This week we tried two different butternut squash and quinoa recipes. The first was a variant on a standard butternut squash risotto:

Ingredients (per person):

• 50g Quinoa, rinsed.
• 1 clove of garlic
• ½ onion.
• ½ courgette.
• 100g butternut squash.
• 1 tbs cream cheese.

Chop and fry the vegetables. Add the quinoa and boiling water or stock. Simmer gently for 15 minutes. When the quinoa is soft, stir in the cream cheese.

The second recipe came from the BBC Good Food website. I followed their recipe fairly closely - the only changes were: I fried the squash for a few minutes before adding the spices, and I used passata instead of tinned tomatoes. Oh and I threw in some cooked mince which I had in the fridge. I left out the coriander - I'm not a big fan because I find it sometimes leaves a bit of a strong aftertaste.

The Coventry Beer Festival started last night but we didn't go until the saturday afternoon session. We were a bit disappointed to find that some of the beers had sold out already, such as the elderflower beer, which we would have been interested in trying.

The range of beers was impressive, especially when we realised that we hadn't seem many of them before. A lot of previous beer festivals have had a lot of beers in common but this year the selection of new beers was impressive.

There was also a good selection of ciders and perries and also fruit wines. We finished off with a glass of the sloe wine and the rosehip wine.

Normally when I make a curry, I usually fry the meat and vegetables and add the curry spices. I then add stock and sometimes tomato puree to make the sauce. Tonight I made a slight variation on the above recipe:

• Dice and fry the vegetables (eg. onion, pepper, courgette, leek, garlic)
• Remove half the veg. Place in a food processor with a splash of stock and mix to a smooth purée.
• Add the meat to the pan and fry for a few minutes.
• Add the curry spices and cook for a few more minutes before stirring in the puréed vegetables andd some tomato purée.
• Simmer until the meat is tender.
• Serve with rice or naan bread.

The flavour and texture of the sauce was much better than our usual curries. It was similar to a Dopiaza recipe where half of the onion is puréed and the other half is chopped and fried with the meat.

We seem to have gone through this week without cooking anything new or original. Today's lunch was something we haven't made before, but that was just a quick pasta meal using a tin of condensed chicken soup as the sauce. We fried some leeks and added those.

A couple of weeks ago we bought 2 bags of going-out-of-date chilli peppers - they were a mixture of red and green chillies. I dried some by cutting them in half and putting them in a foil tray. I put some of the trays in the oven, at gas mark 1, for a couple of hours. The other trays I put on the radiator and left them for a week. The oven-dried chillies had turned brown whereas the radiator-dried ones had kept their colour. I put the dried chillies in a food processor and blitzed them to make chilli flakes.

Today I decided to try to make a chilli sauce from the remaining chillies. I chopped the chillies, sprinkled them with salt and put them in the fridge for a few days. The next step was to put the chillies, 1 clove of garlic, some spices (mustard seed, onion seed) and a splash of vinegar in a food processor and blend to a purée. I simmered the purée for a few minutes before putting it back in the food processor to make a smooth paste. I added equal amounts of water and vinegar until it reached a decent pourable consistency. I've put the sauce in a jar in the fridge to mature for a few weeks before I try it.

We aren't very adventurous with our carbs, mainly sticking to pasta or rice. We don't eat potatoes very often but we sometimes have sweet potatoes. I was looking for a recipe to use bulgar wheat and found a recipe on the BBC Good Food website.

I followed the recipe reasonably closely, reducing the quantities because I was only cooking for 2. I cooked the beans last night, starting with soaking 100g of dried beans in boiling water:

• Simmer the beans for 5 minutes. Drain.
• Cook for 10 minutes in a pressure cooker. Leave to cook.

To make the burgers:

• Finely chop 1 red onion and 1 clove of garlic (or cheat and use a food processor - chop but not purée).
• Fry the garlic and onion until soft.
• Simmer 25g of bulgar wheat for 5-10 minutes until soft. Drain.
• Stir in the spices (1-2 tsp of whatever you fancy) and add the cooked onion and garlic.
• Use the food processor to mash up the cooked beans and add to the mixture.
• If the mixture is a bit soft, add some breadcrumbs.
• Shape into burgers. Fry in a little oil for 5 minutes per side.

Since the burgers were a replacement for both meat and carbs, we served them with some pesto vegetables: onion, leek and courgette, sliced and fried, then mixed with red pesto.

This afternoon we were near Leicester meeting someone to pick up some mice to replace some of ours which had died recently. The new mice have been named Phantom and Bandit. We don't have any photos yet.

After collecting our mice we drove into Leicester and had a wander around the High Cross shopping centre. I think we mainly went because Emma wanted to go to John Lewis. That was ok by me because I'd never been to one so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I guess if you lived near one it'd be worth shopping there occasionally. We did buy some incredibly tasty dessert sauce though (Luxe Chocolate Noir with Tart Cherries).

This is a bit like a luxury version of the tins of baked beans with sausage, but using chicken and prawns instead of sausage.

Ingredients

(serves 2)

• 2 chicken breasts
• 250g (half a carton) of passata.
• 1 carton or tin of haricot beans (approx 300g drained)
• approx 100g king prawns
• seasoning (eg. stock cube, jerk seasoning, fajita seasoning)

Method

Start by bringing the passata to a gentle simmer. Add seasoning - something slightly spicy works very well. Place the chicken breasts in the passata and simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the prawns and beans and cook for a further 5 minutes. Passata sometimes thickens on its own when simmered but if you cooked with the lid on, then it may need thickening with a little cornflour.

We cooked a second new recipe this week, also inspired by the You Magazine.

• Chop and fry 1 onion, 1 leek, 2 cloves of garlic.
• Add a pinch of dried chilli and some mixed herbs.
• Add 250g of passata and simmer for a few minutes.
• Place the cod steaks on top of the sauce. Put the lid on the pan, turn the heat down, and let the fish cook for about to minutes.
• Meanwhile, boil some pasta to serve alongside.

This was adapted from a recipe in the You magazine which came with the Mail on Sunday. The original version called for almond butter and rapeseed oil but we changed those for ingredients we already had in the house.

• 250g Peanut butter.
• 80ml Sunflower Oil.
• 120ml Maple Syrup.
• 1 tsp vanilla extract.
• 200g Spelt flour.
• 60g plain chocolate (around 70% cocoa), broken into chunks.

Mix oil, peanut butter, maple syrup and vanilla extract together. Mix in the flour and chocolate. Form into small disks and bake at gas mark 4 for about 20 minutes.

This weeks new recipe was halloumi, pasta and garlic bread, which we ate on Tuesday.

• Dice and fry some red onion and red pepper.
• Boil pasta.
• Slice and fry the halloumi, just enough to soften it without completely melting it.
• Mix the pasta and vegetables together then stir in a dressing made using equal quantities of lemon juice and balsamic vinegar.

On Wednesday we had stir-fried vegetables and noodles. We cheated slightly and used packets from the supermarket. I sliced and fried a tuna steak from Marks & Spencers. It was possibly the best tuna steak we have bought. It was very fresh and had a much 'cleaner' taste than normal. I guess sometimes it's worth paying slightly more for ingredients.

Tonight's tea was baked cod (again from M&S). I cooked a simple vegetable risotto as accompaniment:

• 1 onion, 1 small leek, ½ courgette, 2 cloves of garlic, chopped and fried.
• 1 cup of risotto rice
• a pinch of mixed herbs
• 2 cups of chicken stock.
• When the risotto was cooked, I stirred in 1 heaped tablespoon of low-fat cream cheese. This is much healthier than adding a knob of butter but it gives the pasta a nice creamy texture.

I finished filtering the Sloe Gin and Sloe Brandy which I started in the autumn. Each drink was made using 750ml of spirit, 200g sugar and 800g of sloes. Last time I made it pricked the sloes. This time I froze them for a couple of weeks to help break down the fruit and split the skins.

The brandy tastes slightly sweeter than the gin. Both drinks are a bit on the sweet side - they may have benefited from slightly longer on the berries, or maybe slightly less sugar.

Each bottle of spirit turned into about 1 litre of sloe liqueur. I tipped all the left over sloes into a 2 litre jug, ready to make another sloe infusion.

A few years ago we made some 'schnapps' using a kit which ferments to 20% alcohol. The kit was reduced because it was out of date. Everything was ok apart from the flavour sachet, which had lost colour and separated out. We bought some peach flavouring from the homebrew stall on the market to make 1 litre of peach schnapps. We added vanilla essence to the other litre to make a vanilla schnapps.

The peach drink was fine. We drank most of it at the Leeds Festival that year, adding it to a mugful of Liptons iced tea, which when heated made a good warming night time drink. The vanilla drink, on the other hand, was disgusting. Over the years I occasionally experimented with mixing it with various drinks, to try to find a combination which was palatable. So far no success.

With just over 1½ kilos of sloes going spare, and no spare gin or vodka in the house, I thought I'd see if a Sloe Schnapps would work. I'll give it a few months in the jug before I give a verdict.

We tried this recipe 2 different ways. The first time used boiled sweet potatoes: 2 sweet potatoes, diced and boiled until a knife goes in with little resistance. Mash, mixing in a few drops of chilli sauce. The sauce we used was Encona Original Hot Pepper Sauce which is a mixture of habañero and scotch bonnet chillies. It gives a sweet/spicy kick to a recipe.

For the second version we roasted the sweet potato instead of boiling.

• cut 2 sweet potatoes into 1 inch chunks and cook for 30 minutes at gas mark 6.
• finely chop 1 red onion and gently fry until it goes soft. Add 1 crushed garlic clove and cook for a few more minutes.
• when the potatoes are soft, mash them. Adding the onion and garlic.
• Mix in a splash of chilli sauce.

Serves 2, and counts as 1 portion of veg.

... but Waitrose thinks they are in England.

On a related note, we have just finished drinking a bottle of Asda Premium Gin. We first tried it in a Gin & Tonic but were disappointed with the flavour. When drunk on its own, it actually tastes really good but as soon as you mix it with something, the flavour completely disappears. Even adding a splash of soda water is enough to destroy the flavour.

The Haleem mix pack came from Adsa, reduced from £1 to 50p. The box contained 2 packets: one grain mix, with a mix of wheat, barley and lentils. The other packet was the spice mix.

The pack looked a bit much for two so we used half the quantities. We followed the recipe quite closely, using chicken and onions but also adding some diced pepper and courgette. The end result was fairly sloppy, a bit like tarka daal, so we treated it like a thick soup.

Our verdict: Very spicy. I think we will use less spice mix when we cook the remaining half.

Every now and again we promise to ourselves that we will try to cook a new recipe each week. We don't always remember to do so this is one of our resolutions for 2010.

Week 1: Falafel with Halloumi

Not a true recipe since the Falafel was bought ready made. We heated the falafel in the oven, sliced and fried the halloumi. We mixed some chilli sauce and mayonnaise together to make a spicy dressing.

To Serve:

Mix the dressing with salad. Fill a pitta with the salad, falafel and halloumi.