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Cooked for the wife for the first time in, ooh, about 6 months last night.  She’s been on a diet that’s basically meant her not eating any real food, which has meant fending for myself.  This isn’t really a problem – I don’t struggle to feed myself – but I’ve missed the social aspect of eating a meal together.  I’ve also missed the nurturing feeling you get from cooking for someone else.

P’s decision to come off the diet came rather suddenly so I didn’t really have time to plan any great ‘first meal’ for her but I was able to rustle up something from the ingredients in the fridge.

Given the nature of P’s diet, I kept the meal very simple to avoid shocking her system. A couple of tomatoes and a chopped red pepper were tossed in a bowl with some olive oil and seasoning before being put into a medium oven for 30-40 minutes and then mixed in the bowl again with some balsamic vinegar and fresh basil leaves.  The meat component involved massaging a couple of chicken breasts with a little olive oil before grilling it on the Creuset grillet.  The meal was completed by some steamed fine beans.

Breakfast:

Oh my god, this is getting so predictable: two slices of toast and marmite, washed down with green tea.

Lunch:

Unexpectedly ended up having to travel across to the other side of London for a meeting in the afternoon, so grabbed a ham and mustard sandwich from M&S, along with a packet of Skips (except it wasn’t just any prawn cocktail flavoured melty crisp snack, it’s an M&S Skips rip-off).

Dinner:

Schoolnight, so P cooked dinner. One of my favourites, from a book called One Pot Meals (I think) that I bought when I was in San Jose last autumn: can’t remember the title of the recipe, but it’s essentially a casserole dish filled with minced beef, green peppers, macaroni, a tin of tomatoes and a cup of water. Whacked in a medium oven for, ooh, 20 minutes or so until the macaroni has absorbed the water. Lovely.

Breakfast: It’s 8pm, and I can’t actually remember what I ate 13 hours ago for breakfast, reflecting either my age-affected memory, my Amélie-affected memory, or the utter forgetfulness of what I ate. Not good.

Lunch: After flicking through the Lazy Brunch recipe book (full of recipes from my current favourite tv programme about food: Something for the Weekend), I decided to give the much-discussed (on SFTW) scotch eggs recipe a go.

The recipe’s actually fairly simple. Basically, it’s sausagemeat – well-seasoned with salt, pepper, spring onion, parsley, and thyme – wrapped around a hard-boiled egg, coated in breadcrumbs, then deep-fried and finished off in the oven. The recipe worked like a dream and the whole family, including Amélie approved of the results.

Polly decided she also wanted me to try out the stuffed beef tomatoes recipe from Lazy Brunch.That, too, was a simple enough recipe – hollowed-out beef tomatoes, filled with a mixture of toasted flaked almonds, breadcrumbs, tomato juice and parsley, roasted in a medium oven for 10 minutes or so – and was equally well-appreciated.

Amélie’s always been good about eating fruit and veg, but she seemed particularly to appreciate tomatoes done like this.

Dinner: We’re trying to establish some sort of family tradition that we all eat together on a Sunday. What better way to do that than with a Sunday roast?

This week I roasted up an organic, free-range chicken from Waitrose. Yes, it costs more, but blimey, it tastes so much better.

I normally follow Nigel Slater’s method for roast chicken (involving lots of lemon juice and garlic) but I forgot to buy the lemon and garlic (duh). So I improvised and used the remainder of the pack of sausagemeat, left over from the scotch egg cook up, and stuffed that underneath the skin of the chicken.

Worked a treat, although I would probably use less sausagemeat in future. Skin crispiness was assured by smothering the bird in masses of butter and lots of salt & pepper.

Served with roast spuds, cauliflower and sweetcorn, and a ‘proper’ gravy, made simply using the juices in the pan, water, a smidgen of flour and salt.

All the water used to cook the veg was reserved, and has gone into the stock pot, along with the chicken carcass, four fresh chicken wings, an onion, a carrot, a couple of tomatoes, bay leaves, peppercorns and herbs left over lunch. Topped up with water and left to simmer for a couple of hours, the chicken stock will contribute at least one other meal for the family.