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.