We made two new recipes today. The first was carrot cake. Emma's aunt recently gave us some apples from the tree in her garden. I ate most of them and we decided to bake something with the rest. Emma had read about using apple sauce as a replacement for vegetable oil in recipes. Last night I chopped the apples and simmered in half an inch of water until they had started to break down. I then liquidized the apples to make a smooth sauce.

We usually follow Delia Smith's recipe so I used that as the basis but replaced the oil with an equal volume of the apple sauce. I also reduced the amount of sugar from 6oz to 4oz. Delia's recipe suggests baking for 35--40 minutes but we found that it needed closer to 50 minutes.

This evening I make tuna and chickpea burgers, based on a recipe from the BBC Good Food magazine. I used leeks instead of onions and parsley instead of coriander but apart from that I followed the recipe fairly closely. The cooked burgers had a fairly soft texture but they tasted good.

I was discussing food with one of my colleagues in work and I remembered that we had some chopped spinach in the freezer which we had bought a couple of months ago but haven't used yet. When I got home and mentioned this to Emma, she looked for recipes and found Spiced chickpeas with halloumi. She described the recipe to me then I went into the kitchen to start cooking our version. At this stage I hadn't actually read the original recipe.

I started by slicing and frying one red pepper and one orange pepper. I then added a sliced onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, 3 small chilli peppers, and a level teaspoon of dried ginger. I stirred everything together then left it for a few minutes for the veg to soften.

I sliced the halloumi and left it on a piece of kitchen roll to remove excess water while I drained one can of chick peas and added them to the pan then added a handful of the chopped spinach. I then fried the halloumi in a separate pan.

The meal was rather spicy (Emma actually added the chillies and 3 seemed like a reasonable number - we didn't realise the original only called for 1) and I couldn't really taste the ginger, so next time I might reduce the chilli and increase the ginger. For a less vegetarian version, we could also add some shredded chicken to the chickpeas

Ingredients

• 340g turkey mince

• 1 medium onion

• 2 cloves garlic

• 400g tin of chickpeas, drained

• 1 small egg

• generous teaspoon of marmite

• pinch of dried herbs

• pinch of dried chilli

• 100g diced mozzarella

Method

Finely chop the onion and garlic, and fry until soft. Mash the chick peas (or use a food processor). Mix all the ingredients together, apart from the cheese.

Put half of the mixture in a small loaf tin, then scatter a layer of diced mozzarella, followed by the rest of the mixture. Bake in the middle of the oven, gas mark 6, for about an hour.