Late last year I had a go at making turkey pies using a hot water pastry. This week I had a go at a more typical pie, using a shortcrust pastry.

The filling was made by mixing cooked diced meat with stuffing - one pie used chicken, the other had pork and bacon. The pie shown here was chicken (with a 'C' on the lid). The pork and bacon pies had a 'P' on the lid so I could tell them apart after cooking.

The chicken pie was probably the better of the two. The stuffing helped hold the filling together and stopped the chicken from drying out. The meat in the pork and stuffing pie was slightly over-cooked and had gone a bit chewy but the pie was still ok.

Earlier this week I dug up a load of dandelion roots so I cleaned them and dried them so I could have a go at dandelion coffee. I dug out my copy of Richard Mabey's Food for Free and it was very vague so I looked up a few websites for more info.

In the end I roasted the roots at gas mark 6 until they were dry and crumbly (but they hadn't gone very dark), ground them up in a pestle and mortar and ended up with only 1 tablespoon of bits.

I put the bits in a jug, poured over a cup of boiling water and left it a few minutes before straining into a cup. I think I probably needed more roots because the drink was a bit weak but most noticeably it didn't resemble anything coffee-like at all (I am reminded of Arthur Dent and his cup of something which was "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea").

The flavour was like a cross between unsalted potato crisps and something a bit like parsnips. I'm not sure whether to try again the next time I dig up some roots but my first attempt wasn't great. At least it was better than the cornsilk tea or the hyssop tea, which were my previous attempts at drinks from the garden.

A few weeks ago I decided to branch out from experimenting with different breads and try making some pies and quiches. My first attempt was a Leek, Bacon and Sweet Potato Quiche (using up spare/leftover food from the fridge and freezer).

The pastry recipe came from the BBC website. I had a look through some of the many recipe books at home and was surprised to find that there wasn't a single quiche recipe in any of them. I found a few recipes online and used them for inspiration. I cooked the leek and bacon, then diced the sweet potato and boiled it in water. The filling was some milk, egg, grated cheese and a little salt and pepper, beaten together then mixed with the rest of the filling.

The pastry was baked blind first then the filling was poured in and the quiche was put back in the oven.

I still have several tubs of mashed banana in the freezer, from when I bought a bag of over-ripe and/or bruised bananas for 8p a couple of months ago. The sourdough baking booklet has a recipe for banana bread which is made using a sourdough batter with added baking soda for extra rising. I decided to use half the amount of sugar they suggested because I was adding dried fruit instead of chopped nuts and I didn't want the bread to be too sweet.

The resulting loaf was good, very similar to the River Cottage recipe I used previously.

We regularly buy a ginger and coriander marinated chicken from the supermarket but usually did it with fried rice and had kind of run out ideas for it. I did a bit of googling for recipe ideas and thought I'd have a go at Ginger Peanut Chicken Pasta. I did my usual thing of just reading through the ingredients then making up my own version.

I fried an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, added 1/4 tsp ground ginger and 1 tsp chilli flakes and a splash of lemon juice and soy sauce. I then mixed 1/2 cup of milk with a heaped tablespoon of peanut butter and a teaspoon of cornflour and stirred it to get it as smooth as possible. Meanwhile I cooked the chicken in the oven and boiled a pan of spaghetti. When the chicken was cooked I added the peanut/milk mixture to pan and heated until it had thickened. It worked out quite well.

This week's new recipe is yet another from the River Cottage Bread book. I followed their recipe as closely as possible. When it came to making the cross on top, I mixed the flour and water using the given quantities but it was far too runny and impossible to use in the piping bag without it all immediately running out of the nozzle. I mixed in some extra flour to make it a bit thicker and it worker better.

The hot cross buns were very good when eaten fresh. When they were a couple of days old, they had started to go a bit hard and dry and needed to be toasted, but they proved to be very good that way, with a bit of butter melted into them.

A couple of quick recipes this week, both coming from the River Cottage books (which I seem to be using rather a lot these days). One was more successful than the other. The first is soda bread. This is incredibly quick and easy to make. I didn't have buttermilk but used watered down full fat milk instead. The great thing about soda bread is that you only knead it for long enough to make sure it is fully mixed together.

The resulting bread tasted as good as a bought bread and we ate it within about an hour of starting it, with a bit of butter.

The second recipe was scottish oatcakes. Unlike the staffordshire oatcake, which is more like a pancake, these are hard dry biscuits. I made them using a mixture of plain flour, porridge oats and pinhead oatmeal. I didn't follow the recipe exactly and the biscuits came out a bit crumbly so I might try again but follow the original recipe a bit more closely.

This week's recipe was inspired by an episode of Man v. Food we watched last week. They were in Chicago and ate a traditional deep pan pizza. We decided to try one as part of our traditional weekly pizza night.

We started off with our normal pizza base recipe, using ¾ bread flour and ¼ yellow cornmeal. The dough was made in the usual manner and allowed to at least double in size. I then flattened it out, spread it with butter then folded it over a few times. I put the base in a 9 inch cake tin and pressed it into the edges and about an inch up the side.

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The second recipe this week is based on one from the BBC Good Food website. Their recipe used lamb meatballs but I already had some homemade turkey meatballs, cooked and in the fridge from yesterday.

Since the meatballs were already made, the meal was incredibly quick to prepare. I chopped one clove of garlic an fried it in a little oil, then added a tin of tomatoes. I added the spices (1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp cinnamon, ½ tsp ginger, a pinch of salt, a pinch of chilli flakes) and left the sauce to simmer while the cous-cous cooked in a pan of hot chicken stock.

The meal left the kitchen smelling very aromatic and spicey even though the sauce was quite lightly spiced.

There are going to be 2 new recipes this week. The first is a sourdough loaf, made following a recipe in the River Cottage 'Bread' handbook. As usual with sourdough breads, this one took 2 days to make.

Last night I made the sponge by mixing sourdough starter with water (300ml) and flour, (250g) stirring together and leaving overnight to ferment.

This morning I added a teaspoon of salt, about a tablespoon of olive oil and the rest of the flour (300g) and mixed everything together, kneading for about 10 minutes. This was quite tricky to do because the dough was very sticky but the mix does need to be quite wet for this recipe.

The next 4 hours were repeated cycles of knocking back and reshaping the dough every hour which left it very soft and elastic. After that I shaped it into 2 loaves and left them to rise. I baked the loaves on our pizza stone, starting off at gas mark 9 then turning down to gas mark 3 after 10 minutes.

The resulting bread has a firm crust with a soft inside with lots of air bubbles. The bread had a slightly crumpet-like texture flavour, which I liked.

This weeks recipe was based on the chicken and ratatouille pie from three years ago, when I last tried to cook a new recipe every week.

The pastry was made exactly as I described but for some reason it came out fairly dry and crumbly so we put discs of it on top, like a cobbler, instead of a single sheet. It still tasted good though.

To make the filling, I finely diced one onion and a clove of garlic and fried them in butter until soft. I warmed about 200ml of milk with a pinch of nutmeg, some freshly ground pepper and a clove. I strained the milk through a sieve into the pan with the onions. I added the diced turkey and a couple of tablespoons of cream cheese. The asparagus was placed in the bottom of a pyrex dish, the turkey in white sauce was poured over the top. Finally the discs of pastry were put on top.

The pie was cooked at gas mark 5 for around 45-50 minutes until the sauce was bubbling and the topping was crispy.

After a couple of weeks of cakes, it's time to return to savoury main courses, although there is still a sweet aspect to tonights recipe. We are not normally fans of meat with fruit, I have never liked the combinations of pork with apple or gammon with pineapple. The sweet fruit would always feel unbalanced next to plain meat.

A couple of years ago I had a Lamb Tagine which contained apricots and the spiciness of the sauce worked well with the fruit. I had actually eaten half of the meal before I noticed that there were pieces of fruit in it. Tonight I attempted to emulate this meal, using turkey instead of lamb. The recipe here is based on several sources, I mixed and matched ingredients to fit what we had in the kitchen. Most of the original recipes included honey but I omitted that since the fruit made the sauce sweet enough for us.

I started off with 500g of turkey which I diced and fried in olive oil. When it was cooked, I removed the turkey from the pan and added three small onions and three cloves of garlic (all finely sliced). After cooking the onions for a few minutes, I added the dry spices (one teaspoon each of ground ginger and cinnamon, half a teaspoon each of cumin and turmeric).

I added a cupful of chicken stock and a generous pinch of saffron and gave the pan a stir, before adding about a tablespoon of lemon juice. I also added a couple of tablespoons of passata.

After a few minutes of simmering I added the apricot halves and a small handful of sultanas. The tagine was served on a bed of cous cous with some toasted flaked almonds sprinkled on top.

As I said earlier, we found it sweet enough without needing the honey. The meal was quick and easy to make, especially because cous cous cooks much faster than rice. We might omit the apricots next time.

We went to a birthday party today and took along a cake. This one can be considered a sequel to the Spotty Dinosaur cake from last week. The bottom tier was the spotty madeira cake. The middle tier was a sponge with lemon curd filling.

The top tier was two small chocolate sponge cakes with chocolate buttercream, Cadbury's Finger biscuits and Fudge Fingers along the edge, with a ganache topping and icing pigs lying in the 'mud'.

I can't take any of the credit for this cake. Emma made it all, including the decorations.

The cake was based on a madeira cake recipe. The coloured cake balls were made first, adding food colouring and baking them in a round mould designed for making 'cake pops'. The cake was assembled by pouring a layer of cake batter in the bottom of a cake tin, adding the cake balls then pouring the rest of the batter on top.

The 6 cheeses were:

• Cream cheese mixed with basil puree, spread on the base
• Grated mature cheddar
• Grated pecorino
• Grated applewood smoked cheese
• Sliced goats cheese
• Shredded mozzarella