As Heidi Swanson, author of 101 Cookbooks, says:

I’m not sure why this never occurred to me, but until I [read the recipe], it hadn’t.

This is a tweaked version of a recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook. I’ll be giving it a go soon but wanted to put the link up now.

Lunch was just a carton of pea and ham soup.

I don’t, and couldn’t, eat this every week but since I’d been pretty good with food since the beginning of the year, I thought I’d earned enough brownie points for this.

I kind of made up for it at lunchtime, by buying a big bottle of apple and mango juice instead of buying a big bag of crisps to accompany my main lunch of crab pate with bread rolls.

Dinner consisted of some leftover Parsi lamb dhansak from the other day.

Lunch was at Yo! Sushi in Bluewater. It was as bland as I expected but better than going to KFC.

Wild boar sausages from Robert & Edwards in Reigate, served with mash potatoes (nothing fancy done with them; only olive oil, salt, a knob of butter and a splash of double cream) and onion gravy, the onions having been roasted with the sausages.

Dessert finished off the last of the Christmas leftovers, with half a panettone being sliced and broken up to use instead of bread in a middle-class version of the classic bread and butter pudding.

Perfect comfort food for a snowy Sunday and I couldn’t help taking a chef’s pride in seeing empty plates all round.

The ‘apple-a-day’ experiment continues. I nearly went a day without an apple on Thursday 7th, but I managed to remember to eat one just before going to sleep.