A couple of days ago I had a go at making Heston's cheese sauce. The big difference between his recipe and a traditional one is that you don't start with a roux. The sauce base was white wine and chicken stock, instead of milk. The wine was reduced then the stock was added and heated. The cheese was finely grated then mixed with cornflour before being stirred into the wine/stock mixture.

The end result was a very smooth sauce but the stock flavour was a bit too strong. I will experiment further but next time I might use milk and wine or milk and stock.

My next new recipe was a sourdough bread. This was based on the recipe from the Fabulous Baker Brothers TV series. I made the starter last week using spelt flour, and fed it each day with a bit more flour and water.

I made the dough yesterday and left it to 'prove' overnight before baking it this morning on the pizza stone at gas mark 8. For a first attempt I am reasonably happy with the results. Since the starter was fairly young, the 'sourdough' flavour was quite light but it was a good loaf. I have just realised that this is probably the first loaf of bread I have made completely on my own.

Next time I might make the dough a bit stiffer since I think this one was a bit wet and sticky. The bread had a big hollow bit in the middle, like a giant pitta bread, so we sliced it in half horizontally and made a fried egg sandwich for our breakfast.

We both really enjoy roast chicken so when Heston Blumenthal's latest TV series (How to Cook like Heston) covered chicken in last week's episode, we had to see it. He presented a novel way of cooking a chicken which began with an overnight soak in brine, in a similar manner to cooking a ham. The actual cooking was done at a very low temperature (gas mark ¼) instead of the usual gas mark 6.

We didn't plan our chicken roasting in advance and hadn't done the brining, so today I just did my normal roast chicken recipe. The only real similarity with Heston's is that we both remove the string which trusses the chicken so the heat can get to the legs and side of the breast better. I filled the cavity with a few cloves of garlic and a sprig each of thyme and rosemary to give a bit of extra flavour to the meat. I rubbed vegetable oil on the skin and sprinkled some stock granules all over.

We have a roasting tray with a rack inside and a lid, so I put about half a centimetre of water in the bottom of the tray, sat the chicken on the rack, put the lid on top and put the chicken in the middle of the oven at gas mark 6 for an hour. The water will create plenty of steam which will keep the meat moist while it cooks.

After the hour was over, I removed the lid and let the chicken carry on cooking for just under an hour to let the skin go crispy. The end result was a well-cooked tender chicken with thin crispy (and tasty) skin. The juices which collected in the bottom of the tray, along with the herbs and garlic, will be used later on when I make a chicken stock.

The chicken legs and wings (along with some of the crispy skin) are going to be blitzed with some mayonnaise and a sprinkle of salt to make a sandwich spread for tomorrow's lunch.

The year before last I tried to cook (or at least eat) a new different recipe each week. I probably won't be able to do the same thing again this year but I will endeavour to try more new recipes, since last year we weren't as adventurous with our cooking. I do enjoy cooking different foods but we are both going to be very busy this year, which is why I am not going to make any promises.

Last night we cooked a roast chicken so today I made a chicken stock using the bones, along with some herbs, peppercorns, garlic and the outer leaves from some leeks. Tonight I decided to make a risotto using the stock and remaining chicken. Since we had fish in the freezer and saffron on the shelf, this morphed into a paella. Although we do have some paella rice, I decided to try my normal paella recipe but using the small orzo (or risoni) pasta instead. I tried to stay faithful to the risotto method but I added the orzo to hot stock, instead of the other way round, which is more usual for risottos.

Ingredients and Method

• Dice and fry some vegetables, including red pepper, leek, courgette, garlic.
• Put the fish in a pan of boiling water then turn the heat off and let the fish cook in the remaining heat.
• Add a couple of cups of chicken stock to the vegetables and bring to the boil. Stir in a few strands of saffron and add a cup of pasta.
• When the pasta is cooked halfway, add a cup of shredded chicken and a squirt of tomato puree, along with any seasoning.
• When the pasta is cooked, stir in a tablespoon of cream cheese followed by the cooked fish.

To serve, all it needs is a grind of fresh black pepper and a sprinkle of parmesan. I know that isn't the right way to serve a paella but we like it that way.

I still have a few home-grown chillies and tomatoes in the fridge and I felt like making some kind of chilli sauce out of them. A few weeks ago I came across a Chilli Jam recipe from the BBC Good Food website and I thought that might be suitable. I used to occasionally buy a jar of Tracklements chilli jam and the recipe looked like it might give similar results.

I scaled the recipe down a bit for two reasons: I only wanted to make a single jar, and I didn't have enough vinegar or red peppers. The original recipe called for garlic and root ginger, which I didn't have either so I left those out. I hope it doesn't affect the recipe too much.

I started off by weighing 150g of granulated sugar into a pan and added 100ml of white vinegar. I started warming this through gently while I chopped one red pepper and 5 small cayenne peppers and put them in the liquidizer. I peeled 100g of fresh tomatoes, popped those in with the peppers then turned the liquidizer on and blitzed everything to a fine mush. I then added that to the pan.

At this stage, I transferred everything to a small camping stove in the back garden since every time I boil up vinegar in the kitchen, the smell permeates the house and lingers for hours. I gently heated the pan until it started to simmer, then left it for about an hour, stirring occasionally.

When it had started to thicken (and had reached what felt like the consistency of a melted jam) I turned the gas off and let the pan cool slightly while I sterilized a jar by pouring boiling water over it. I emptied the jar, left it to dry for about a minute, then carefully spooned the jam into it.

I haven't tried the jam yet since it is still cooling down so I hope it works out ok.

Last week Nigel gave us a bag of fresh kale. We used half of it in a Kale and Rocket Pesto, which was based on our Kale Pesto recipe. Today I used the rest of the kale to make gnocchi. I took inspiration from a Pumpkin and Rocket Gnocchi recipe in the Covent Garden Soup and Beyond book.

Start by dicing 200g of squash then boil for about 5 minutes until it softens. Take a good sized handful of Kale and cut the stalks from leaves. Drop the kale in the boiling water for a few seconds until it wilts.

Mash the squash and stir in about 70g of plain flour. Chop the kale and stir it in. Some parsley and watercress can also be chopped and added as well. Grate about 60g of cheddar and mix that in too, along with a pinch of salt and a beaten egg.

If the mixture is a bit sloppy, you might need to add a bit more flour. Put dollops of the mixture on a well floured surface and roll into a sausage. Break off bits and roll into balls.

Add the gnocchi to a large pan of simmering water and wait until they float. Serve with a sauce of your choice.

The final picture above has the gnocchi with a tomato and vegetable sauce made by finely chopping some red pepper, a chilli pepper, courgette, leek and garlic and simmering in passata with some added herbs and seasoning for about 15 minutes or so.

The meatloaf recipe is similar to our normal burger recipe but baked in a tin instead of being fried in a pan.

Ingredients

All quantities are approximate.

• 400g or so of turkey mince
• 1 medium leek
• ½ courgette
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 chilli pepper
• plain flour
• 1 egg
• a couple of handfuls of breadcrumbs
• 100g mozzarella or other cheese
• salt and pepper or other seasoning as preferred.

Start by finely chopping the vegetables frying in a little oil until they soften. Stir in a couple of tablespoons of flour then leave to cool before mixing the vegetables with the mince.

Add the seasoning, breadcrumbs and egg and mix well. Put half of the mix into a loaf tin then layer half of the cheese. Cover with the remaining mix. Cover with foil and bake for about 1 hour at gas mark 6. Remove the foil and cover with the remaining cheese before returning to the oven for about 10 minutes to melt the cheese.

Our fridge is starting to fill up with tomatoes from the garden, I seem to be harvesting them much faster than I can eat them. Emma suggested making a tomato soup and pointed me towards the Red Onion & Roasted Cherry Tomato Soup recipe in the Covent Garden Soup & Beyond book.

I have had to slightly adapt the recipe, leaving out the onions and using a tube of pureéd basil instead of fresh basil leaves, as well as roughly halving the ingredients to make it serve 2.

Place the following in a roasting pan and put in the oven at gas mark 5 for about 50 minutes, until the tomato skins start to brown slightly.

• 1.5lb tomatoes from the garden
• Sprinkle of salt
• 2 cloves of garlic
• a generous drizzle of olive oil.

Leave the tomatoes to cool for a few minutes then liquidize and pour into a pan. Add 1tsp of balsamic vinegar and 1 heaped tsp of dark brown sugar. Bring to a simmer, add the basil and some water to make it a decent soupy consistency.

Our tomatoes can be a bit bland and watery so I didn't add the full 150ml of water (I actually used slightly more than the 1.5lb of tomatoes since I picked more this morning and I added any where the skins had split). I made the soup in advance and let it stand for a few hours to let the flavours mix together properly.

The meatballs were our usual recipe (turkey mince, breadcrumbs, minced onion, seasoning). The pasta sauce contained leeks, garlic, passata and cream cheese.

The recipe came from the Joy the Baker website.

We followed the recipe exactly as written but we had ordinary bakers yeast instead of 'active dried yeast' so ours took a little longer to rise.

We are a fan of puff pastry but we don't eat it very often. Every now and then we get some sausage rolls or a puff pastry pie but recently we keep seeing ready made puff pastry on offer in the supermarkets.

Tonights tea was a crayfish tart with a 'garden herb' salsa verde.

To make the sauce:

• Gently fry a couple of cloves of garlic in olive oil for a couple of minutes then add to the liquidizer.
• Add a mixture of herbs, including water cress, rocket, oregano, mint and parsley. I had some 'fat hen' in the garden so I sautéed that in oil until it had wilted before adding it.
• Drain and add a tablespoon of capers and a couple of anchovies.
• Liquidize everything, adding a splash of oil to make a sauce.

Spread the sauce on the pastry then top with roast red peppers, crayfish and feta cheese. Cook for 20-25 minutes at gas mark 6 then serve with a rocket and feta salad.

We have some Fat Hen growing in the garden, courtesy of the 'Edible Leaves, Roots and Shoots' seed pack which came from Garden Organic at Ryton. Most of the plants in the pack are mainly considered weeds so I had sprinkled the seeds in a potato planter in an attempt to stop the plants from spreading too far in the garden. The most prominent leaves at the moment look like they could be Fat Hen so I read through my copy of the River Cottage 'Hedgerow' book by John Wright to see what I could do with it.

The most promising suggestion was to deep fry it and make a type of crispy seaweed. I washed and shredded the leaves then tried a couple of different versions. First I simply fried the leaves in some hot olive oil. The texture was very similar to crispy seaweed and olive-oil flavour gave it a nice edge. Restaurant seaweed often has a sweet & salty flavour so the 2nd attempt was marinated in soy sauce for a few minute before being fried. It was then sprinkled with a mixture of salt and brown sugar. This was much closer to 'real' seaweed. Since we have a lot of fat hen in the garden, it's good to know that we have a good recipe for it, and after tonight's tea we have 2 recipes.

We tried a couple of new recipes at the weekend. On friday we did rustic roast cod. It was ok but took much longer to cook than the recipe suggested, possibly because our roasting tray completely fills our tiny oven and the heat doesn't get around it properly. Last nights recipe was completely new: Baked chicory with chicken. It's not very often that we try a new ingredient and neither of us had cooked with chicory before. We didn't have any dijon mustard but we had wasabi paste (which is similar...) and some yellow mustard seeds, so they went in instead. We think it worked well, we could probably make the recipe again using different veg depending on what we had in the house.

It is the monthly cake day in work tomorrow. Normally it is held on the last friday of the month but it's been moved to coincide with Comic Relief day and the cakes are going to be sold for charity.

Since I like lemon drizzle cake I decided to have a go at making an Orange Drizzle Cake, based on the recipe in the Daily Mail. I followed the recipe fairly closely and only made a couple of small changes: I used granulated sugar instead of the caster and icing sugar and I reduced the amount of sugar used in the syrup because my oranges weren't very juicy.

I made one full-sized cake for tomorrow and two small 'samplers' in bun cases for us to try tonight. The cake turned out well - definitely a recipe I'd recommend.

The rice cake was made using a mixture of wild and long grain rice, with a beaten egg, grated cheese and chopped chilli added. I fried the rice cake on one side for a few minutes until it was firm enough to slide onto a baking tray to finish cooking in the oven. The hot-smoked trout was heated through in the oven while the courgettes and leek slices were fried in a little butter.

The soup was made using some spare roast butternut squash from the freezer. The rest of the ingredients were:

• 2 small onions, 1 leek, 2 cloves of garlic. Chopped and fried until softened.
• 1 tub of chicken stock.
• 1 tbs chopped parsley
• 1 medium sized cooked potato
• A pinch of salt.
• 1 diced carrot.

Everything was simmered for about an hour then left to cool before being liquidized. There was enough for 2 days. Day 1 was a mug of the soup with diced chicken added. For day 2 I cooked some 'soup mix' which contained pasta, pulses and grains. This made the soup very thick, almost like drinking a stew.