The pizza base was made using a naan bread recipe:

• Make a yeast starter using 1 tsp of yeast, 1 tsp of sugar and a couple of tablespoons of warm water. Leave for a few minutes for the yeast to start working.
• Add 200g of flour, 1 tsp of black onion seeds, 1tsp of chilli flakes 1/2 tsp of baking powder and a pinch of salt.
• Add a couple of tablespoons each of milk and yoghurt and mix together to make a dough. Knead for a few minutes.

The pizza sauce was a mixture of tomato purée and curry paste.

The first pizza was a chicken curry, topped with onion, pepper, chillies and a slightly sweet cheese with bits of ginger in it.

The second pizza had prawns, the same vegetables, and a garlic and herb cheese.

We saw the naan breads being made on the Saturday Kitchen on TV and it looked so easy we decided to give it a go. We followed the recipe from the BBC web site but needed to add a few extra tablespoons of water to get the dough to come together properly. We also found that gas mark 1 was a bit low so turned the oven up to 2 and gave them a few more minutes.

The naan bread tasted like 'proper' bought ones. The black onion seeds are vitally important and give the bread most of its familiar flavour.

We served the naan breads with our chicken korma, and washed it down with a glass of Indian wine. The wine was an Indage 'The Grey Count' chenin blanc and went rather well with the curry. The wine was ok on its own but the spiciness of the curry seemed to bring out more flavour if you take a sip immediately after a mouthful of curry.

Sign outside The Rocket pub, near Coventry railway station.

In the second series of the BBC TV series 'Grow your own drugs', James Wong gave a recipe for a herbal moth repelling mixture. We haven't had a problem with moth-eaten clothes but we do sometimes get a lot of tiny moths in the house.

The recipe calls for sage, rosemary and wormwood. We already had sage and rosemary in the garden so I bought some wormwood seeds. It took a few months for the plants to be big enough to pick the leaves but a few weeks ago I picked some of each herb and spread them out to dry.

I put some of the dried herbs in a small bowl in the living room and after a few days it seemed to be working - there are definitely fewer moths in the room. I have since read that moths don't like cloves so I added a few cloves to the bowl first.

This morning I made up some of the moth repelling sachets, adding a couple of cloves to each. I didn't have any muslin so I cut an old tea towel into squares and used that instead. The material was a bit too thick so they were a bit fiddly to make. I put the sachets in the wardrobes and on the bedroom shelf so I will see if they make a difference.

The pasta bake makes enough for 4 servings. We ate half on wednesday and put the rest in the fridge. We finished it off tonight and like a lot of such foods, the flavours seem to improve after a few days.

Method

• Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4.

• Dice and fry some vegetables: 2 medium onions, 1 small courgette, 1 pepper, a couple of cloves of garlic.

• Cook 250g of pasta.

• Drain one tin of tuna.

• Make a cheese sauce (approximately 400-500ml or so). We made a roux using 40g of butter and 40g of flour. We added 100g of grated cheese, 1 tablespoon of wasabi paste, and a sprinkling of chilli flakes.

• To assemble, mix the pasta and vegetables in a pyrex tray. Stir in a couple of tablespoons of tomato puree and the tin of tuna.

• Stir in the cheese sauce and top with a mixture of grated cheese and seeds and/or breadcrumbs. We used some ground-up Wasabi Peas (from Marks & Spencers) to give a crunchy texture and extra wasabi flavour.

• Cover the tray with foil and bake for 40 minutes, removing the foil 10 minutes before the end to crisp off the toppings.

Clockwise from top left: 1) Pasta and vegetables in the pyrex dish. 2) Tuna and tomato puree mixed in. 3) Ready for the oven. 4) Close up of the crispy topping.

I made the Elderflower Delight on thursday evening and put it in the fridge overnight to set. When I checked on friday morning, it hadn't gone properly firm but was more like a very thick syrup.

On friday evening I scraped it back into a saucepan and warmed it up again, adding another sachet of gelatine (the gelatine was a bit out of date so might have lost some of its effectiveness). This time it set properly - still slightly soft but firm enough to cut into cubes.

I mixed equal weights of icing sugar and cornflour together and coated the cubes in it to stop them from sticking together.

For a first attempt, the elderflower delight was quite good. It is quite sweet, so I could probably only eat a few cubes at once, but the elderflower flavour was just about right.

I spotted this recipe in the River Cottage Hedgerow book. We had all the ingredients in the kitchen (sugar, cornflour, elderflowers, lemon juice, gelatine) and it seemed straightforward enough to make.

The only changes I made were to use 300ml of elderflower extract (which I had made for the elderflower wine and cider) and to use powdered gelatine instead of leaf gelatine.

I don't think I was prepared for the amount of stirring involved but eventually it thickened so I poured it into a baking tray to cool and set.

I ordered this book last week and it arrived this morning. I had a quick flick through it initially and one of the first things I noticed was that one of the plants which grows along the path through the woods looks a lot like Horseradish.

I had a more thorough read through at lunchtime to confirm the identity of a few other plants which I have seen locally. Each plant in the book has a page or two describing its appearance, typical location, any associated folklore, and usually a recipe suggestion.

I was never brought up to recognise wild plants - I knew about sloes and blackberries but that was about it. I have since encountered elderberries, plums and rowan berries but that's about it. The book is going to be invaluable in helping me learn a bit more about the various plants growing in the countryside, and to spot which ones are worth eating. There is also a section on poisonous plants and how to recognise them when they might be confused with other edible plants.

In addition to the brief recipe suggestions associated with each entry, there is also a chapter of recipes at the back of the book which makes use of many of the wild ingredients.

I'm very new to the foraging/wild food idea but the book is an excellent introduction. It will certainly accompany me whenever I'm out in the countryside.

This afternoon we had a go at assembling the 'Nanoblock' Koala which Emma bought in Japan. It was very small and fiddly and we both felt relieved when we finally finished it.

Out freezer needs defrosting so we are trying to empty it by avoiding buying frozen food, and eating what's already in there. Unfortunately some of the food has been there rather a long time. For 3 days this week, I found myself some fairly out of date things.

• Tuesday: The first out of date food of the week actually came from the fridge. We recently bought some falafel but the pack had got pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten about. It was a week past its sell-by but it smelt ok. I cooked it anyway and it tasted fine.

• Wednesday: We have had a bag of salmon steaks in the freezer for ages and they had started to look a bit 'freezer burnt'. I decided to make a salmon paella so I put the steaks in a pan of cold water and slowly brought them to a simmer. After leaving them to cool, I removed the skin and cut off the dry or discoloured bits. The texture wasn't great - it was a bit chewy compared to decent fresh salmon.

• Thursday: When I took the pack of bean burgers out of the freezer, I thought it felt a bit light. I didn't bother checking the weight but I took 2 out and put them in the oven. After the recommended cooking time, I took them out and put them on a plate. They had gone all dry and crunchy and were really awful. They were only 3 months out of date. There were still 2 more in the pack so I tried to rescue them by pouring a couple of spoons of stock over them, wrapping them in foil and cooking them in the oven. They were a bit better but I still had to cut away some crunchy bits.

Friday: Got home from work fairly late. Couldn't be bothered cooking. Bought take-away instead.

We have often thought that baby roborovski hamsters look a bit like monkey nuts.

One of these things is not like the others...

Last year I planted some 'Mignonette' alpine strawberries. We only got a handful of strawberries per week last year but this year we are getting many more. Most of the time we eat the fruit on its own, with melon, or with ice cream. This week I decided to keep the strawberries in the fridge until I had enough to cook something new.

Ingredients

• 250g puff pastry, rolled out.
• 2 cups of strawberries.
• ¼ cup of light brown sugar.
• 3 tablespoons of cornflour.

Method

Mix the strawberries, sugar and cornflour together. Place in the middle of the pastry. Brush the edges with milk, and roll up, crimping the ends together. Brush the outside with milk then bake in the oven, gas mark 7, for 20 minutes.

The strudel was slightly over-cooked, thanks to me failing to start the kitchen timer properly, but otherwise it was good.

This weeks recipe came from the Mail on Sunday. When we first read it, it sounded unusual and interesting. Since we recently tried Chocolate and Beetroot Cake, we thought another strange vegetable cake was worth trying.

The cake came out quite moist and lightly spiced. We made a few slight changes, using allspice instead of ground cloves, and doubling the quantity of cinnamon. You couldn't tell it was tomato soup based unless you tasted carefully and tried to discern the flavour. If you didn't know, I don't think it would be obvious.

Earlier in the year I bought some Red Sunflower seeds from a shop called Premier Seeds Direct, off Ebay.

I planted some, along with some sunflower seeds picked from the hamster food. Both types of sunflower sprouted, but the red sunflowers grew the fastest and so far are the only ones to flower.

Both the above flowers were grown from the 'red' seeds. Some of the plants have multiple flowers, such as the one on the left where several smaller flowerheads are visible.

Some photos from this year's Festival of History.

Click on the thumbnail to view the image