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.

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