The recipes this week came about because we had an assortment of vegetables which needed using up: a bag of potatoes we bought which were at their sell-by date, a butternut squash we bought last week but hadn't used yet, some frozen spinach from last year which we keep forgetting to use.

The Saag Aloo contained onion, potatoes, and spinach and was spiced with garlic, ginger, chilli, mustard, cumin and turmeric.

The Prawn and Squash curry was spiced with cumin, chilli, turmeric, ground coriander and curry powder. We had a pot of plain yoghurt open in the fridge so I used that instead of the double cream in the original recipe.

I served the curry with a mixture of plain and wild rice.

At the weekend we were driving near the Millet's farm shop near Abingdon (on our way home after collecting our new Dormouse). We both really like going round shops like these. They have an impressive range of food available. A lot of it is fairly pricey but the fresh cakes are always excellent value. While we were there we bought a cream-filled 'Viennese Slice' and a really nice flapjack. In addition to those we also bought some cheeses. Tonight we used the smoked sheep's cheese.

We used ready-made puff pastry which we rolled out then spread with red pesto. Next we added a layer of sliced onions which had been gently fried to soften them. The next layer was prawns and sun-dried tomatoes before finally being topped with the grated smoked cheese.

It was baked at gas mark 6 for approximately 20 minutes, until the pastry had puffed up and turned golden.

This weeks recipe was based on one from the Cottage Smallholder website. While the gnocchi were cooking, I washed and chopped a handful of watercress. After I drained the gnocchi, I put the creme fraiche in the pan and heated it through along with the watercress, a handful of grated cheese (because we had spare in the freezer), and a pinch of chilli flakes. I stirred the gnocchi into the sauce before pouring everything into a pan, ready to be grilled.

We had a packet of mozzarella which was nearly out of date so that got shredded and sprinkled on top before we added the breadcrumbs and parmesan. The pan then went under the grill to melt the cheese.

The meal was very quick to prepare and could easily be adapted to other ingredients, such as chicken instead of prawns, leek instead of the watercress (which was itself a replacement for the spinach in the original recipe).