Pig-on-pig with brocolli and caponata

Wow, this dish inspired me to get blogging again - it just looked so appetising I couldn't resist photographing it. (And now we've found our usb/camera lead, I can actually upload pictures again which makes blogging seem work it.) Fortunately this meal tasted just as good as it looked - a great Sunday night dinner. I wrapped a pork fillet in streaky bacon which had been layered and spread with grainy french mustard and roasted it for about an hour at somewhere around 180/200 degrees centigrade. We served it with tenderstem broccoli and a sort-of caponata (which I rustled up with aubergine, red onion, capers, tomatoes and some herbs). The caponata was delicious the today for lunch with a wholemeal pitta. Yum. I'm so happy I bought another pork fillet which is sitting in our freezer waiting for a suitable occasion, which for us piggies will probably be next weekend...

This is the life

To come in from a hard day's work to find a chicken roasting in the oven above a mirepoix of vegetables and some fluffy jacket potatoes - and be eating it all within half an hour - is ideal. The beauty was... it was all done for us by my kind mother. We'd gone back to my parents for the weekend and they'd gone out, leaving the food cooking for when my boyfriend, a brother and I arrived.

It was fantastic. We guzzled the moist and tender chicken (with crispy bacon on top), perfect spuds and a flavoursome mix of veg (onion, garlic, celery, parsnips, turnips and carrots, seasoned with black pepper and oregano). We also warmed a tin of sweetcorn for a bit of extra colour. Perfect. We had thought we'd get a takeaway but this was better by far.

A good English fry-up...

can rarely be beaten, except maybe by steak. Perhaps I should do an English breakfast with steak too - that would be cool. This was my fry-up this morning, which we had about lunchtime, so I guess I could call it brunch. As you can see, it has a fried egg, crispy sausages and ubercrispy bacon, grilled tomatoes (drizzled with balsamic vinegar for extra sweetness) and mushrooms and onions. I put a bit of cayenne pepper with the mushrooms and onions and a small clove of garlic for some extra kick. My other half had baked beans too, but I'm not a fan of them so I didn't. Neither of us like fried bread either, or black pudding particularly, so for my taste, all the basics were here. Maybe some potato waffles or chips would have been good too - but a bit unnecessary, I think. I had ketchup on the side, of course - how could you have a fry-up without Heinz ketchup? Impossible.

Scallop and bacon salad - healthy?

This was our scallop and bacon salad. It felt pretty healthy. I love the contrasts of delicate scallops with crispy, salty bacon and salad. Just thinking about it is making me hungry.

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.

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.

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!

Another great breakfast...

A bacon and egg butty. This morning's was cooked to perfection by my boyfriend - we think it's possibly the best thing he's ever cooked me. Toasted wholemeal bread, 3 rashers of unsmoked back bacon, grilled to a crisp, a perfectly fried egg and a swirly squeeze of tomato ketchup in the finished butty. It looked so good I took two photos of it in different stages of its construction. Oohh, with the runny egg about to drip out of the edge of the sandwich... doesn't it look good?

And... this is what you need on a Sunday morning...

A bacon butty. Best with brown or wholemeal toast, crispy back bacon and heinz tomato ketchup. People who like their butty with sliced white bread, floppy bacon and brown sauce are just wrong.