No real recipe, just thinly sliced beef rump steak marinated in sesame oil, soy sauce and honey, seasoned with a little freshly ground black pepper – I’d have used white pepper ideally, but since it’s not something we ever have in the house, that was difficult – which was then thrown into a wickedly hot wok, along with some sliced red pepper, mange tout, bean sprouts, spring onions and noodles.  A bit of extra soy sauce and toasted sesame oil was added as final seasoning.

Day 2 of the ‘apple a day’ experiment saw me eat two apples – one for breakfast and one after dinner. Lunch was leek and potato soup.

Breakfast:

A rare cooked breakfast, although it was only scrambled egg on toast. Amélie had some, too, although I obviously over-cooked her egg just a bit to make sure it wasn’t too wet. Oh, the other difference was that she didn’t have toast: she had scrambled egg instead.

Lunch:

Decided to try a home-made version of KFC today. Major difference between my version and KFC’s version would be the fact that the chicken I bought was free-range (or so the packet said).

So, I had 8 chicken drumsticks (dark meat obviously being the tastiest part of the bird – I really can’t understand the English obsession with chicken breast), which I marinated for a couple of hours in a concoction of lemon juice, garlic paste, basil and chilli powder. I then dipped the chicken in some flour that had been seasoned with salt, loads of cayenne pepper, a dash of ground cumin and another dash of chilli powder.

You’ll notice in the photo that some of the drumsticks are darker than the others. That’s partly because I cooked the chicken in two batches and the second batch didn’t have quite the same amount of time in the fryer. However, I also double-dipped the second batch, so after coating the drumsticks in flour the first time, I then dipped them into a lightly whisked egg (let down with a bit of water), then dipped them into flour again.

The double-dipped batch had an undeniably crispier and crunchier skin and you definitely got a bigger kick from the spices. For me, that makes it a winner but P said she preferred the single-dipped batch.

Dinner:

We were supposed to have a Sunday roast (beef) but since my mum and sister came round to see us, I didn’t really have time to prepare it properly. Also, the spuds I was hoping to use were somewhat sprouty, so we deferred the beef until Thursday. Instead, I made use of the char siu, pak choi and bean sprouts that my mum brought round. I added onion, sprouting broccoli, spring onions and some fried noodles to the mix, and knocked up a stir fry. As usual I made too much.