Well, courtesy of Thomasina Miers excellent book, Mexican Food Made Simple actually.

I made guacamole, using her recipe, and red rice, which I served with sliced griddled rare rump steak and her pickled pink onions.

The onions are so simple.

You soak some thinly-sliced red onions in boiling water for 10 minutes, drain them and season them with salt and pepper and then marinate them in orange and lime juice and finely chopped habanero chill for a few hours.

The red rice recipe in her book uses Basmati rice, but I prefer ordinary easy cook long grain rice.

The red colour comes from tomatoes and tomato purée and the dish also contains peas and carrots. It is delicious and the colour makes a lovely contrast to the pale green guacamole.

You can make the rice ahead of time, because the recipe calls for it to be kept hot in the oven.

This was something of an experiment.

I caramelised peeled, cored and sliced Egremont Russets in muscovado sugar and butter in an oven-proof dish and then left them to cool.

I made a topping from two eggs, a 250 ml tub of cream, some demerara sugar, vanilla extract and fresh breadcrumbs, all whisked together and poured over the top.

This was then baked in the oven until the top was golden and somewhat souffléed (it later sank again!).

I served the pudding at room temperature, with vanilla ice cream and some of the caramelised juices drizzled over the top.

Altogether a success!

Silverside is a joint that you see in butchers and occasionally in supermarkets, and I am sure that a lot of people buy it as a roasting joint.

However, it doesn’t roast well, the meat is lean muscle from the top of the hind leg and has done a lot of work during the animal’s life. Roasted silverside is basically too tough and is a waste of a nice piece of meat.

To get the best from silverside it needs liquid and long, slow cooking. Therefore it is great as boiled beef, perhaps in a pot au feu, or as a pot roast.

It has plenty of flavour and, cooked properly produces good results for Sunday lunch or dinner, with enough meat left for use in something like a boeuf miroton (of which more in a day or two).

I pot roasted a nice joint of silverside with carrots, leeks, turnips and parsnips, seasoned with salt, pepper and thyme in some beef stock and brandy for around three and a half hours at Gas Mark 6 (180C).

The meat was left to rest and the vegetables kept warm while I made a gravy with the liquid in the casserole, thickened with beurre manié.

I served the nicely sliced tender silverside with whole-grain mustard and olive oil mash, Yorkshire puddings and with the vegetables from the casserole as well.

As the oven was on for the beef, I also cooked some small beetroots in a sealed foil parcel with balsamic vinegar, garlic and thyme, and these were nice on the side, to provide a piquant accompaniment to the beef.

There was also some proper English mustard too, beef needs mustard.

To drink we had a bottle of Château David 2010 AOC Bordeaux Supérieur, from Sainsbury’s. This was reviewed in The Guardian a while ago and I decided to give it a try.

I wasn’t disappointed. It isn’t a great wine but it is a nice example of the kind of easy-drinking claret that you can buy in the Bordeaux region but which don’t always make it to the UK. It has a decent structure and lovely blackcurrant fruit. Definitely a wine to come back to again.

What I wanted was a dish that would work as a light evening meal, the French original usually being served as a starter or for lunch, I think.

I used Egremont Russet apples, sautéed in butter, the pan deglazed with cider vinegar and then flambéed with Calvados and a nice piece of black pudding, which was cut into bite-sized pieces and sautéed in bacon fat with a little knob of butter.

The salad was made with Little Gem lettuce, cucumber and small tomatoes, with a cider vinegar and olive oil dressing, finished off with some crisp unsmoked bacon lardons.

To add some bulk to the dish, I served it with a toasted slice of sourdough bread.

Without the apples on the place, I think that you could serve a poached egg with the salad. The yolk would be lovely oozing over the fresh leaves and sharp dressing.

And once again, it is my favourite roast chicken.

This is a pretty traditional take on the Sunday roast; chicken seasoned with salt and pepper and roasted with thyme, potatoes roasted in duck fat, roast parsnips and a bed of Savoy cabbage, cooked with some smoked bacon lardons and thinly sliced carrots, all finished off with gravy made with the roasting pan juices and stock.

It isn’t fancy cooking but it is comfort food par excellence.

You can drink anything you want with a classic roast chicken; red wine, white wine, beer, cider or nothing. Personally, I like a good red, ideally one with some age to it and today we had a bottle of 2008 St Nicolas de Bourgueil. This was a Vieilles Vignes wine from Domaine Guy Hersard, a producer whose vines are grown predominantly on sandy, gravelly soil. As with all wines from this appellation, the grapes are 100% Cabernet Franc.

For pudding, I made another classic, a bread and butter pudding.

This is a great pudding. Often I make this with brioche but today I used the more traditional white bread.

First you soak some sultanas in brandy (or cold tea).

You make little triangular buttered sandwiches which you have sprinkled with Demerara sugar and place them in an oven dish. Then you scatter over the brandy-soaked sultanas.

You cover this in a custard base, made by whisking cream, milk, two eggs and two egg yolks, flavoured with vanilla extract, to which you add the soaking brandy (if you have used cold tea, throw it away).

Finally, grate some fresh nutmeg over the top and bake this until the custard is lightly set and the bits if bread that protrude are golden and crisp. I like my custard almost liquid here, I don’t really want it fully set. If you do prefer it firmer, use four whole eggs.

You don’t really need anything else with a bread and butter pudding, but a dollop of clotted cream is a lovely indulgence.

Roast lamb actually, the fillet end of a leg, with the bone removed and stuffed with a simple stuffing of bread soaked in milk, parsley and thyme and chopped anchovies.

Lamb and anchovies are a classic combination and people who worry about anchovies shouldn’t worry, because they just add a savouriness to the meat rather than a full-on fishy hit.

I did a non-traditional accompaniment of Yorkshire pudding, because they are great with any roast and there was gravy made from the roasting pan juices, some stock and flour.

I didn’t want classic English roast potatoes but roast new potatoes are lovely so they were a great alternative.

The vegetables were steamed cabbage and some carrots.

All in all, a nice satisfying Sunday roast.

There is always a bit of a problem with constantly trying to cook different things, new recipes or alternative cuisines and that problem is that I find I am often doing new dishes just to avoid things that I like to eat, like a good rare steak

I don’t eat steak that often though, probably less that once a month, but when I do eat steak, I know what I want – and I want simple.

It needs to be good meat though, you really need to get your steak from a butcher you trust and I am lucky that I have Murray’s of Gloucester Rd within 10 minutes walk.

This sirloin was lovely and tender, the meat a darker colour than the standard supermarket steak and really only needed to be rubbed with olive oil and some black pepper and then griddled for about two minutes on each side and then left to rest for five minutes, while I finished off the already blanched cubes of potato.

The tomato salad was simplicity itself; some yellow and red baby plum tomatoes roughly chopped and mixed into some olive oil, fresh thyme leaves, sherry vinegar and salt and pepper.

This is simplicity itself.

Chocolate mousse is one of the easiest desserts to make.

For the basic recipe, you need four large eggs, which you separate and a standard 100g bar of chocolate.

You beat the whites until stiff, melt the chocolate in a mixing bowl over a pan of hot water and then you remove the bowl and stir in the egg yolks, mixing so that they amalgamate completely. Then you fold in the whites until everything is smooth, pour into serving dishes and chill in the fridge until set.

The variations here that make it different are that the chocolate used was Lindt Excellence Chilli Chocolate and that I added two tablespoonfuls of Kahlua to the chocolate as it was melting.

I think that this was a delicious twist to a standard chocolate mousse and I am sure that there are other variations that would work equally well. the level of chilli was so small that you got a background warmth and a depth of flavour, rather than a full-on heat kick. Very enjoyable overall.

To go with this we had a glass of Chilean 2010 Late Harvest Moscatel from Vistamar. This was another wine from Majestic and worked well with the mousse, it is never easy to pair chocolate with wine, it is always something of a compromise but this worked well. It has a balancing acidity to the rich apricot fruit flavour and is rich and concentrated.

It was Chinese New Year on Monday 23rd and we are now in the Year of the Dragon. We were watching the BBC1 TV programme Saturday Kitchen yesterday and Ken Hom was on, cooking a roast pork and egg-fried rice dish to celebrate the new year.

We love roast pork, especially with lots of lovely crackling so Sunday dinner was decided for us.

I had to modify Ken’s dish a bit because I was late getting to the butcher and all of the belly pork had sold out, so I bought a piece of boned and rolled loin and opened it out. The skin side had already been scored by the butcher, which I wouldn’t have bothered with if I’d had a piece of belly, but I scalded the skin with boiling water and wiped it dry just as I would have if it had been belly pork.

The meat side was rubbed with five-spice powder, caster sugar and crushed Sichuan peppercorns and the joint was left out on a rack so that the skin would stay dry.

It was roasted in a hot oven, on the rack in a dish of water, for about an hour and a half, less time than for belly, but loin lacks the fat to keep the meat moist.

The egg-fried rice was made with Thai fragrant rice that had been cooked earlier and allowed to cool on a tray. First, the rice was fried in hot sunflower oil and then two large eggs, beaten with pepper, salt and sesame oil were added and stirred into the rice. Before serving, the rice was garnished with chopped spring onions, which were stirred into the rice.

In addition to the pork and rice, I served some steamed pak choi, which was dressed with a simple sauce made from some oyster sauce, sesame oil and sweet chilli sauce.

To go with this, we had a nice bottle of red Burgundy from the Cave des Vignerons de Buxy, the 2007 AOC Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise Rouge Château du Cray, which is really drinking well now. It has a lot of good Pinot Noir character and soft red berry fruitiness and the tannins are really soft and integrated.

On Friday we had already decided that Saturday night would be kofte night and it made me smile this morning to see that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, writing in The Guardian magazine, had a merguez-style kofte recipe. Well, I like merguez too, so this seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

I decided to use his recipe for tonight’s meal, because it looked good, but I didn’t bother with leaving the meat mixture overnight (well, I didn’t actually have the time) and I mixed the sesame seeds into the mixture rather than coating the koftes, because I used my griddle to cook them instead of a frying pan. Also, I didn’t add any poppy seeds. Apart from that, it was pretty much as described in the link, except I bought both minced beef and minced lamb from the butcher and they were sufficiently fatty.

To go with them, I made a red and white cabbage, red onion and grated carrot salad, with a lemon juice and olive oil dressing, some thinly sliced Turkish green peppers dressed with olive oil, salt and cider vinegar, cacik, hummous, a splash of hot chilli sauce from a bottle (Encona is great here) and pitta bread.

They were pretty tasty, but I think that next time I will put the minced meats in a processor to make the mixture a bit more close-textured. I’ll definitely use this recipe again though.

To drink we had a bottle of Hochar Père et Fils 2005, from Majestic, which is the second wine of the famous Lebanese winery, Chateau Musar. This was a fabulous rich wine, made from classic southern French grape varieties and with real depth and fruit. It is lighter than the main wine from the estate but is still a wonderful, mouth-filling red wine that works brilliantly with Middle Eastern and North African flavours.