Friday Sunday lunch

It's a Friday, but it seems that it's a Sunday, as we're definitely having a full Sunday roast and pudding. I don't know why and I wouldn't dare ask in the post-Christmas frenzy we seem to be experiencing in this house. But I'm not complaining. We had delicious roast beef (topside) from the village butcher, perfectly rare and tender, as you'll see in the picture, with roast potatoes and parsnips, green beans and cabbage. We served it with Suffolk Mud (the brand name - thankfully there's no mud in the ingredients) cider and horseradish mustard and other horseradishes and mustards which went well too.

For pudding we had a sort-of pavlova. Home-made meringue covered with a layer of whipped double cream, then a layer of British pears, sliced, and pomegranate seeds. Delicious. I've shown you a picture of it on my plate and a picture of it whole. It was all eaten very fast. Scrumptious.

Boxing Day Turkey Curry

And here is the Boxing Day turkey curry, made by my brother to a secret recipe - I'll get it out of him soon. We had it with daal (lentil curry - pulses aren't my favourite food, but I'll try most things), a delicious onion salad (made with white onions, tomatoes, cucumber, cumin and lemon juice, I think), yoghurt and tortillas and pittas instead of rice. I was too full to appreciate it really, but it was good.

Boxing Day lunch

This was a 'light' (hehe) Boxing Day lunch, in anticipation of this evening's turkey curry. It's a massive platter of seafood salad - and no, this wasn't all for me - it fed six people, with seconds. The salad contained romaine lettuce and mixed, locally grown salad leaves, cucumber, tomato, avocado, a few sundried tomatoes and marinated garlic cloves, smoked trout and smoked mussels from the local farmers' market and tuna and was served with wedges of lemon and mum's homemade bread rolls.

It's twenty to five and I'm still stuffed and have no idea how I'm going to find the space for some of my brother's turkey curry tonight. Let's hope it's a late one.

Grandad's Christmas 'hamper'

I gave my Grandad a pot of my homemade tomato and apple chutney, some Sainsbury's organic cheddar and his favourite biscuits for cheese - digestives - all in a wrapped-up shoebox. Who'd want a Harrod's hamper anyway?

Christmas Lunch

Turkey, roast potatoes, sausage stuffing balls, veggie (walnut and apricot) stuffing, bacon rolls, sausages, sprouts with chestnuts and pancetta, peas and gravy (not seen, but I did have some on the meat), bread sauce (not seen either as it wasn't on my plate yet).

Christmas pudding (some burning booze made a run for it and burnt along the table - a scary Christmas moment there - and it was alight for so long we thought the plate might crack) and the tastiest threesome on the Christmas table - brandy butter, oozing rum butter and cream. I don't even like Christmas pudding much, but I don't need much coercing to eat these three.

Christmas Eve super-salad supper

Ok, so this isn't our usual Christmas Eve supper, but as we had a big lunch my Dad made one of his warm super-salads in the evening. As it's Christmas, we followed it with cheese, of course. There's barely a meal around Christmas without cheese in this house, execpt maybe breakfast. This warm salad had toulouse sausage and chorizo (cooked with onions, peppers, mushrooms, courgettes and cherry tomatoes) marinated garlics, sundried tomatoes, and probably lots of other things from the fridge and larder. The only thing is, I'm not used to waking up feeling hungry on Christmas morning after our traditional gammon feast the night before... maybe that's why I can't sleep.

Angela's Christmas Eve Rum Truffles

I can't sleep. But 8.30 on Christmas morning in a child-free house is definitely a time for sleeping...

As I forgot to blog about the chocolate truffles I made last night, I thought I'd upload them now, before seeing what needs to be done in the kitchen. I made a similar batch to those I rolled for my friend's birthday on the 9th December, but this time I made sure there was a serious amount of booze in there - it is Christmas, after all. It's been sort-of a tradition over the last decade or so to make them every year if we feel like there isn't enough chocolate in the house at Christmas.

Christmas Eve gammon lunch

We normally have this meal in the evening on Christmas Eve - I'm not sure why we had it at lunchtime. Perhaps it was because this year Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, or perhaps it was to ensure my twin brother arrived home in the morning - I'm not sure. But anyway, for lunch we had delicious moist gammon, simmered for a couple of hours with an onion, peppercorns, a bay leaf and cloves, mashed potato and celeriac, leeks in a white sauce and sweetcorn. We served it with my apple and tomato chutney (really easy to make - I promise I'll put up the recipe soon) which went surprisingly well with the gammon (although I prefer it with cheddar) and lots of grainy mustard on the table.

To follow, as is our family tradition, we had mum's homemade trifle. Unctious and creamy, with raspberries from the garden via the freezer, it is wonderful. And as I write there's still loads left, slowly slipping down the side of the bowl to make a sticky, creamy, fruity mess in the middle for tomorrow or boxing day. I can hardly wait.

Venison casserole...

Made with lots of red wine, vension from the local farmers' market, mushrooms, onions and tomatoes, served with green beans and delicious jacket potatoes. I've kept mine off the plate as I like the skin to stay as crispy as possible so I prefer it if it doesn't sit on the plate getting soggy in the sauce. I did mash a bit of the fluffy potato into the sauce while I was eating it - lovely.

Warming chorizo pasta

This was my late lunch on Friday. Hungover again (damn this Christmas party season), we had had Christmas champagne at work about 11 o'clock, and by the time I reached my parents' house at about 3.00pm I was starving and needed something big. I made myself a pasta dish - penne pasta, chunky chorizo sausage, onion, red pepper and my mum's homemade tomato sauce from the freezer. It was just what the doctor ordered, so to speak. My mum asked me what I thought of the tomato sauce - I was honest and said it was delicious but very lemony (surprising as it only had a dash of lemon juice in it, I suppose to add a bit of a fresh tang) so I don't think chorizo was the best match for it. With prawns it would be fab. Great!

I was quite excited when I saw this...

Well, relatively excited, or maybe as excited as I could be seeing a new product in a supermarket that I don't care that much about. Anyway, I thought this 'panini pizza' looked like it had potential. (Roasted veg, mozzarella, panini/pizza - great!) Sadly, I was wrong. Ok, I know pictures on ready-made food boxes aren't always to be trusted, but really... this only had about 2 bits of veg in it, and a load of cream cheese (it says creme fraiche but I think they are lying).

I griddled it, as instructed 'for best results'. It was pretty horrible and I wouldn't recommend it.

You may ask, I suppose, what was someone like me who usually cooks using fresh ingredients doing even in the pizza aisle? Or maybe you wouldn't ... as I reckon quite a lot of my blog disproportionately shows me to be a bit of a fast-food eater. I'm not. At least, I don't consider myself one. Just occasionally. Anyway, it's the Christmas party season and the fridge is bare. And I had to get some food in that my boyfriend would consider cooking if he was home, hungry and in a hurry and I wasn't around to force him to eat healthily. So I bought a couple of pizzas as I could shove them in the freezer at the end of the week if they weren't eaten.

The White Hart, Drury Lane, again

This time I had a burger and chips. It was fine, but the chips weren't double-fried as I had waxed lyrical about for so long, so I did look like a bit of a fool in front of my colleagues. They were all expecting the crispiest chips in London. The pub was too busy in the kitchen so to allay our hunger pangs as we waited (not as long as I thought we would have to wait) we nibbled on spicy nuts and seeds. I felt a bit of a 'tit' (haha) as it did seem like we were pecking on bird food, and I must look up what some of the seeds were, but they did the job and were nicely spiced - a bit like a posh, Anglofied Bombay mix.

The burger was fine. It was served in a ciabatta bun with cheese melted on the bottom part which I always find disappointing. Surely both aesthetically and for maximum taste it's best melted on the top of the burger, under the top half of the bun? There was a little pot of tomato relish an enormous endive leaf and some rather underdone chips (in my opinion). I should have taken the top off so you could see the burger underneath, but I didn't. Sorry.

And they didn't have the marinated olives that they do so well. All in all, most of our party of six seemed pleased, but I know they could have done better.

Hangover tuna etc...

Today I had a mammoth hangover. It was our work Christmas party last night and we made the most of the free booze. Fortunately I made it into work - I might not have been particularly productive, but I guess those who managed to make it in were able to show a bit of willing! At lunchtime we needed carbs - carbs and cheese. And somewhere cheapish with a free table for 6 in central London 10 days before Christmas. The obvious choice? Well, Pizza Express, of course as they don't take table reservations. I decided to have an American with extra sundried tomatoes - I guess they didn't have any sundried as when my pizza turned up I saw they'd replaced them with the marinated, oven-cooked tomatoes they've recently added to their menu as an appetiser. Much better - I love those tomatoes. It was wonderful - a perfect pizza in my view - but my plate was dirty with bits of old spinach which I could have done without. I wasn't sure afterwards if I felt better or worse, but by about 5.00pm I was ok, I think.

Anyway, tonight I needed something healthy and we had a pack of stirfry veg in the fridge so I thought I may as well use that. I went past a Tesco Express on my way home and saw they had tuna steaks on offer - I got two for £2 something - I thought that was pretty good. We put some brown rice on to boil and I smeared the tuna in a mixture of finely grated ginger and garlic, a couple of dessert spoons of olive oil, a spoon of lemon vinegar, some dried coriander leaves, a crushed, dried chilli and a bit of black pepper. We did the stirfry veg in a wok and added a dash or two of soy sauce and sherry vinegar, then griddled the tuna steaks on a high heat for a couple of minutes each side, or maybe even less time than that. With nutty brown rice, simple veg and deliciously tender tuna this felt like a healthy end to a decidedly unhealthy day.

Boyfriend's Birthday Beef

This was my boyfriend's chosen meal for his birthday - organic steak with potato waffles and the obligatory tomatoes, mushrooms and salad (not pictured as it was in bowls, but as you can see we needed the green). And one of the best things about this meal was that only 2 pans were used. I love a good dinner with very little washing up. One pan was the roasting tin for the waffles - the other, a griddle. I started off with the steak in a hot griddle to get the chargrilled lines, flipped it over and added the tomatoes. When the steak was still rare I put it to rest in the warm grill (only warm as it was above the hot oven) while I cooked the mushrooms and let the tomatoes stay hot in the corners of the pan. When the mushrooms were done I served it up all with mustard butter. I wish I had the excuse to have expensive steak more often - I love it. Beef is best.

Warm chorizo salad, full of my favourite flavours

And this was today's lunch, lovingly constructed by my dad while I made tomato and apple chutney in my parents' kitchen and my boyfriend did some work. He fried chorizo, onions, peppers and a tomato in a non-stick pan and served it warm over mixed dark green leaves and herbs, with delcious extras like marinated garlic cloves, sundried tomatoes and finely sliced cornichons. We had it with brown bread and butter - a flavourful Monday lunch to celebrate my last day off work before Christmas.

Succulent roast chicken

On Sunday night we went to my parents' for roast chicken. I wasn't feeling very well so I had a smallish portion, although looking at it there it really isn't so small. I was really unhappy not to finish it, although the gannets around the table swooped on my discarded sausages and spuds as soon as I was finished. The chicken was so juicy and delicious there was no need of gravy and the mixed vegetables which had been roasted underneath the chicken (it was on a rack above the veg with the bacon slices laid across it) added the necessary meat juices and moisture. As you can see, we also had green beans and roast potatoes. Fantastic.

Angela's rum truffles (sadly without the rum)

Full of M&S lasagne, I set down to the task of making truffles. Earlier that day I'd melted the chocolate, added the butter, egg yolks and cream and realised, much to my horror, that I couldn't find any rum or whiskey or booze of any kind other than beer and wine to give the truffles a bit of a kick. As booze is usually a major ingredient in my chocolate truffles I was distraught. However, I counselled myself that I was giving these truffles to my friend as a birthday present (the reason why we were away for the weekend) and that I could hardly go wrong with a mixture of chocolate, butter, cream and egg yolks. I do apologise to her though - I know they are missing a certain something to help the flavours along.


So, I'd left the mixture to set in the fridge for a few hours, then after our lunch I sat down to roll the truffles and coat them in cocoa. Here's a picture of the essentials for truffle rolling (a teaspoon, cases for the finished truffles and cocoa) - of course you also need clean hands. Even without the booze they were dark and rich - just not as good as I know I can make so I'll have to remember the rum next time.

M&S lasagne with tenderstem brocolli

As I mentioned in my last post, we were going away for the weekend... we'd planned to arrive at the seaside late on Friday night so I wanted to get a fast, filling meal that we could just shove in the oven when we got there. Things didn't go to plan and we ended up getting to the coast on Saturday morning so this was our lunch - M&S lasagne with tenderstem broccoli. The lasagne was good for a shop-bought version, but of course homemade is much better. The broccoli was great - much better than the boring usual version as I really like the slightly crunchy stems and sweet flavour. It did the job and filled us up so we were ready for our afternoon's work...

Strange pheasant meal

This funny-looking meal was another last-minute concoction. We were about to go away for the weekend and only had carrots and parsnips in the fridge. My boyfriend was walking past Waitrose and went in to buy us some protein for supper - and decided to give us a bit of a treat with these pheasant breasts wrapped with bacon, with a strange, fruity sauce. I boiled and then roughly mashed the carrots and parsnips together and served the pheasant with its odd, sweet fruity sauce with a fried onion mixed with sweetcorn - a bit of a strange meal, but it was really nice to have pheasant for a change and it used up the food we had. Could have done with some greens for colour, I think!

Burger King, Glasgow Central Station, yesterday

Urrgghh. We were hungover to hell so thought this whopper with cheese meal (with diet coke) might be a good idea. It wasn't. I had a few bites and a few chemical-tasting chips and left it. Gross. Thank god for Simply Food at stations - some nibbly bits for the train and we were fine. Phew.

Bella Italia, Hope Street, Glasgow

Simply disgusting. In fact, I was really disappointed to realise that almost all the food I've had in Scotland over the past three days has been pretty revolting. And weirdly, everything tasted of chemicals - I'm not sure why. Could it be the water or something? The Ibis hotel's red pepper and tomato soup that I had when we arrived seemed ok, but left me with a pretty sicky feeling in my stomach over the next 12 hours. Gross. Then, on Sunday, in a bit of a rush, we were trying to find somewhere that was open for food - no easy feat as it was pouring with rain and everywhere seemed to be shut. So we ducked into Bella Pasta, thinking that at least we'd get a warming meal. This was what I got.

It was supposed to be penne pasta, baked in a spicy diavola sauce, with chicken, pepperoni, peppers and red onion. The pasta was hard as nails; it certainly wasn't oven-baked - it had clearly been tipped into the dish and shoved under the grill/in the oven for too long; the sauce was fairly flavourless; the chicken was flabby, and generally it just didn't taste very nice. My boyfriend had a chicken in white wine 'oven-baked' pasta and had stomach pains for the next 24 hours.

We shared some garlic bread. But who makes garlic bread by slicing some bread and simply pouring some butter over a tiny section of each slice? I don't want to have three-quarters normal bread with no butter and a few bites of garlicy, butter-soaked bread - I want it all to be garlicky. Very strange.

I didn't say anything to the waiter - to be honest I felt so deadened by the whole experience I couldn't be bothered. A very depressing place to eat - don't even bother, even if you're stumbling around Glasgow trying to get out of the drenching rain.

Sadly blogger can't seem to put up photos at the moment - I'll put them up as soon as I can.

Nicoise salad again

This was my supper. I ate at least enough for two. It was good.

Beefy pasta supper

I have eaten meals that aren't based on beef this week - honestly. I had stirfried prawns in a tamarind sauce with rice the other night, and a mackeral salad last night (healthy guilt-food after a few glasses of wine - come on, you know you've done that at least once). And I had a panini with mozzarella and roasted peppers for lunch today - lovely and filling.

But tonight we finished the beef. We had brown pasta with a sauce made of mushrooms, red onions, a carrot, garlic, the end of the joint of beef with its juices, a bit of red wine and a Sacla sundried tomato and garlic stir-in sauce - I couldn't be bothered to make my own tonight as we wanted fast, warming food and I was feeling lazy. I added parmesan shavings (after this photo was taken) for a bit of extra oomph.

More roast beef lunch

This joint is lasting forever... we each had another couple of slices from it for our lunch, and it's not even finished yet. This was my enormous meal - I got a salad from the canteen salad bar (mixed leaves, thai noodle salad. tomatoes, a boiled egg because they looked so nice and some grated cheese) and then added the slices of cold roast beef and some more grainy, cider and horseradish mustard. Lovely and filling.

Delectables Fine Foods tomato and beer chutney

We bought this chutney at BBC Good Food Fair. The Fair was dreadful but thankfully the chutney is delicious. It's got very few raisins in it, which is a blessing, and it has a perfect balance of sweet to spice - a lot of both, in fact. It's a good tomato chutney colour (dark, orangey red and unctuous-looking); the texture is slightly sticky in a great way - almost jelly-like (redcurrant rather than Rowntree); the spices give it a wintery flavour (it smells of cumin and allspice) and, reliably, it tastes of spicy beer with a bit of tomato, onions and cider thrown in.

It says on the label 'for cheddar' but I can happily say it's splendid with a range of hard cheeses. (I'm currently nibbling it with some hard, crumbly English sheep's cheese - when I find out what the cheese is called I'll let you know.) It also says 'One of Rick Stein's Food Heroes' - it's a bit tacky having that displayed so prominently on the label, but I'm sure it gets the punters buying it so I can't really blame them.

Sausages for supper

This was supper. Butcher's pork sausages with roasted veg (garlic, onion, courgette, yellow pepper, fennel). Yum.

Lindt Lindor (in a bar)

What a brand! Lindt chocolate has it all - great products, attractive packaging and chocolate-craving-inducing adverts.

I love to use Lindt's dark chocolate for cooking as it has such a high cocoa content yet is still sweet enough to nibble on if I don't use the whole bar. Their extra-creamy milk chocolate is delicious - just think of their gold Easter bunnies with solid ears and their Christmas reindeer, which have just started appearing in the shops again. I'm not a huge fan of white chocolate, but I could happily eat quite a lot of theirs. I remember as a child the delight I felt when our Swiss relatives sent us a perspex box stacked full of tiny rectangular Lindt chocolates with pictures of perfect Swiss mountain scenes, or colourful photos of Bernese mountain dogs with their tongues hanging out. And just think of those glorious television adverts which appear on our screens as Christmas or Easter approaches - you know the ones, a big vat of gleaming melted chocolate is swirled by a man in a comical chef's hat. I'm sure M&S's advertising agency were inspired by this to come up with their beautifully filmed food porn ads.

Anyway, as comfort (or treat yourself) chocolate goes, Lindt Lindor is stunning. It's very sweet, yet each piece melts in your mouth, and it has a gorgeous depth of flavour. The Lindor balls are lovely but very overpriced, so I was delighted when the bar versions appeared in the shops. Look out for them - you won't regret it...

Cold roast beef lunch

Mmmmm. I think as soon as we finish the cold remains of Sunday's joint of beef, I'm going to go and buy and roast another one. I'm not sure my arteries will like that much, but wow, beef is without a doubt my favourite meat. Tender, flavourful, bloody and fleshy looking - there's no way my lunch could pass for a soya-based Linda McCartney 'steak'.

I carved 4 slices from the joint this morning, wrapped two in foil for my boyfriend, and two for me. And we each had a dessert spoon of Suffolk Mud cider and horseradish mustard in a little pot. Then it was up to us to buy the rest of our lunch as we weren't sure if we'd want some sort of a bread roll with our roast beef or a salad later on.

I decided to go to Tesco and I bought (there wasn't a great choice of protein-free salads) a 'You Are What You Eat' mixed salad with seeds & balsamic & olive oil dressing. It was an attractive combination of escarole, wild rocket, lollo rosso, and lots of rather dry shredded beetroot. It had a sachet of mixed seeds (pumpkin, sunflower and linseeds) and a sachet of ok balsmic and olive oil dressing. When I tried to tip it out onto a plate I realised it was huge, so the photo to the left (to follow) only shows about half of it. I was glad the seeds were there as there were a good amount and they really made a difference to the textures and flavour of the meal. The same goes for the mustard - it was lovely with both the cold beef and the salad.

Fairly healthy, nicely filling and delicious - I feel spoilt to have had such a nice lunch.

Sunday Roast Beef

Wow, I'm stuffed. And I think I might pop into our local butcher's on Monday morning to give Tom the Butcher a kiss - the joint of beef (Scotch topside) he sold me yesterday morning was simply incredible. It even looked so perfect when it was cooking that I took a photo of it in the pan (see below).

I dabbed it with a mixture of grainy mustard and butter, roasted it at 220 degrees centigrade for half an hour, then sloshed a glass or so of red wine over it and turned the oven down to 200 for about an hour. I left it to rest for a good twenty minutes while I simmered the carrots and beans and made the red wine gravy. As you can see from the steamy photo on the left, we had roasted salad potatoes (I had lots in the cupboard and when roasted they're lovely and sweet), roasted parsnips and boiled carrots and beans. And we opened a bottle of beaujolais - roast beef just wouldn't be the same without a glass of red wine.

Somehow, everything worked perfectly - the meat was rare and beautifully tender, just how I like it, the potatoes were crispy on the outside and fluffy in the middle and everything else turned out really well. I was really pleased as I haven't cooked a roast for ages and last time I overdid the potatoes (even I admitted they were a little too charred, and I love crunchy roast potato) so I wasn't expecting too much from this one. And I even had a bit of gravy on the meat - as its main ingredient was red wine.

And yes, of course we had seconds. But fortunately I bought such a large joint there's loads left for the rest of the week. Cold roast beef butties - I can't wait!

Viet Garden, 207 Liverpool Road, London N1 1LX

After the cinema some friends rang us to see if we wanted to meet for a drink or two, so we met in a nearby pub. They ordered some chips, which arrived in rubbish-sized portions and after a few more drinks we decided to go for a vietnamese meal at Viet Garden on Liverpool Road.

I love this place. We wanted to get a load of dishes and share, so we got squid in tamarind, sizzling prawns with ginger and spring onion, beef with greens in oyster sauce, chicken in chilli and lemongrass, some singapore noodles and steamed rice. See each dish to the left.

The service was quick and everyone who works there is charming and lovely and full of smiles - and they seemed delighted that I was taking photographs of the food. It was all very tasty - just what we needed - a good mix of flavours, and exactly the right amount to leave all four of us satisfied. See the dishes on the left - mmmmm, lovely. The only thing I wasn't too fond of was the chicken dish - it tasted a bit flabby and low quality to me, but everyone else said they loved it. I've always been a fan of their stirfried beef with greens, and the seafood is great, although it's always deep-fried before being added to a sauce which I think is a bit of a shame. The sauces are always delicious and I assume they add the protein choice to a ready-made sauce to order - if they don't I wonder how their takeaways are almost always ready in just ten minutes.

However they do it, the food tastes great and this place comes highly recommended. With just one bottle of wine shared between us, and including service, it came to just £48. Well worth it.

Cinema popcorn and diet coke

We went to our local Vue cinema to see Pan's Labyryinth this afternoon. It was fantastic (go and see it) but be warned, when you leave the cinema you might feel very tense and a bit screwed up, like someone's stalking the streets out to get you or something. Anyway, in the cinema we shared a large diet coke, and some salted popcorn. We asked for medium but got given large - well, kind of extra large if you ask me, but that's how it came.

BTW - I always have salted, not sweet. Who on earth buys sweet popcorn? I don't think I know anyone who does. Also, why is the bottom third of the popcorn always inedible? At the bottom of the tub it's just the skin of the corn and unburst corns - surely they should fall to the bottom of the big containers? It seems like they allocate a certain amount of inedible popcorn to each person... hmmm.

Salmon fishcakes from The Barnsbury Grocer

This morning we went to visit our local butcher to buy a joint of beef for the weekend - more on that later. Caught in a massive thunderstorm, we ran home to drop the meat off in the fridge. It was incredible, two minutes later the rain had cleared, so we thought we'd go to the Barnsbury Grocer to get some cheese and other bits. We wanted quail's eggs, for a change, but they didn't have any. But we got some interesting looking, oblong white bread, some brie and some hard sheep's cheese, a few feta-stuffed chillis (creamy, with a delayed kick - lovely).

We were going to leave it at that, when we saw some salmon fishcakes in a dish in their fridge. They looked lovely - all fat and filling - so we got two each. When I got round to cooking them (shallow fried in olive oil for about five minutes on each side) I realised one each was easily enough - partly beacuse that's all that would fit in the pan. I simmered some green beans, then drained them in a colander, slipped some cherry tomatoes into the warm pan with a touch of olive oil to warm through, then mixed them with the beans and some wild rocket to made a pretty, warm side-salad. And wow, the fishcakes were fantastic - that sort of fresh, quick, good-quality, ready-made food just can't be beaten.

Late dinner of cold sausages and veg

Last night I went out for a couple of drinks with work people, then met my boyfriend in town. He'd already been home and cooked up some chipolatas (Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Ultimate Pork Chipolatas) which had been defrosting gently in our fridge. He grilled the sausages and stirfried some veg (onions, courgette, mushrooms, a green pepper, garlic) then left my portion in a covered bowl. So I got home about 11.30, a little worse for wear, and had this delicious meal waiting for me. Mmmm, I love cold sausages. I dipped them in some tzatziki and some salsa and added a bit of that to the cold veg for some extra flavour. Great.

Another prawn stirfry

It was about 9.00pm and we'd just got in and were starving. We needed fast, tasty, hot food - and within about 6 minutes we were eating this steaming hot, healthy prawn stirfry. We shared a block of sharwood's fine egg noodles, bubbled in boiling water for 3 minutes, cooked up a sainsbury's stirfry pack with extra broccoli, the end of a yellow pepper and some old and slightly squidgy cherry tomatoes, a pack of wonderful Taste the Difference king prawns, and a sachet of blue dragon chow mein sauce. My boyfriend cooked it all too - just lovely.

Pizza Express, 83-7 Parkway, Camden NW1 7PP

I've just been out in Camden, but as we had an hour or so to kill before the gig we were going to started, my boyfriend and I met at Pizza Express. To review it succinctly, the food was good but the service was terrible, even though the restaurant was almost empty.

I had an American pizza (tomato, mozzarella and pepperoni) with extra chargrilled Italian vegetables. My boyfriend had a Bosco salad (marinated, cooked mushrooms, mini mozzarella balls, spinach, a honey and mustard dressing and dough sticks). I spied a new nibble on their menu, rustic tomatoes, which I thought I'd order to try, but sadly they didn't arrive until after our main course had been served and I'd had a chance to remind the waiter.

The rustic tomatoes had been marinated and oven-baked then left to cool. Served in a little dish with a few cocktail sticks, they were succulent, sweet and actually made rather a nice accompaniment to the pizza and salad, although they would have been equally as good as an appetiser. My pizza was pretty cold, but not cold enough to complain, and it had a good amount of topping as they didn't stint on either the pepperoni or the veg. The waiter had tried to persuade me I'd ordered an American Hot, but fortunately it seems my real pizza was waiting for me as it arrived virtually instantly. I do like Pizza Express pizzas, as (when they're made and cooked well) they have the perfect ratio of topping to base - I can't bear a bare pizza, or one with so much crust your jaws ache just looking at it. The salad across the table from me looked a bit small, so, to put it smugly I was pleased with my choice, which is always satisfying.

I sipped a half bottle of house pinot grigio, which was fine, and my boyfriend drank peroni after peroni, served in an effeminate, tiny, branded glass - very strange. He wanted banoffee pie, which I grudgingly said I'd share. Of course, when it arrived I ate most of it, although it was fairly disappointing - too much tasteless cream, not enough toffee, a thick, cardboard-like base and some old and tired banana. I've made it sound worse than it was, but it tasted more factory than home-made - and it's hardly difficult to make banoffee pie at home, or, I'd imagine, in a Pizza Express kitchen.

We waited so long for the bill and had to ask for it three times, so I wondered whether they wanted us to pay at all. It was £42 for the lot - not bad really considering the booze, but I think the poor service might put me off returning to that particular branch, although the pizza and salad were the usual reliable fare.