner admits defeat.

• Minestrone in minutes

And Minestrone in Minutes takes about as long as it does to cook plain pasta, so it really does happen when you need it to happen. But it was also a bit of a disappointment, possibly because the ingredients we used were all slightly inappropriate. The pasta was too small, the pre-cooked beans weren’t really cooked properly, and so the result was not everything it could be.

I also think that a long slow cook would have warmed up the kitchen more. Maybe I should have been baking at the same time to take the chill off our bones. Still, it looks great, doesn’t it?

• Smoked Trout Pâté

The fish pâté was a doddle. Just dump everything into the food processor for thirty seconds and then scoop into the bowl before chilling. I made some pains façon baucaire, little rolls with holes in the middle, the night before. We had them with the fish and some cornichons. And we still had plenty left for lunch the next day.

You can see I managed to get inside the blender for this shot, which is certainly adventurous if not particularly artistic. For this shot I actually stood on a ladder at the other end of the room, and used a super-zoom to get in this close.

You can see our elegant bowl here, and the pâté in all its tousled, farmhouse-authentic glory. It takes a lot of effort to look this natural. I make no apologies for the sandwich with the gherkin teeth. That was all Helen’s fault.