Yes yes, roast chicken. Not a pimped menu, but a staple; I love a meal that makes three (at least: roast on the Sunday cold-with-veg* on Monday, sandwiches for lunch and I always but always make stock; just call me Martha). However, I decided to tart it up a bit this weekend. Not a total success in that the children were highly suspicious of the spicey bit, even though I omitted chilli of any description, and Tamsin doesn’t like couscous this week, but there was plenty of unmucked-about-with chicken meat to satisfy their carnivorous tendancies – I have odd children – and broccoli on the side is always safe. And followed with a rice pud so there weren’t too many complaints overall.

Anyway. I took one chicken, defrosted rapidly in the sink because I forgot until I was already in bed on Saturday and couldn’t persuade myself to do the sensible thing and go back down to get it. I put a halved lemon inside and poured olive oil all over then coated the skin in a crushed-up mixture of sesame, coriander and cumin seeds, salt, pepper, and orange zest. It’s a bit of a Jamie recipe done from memory (so possibly little resembles his). In the oven at 200C to roast in a normal fashion. An hour before it was due to come out, added a cut-up red pepper and a couple of quartered red onions to the tin.

When it was ready I hoiked out the chicken, poured off most of the fat and squeezed the lemon bits into the tin. I added about 300 ml water and brought it all to the boil then poured it into a saucepan to which I added 250 g couscous, some chopped dried apricots and cranberries, the chopped-up onion and pepper, some salt and a bit of crushed coriander seed. 5 mins with the lid on over a very low flame, and bob’s your uncle.

*Sadly never nice bubble-and-squeak-type veg because, regardless of how many roast potatoes I make, we never fail to eat all but one.

The recipe was on the back of the green and black’s bar I scoffed in a fit of low blood sugar one afternoon at 4 (secretly in the kitchen, having made the children have fruit). They are a bit fall-aparty and the chocolate chips are unnecessary and frankly not that nice (I used plain, of which I am not fond;  milk might be a different matter). The biscuit part is very nice though. As follows :-

Prepare shortbreads 1 and 2 as below; rest them in the fridge for half an hour. Roll them into rectangles approx 1 cm thick and put s/bread 2 on top of s/bread 1. Scatter 100g chopped chocolate over the top (I really wouldn’t bother) then, using greaseproof paper to support it, roll them together like a swiss roll. Squish and squeeze with your hands into a sausage about 22cm long* then slice with a sharp knife into 1-cm-thick rounds. Bake at 150C for 25 minutes; cool on a rack**.

Shortbread 1: 150 g plain flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 50 g caster sugar, 125g unsalted butter. Mix in mixer until a dough.
Shortbread 2: 125 g plain flour, 25g cocoa, 1/2 tsp salt, 50 g caster sugar, 125g unsalted butter. Mix in mixer until a dough.

*This is where the sums go a bit wonky as 22 cm divided into 1 cm slices will clearly make 22 biscuits; the recipe says “makes 14″. I got 18.

**If you do this immediately, not only will they completely fall apart, the melted chocolate swirl drips out and welds the bisctuis to the rack. I suggest cooling on the greaseproof paper.

Ok, so I wasn’t going to include this because the spices came out of a packet, which felt like cheating, but then Karen said it could be anything you don’t usually cook, thus granting me permission to include all sorts of readymade jars and microwave meals. Maybe not entirely within the spirit of the thing, but hey. I might tell you all about an asda pizza or something next week.

Last summer, I hosted a “Jamie at home” party, at home*. It left me with several packets of spices in the cupboard, each nicely wrapped in cardboard with a shopping list and instructions. The chicken one was lovely but they are very spicy, and my children do not eat anything spicy (which is the main reason they – the mixes, not the children – have been in the cupboard for so long; I am not somebody who chooses to cook two separate meals very often.) That said, Saturday night is curry night so I decided to try the lamb rogan josh. This cooking from a packet malarky is easy and fun! Marinate lamb in a mixture of brown spices and yogurt; use food processor to blitz onions and peppers, cook with rest of brown spices; add lamb, simmer. Put yellow spices and rice in rice cooker.

Unfortunately it looked like nothing so much as cat sick with yellow rice. Eaten with closed eyes, it was surprisingly tasty. Could have done with some veg.

*without Jamie.

For normal meringues or pavlova, ignore any nonsense you see about cornflour or vinegar. Delia says they are not necessary, and she knows best. All you need is eggs and caster sugar: 2 oz of the latter for every large one of the former. A scrupulously clean bowl (grease stops the eggs whipping properly)  and separate the eggs individulally into a cup or bowl because if you get even a dot of yolk in, ditto.

Whisk the egg whites – I did this by hand once and once only, you really need a mixer or at the very least an electric hand whisk – until they stand in soft peaks and you can turn the bowl upside down without them falling out (test this cautiously!) – but no more as you can over-beat.  Whisk the sugar in a dessertspoon at a time; the eggs will look all lovely and shiny. Use white sugar for white meringues; I usually use golden with no ill effects. Best of all, substitute a couple of dessertspoons of the caster sugar with light muscovado or rapadura for lovely fudgey meringue.

For meringues, blob tablespoonfuls onto baking parchment on a baking sheet. (I believe you can use a piping bag for neatness if you are so inclined: I’ve never tried it.) Treat it reasonably gently as you don’t want to squash the air out, but don’t fret, it is more robust that you’d think. For a pav, trace a circle on the paper – I use a side-plate – and spread meringue into a circle to make the base, then blob tablespoons round the circumference to make the edge. You can use a skewer to make nice pointy turrets.

Put into the oven, which you have preheated to 150C. Immediately turn the oven down to 140, then after an hour turn it off altogether. Leave the meringue in the oven until it is cold, though (usually overnight).

For chocolate meringue, after you’ve added all the sugar, sift in some cocoa – about 1/2 tbsp (certainly no more than this) per egg white – and grate in some plain chocolate (about 50 g for 4 egg whites, or thereabouts).

The recipe for these lovely Jewel Biscuits is taken almost un-fiddled-with from the lovely Scheherezade Goldsmith’s lovely Christmas book (subtitle: how to have a really lovely jolly eco Christmas; chapter 1: first acquire an enormous amount of money and several hundred acres of Herefordshire. Add staff to do the menial stuff while you footer about with felt and oranges, and find friends of the sort to appreciate a galvanised bucket of salt as a present.)

Ahem.

Cream 100g butter and 275g caster sugar. Add 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and 2 large eggs, then sift in 525g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Mix it all up with a slosh of milk until it is nice and doughy, then wrap in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes or so (NB Sheherezade does not specify clingfilm as it is not very eco. Use whatever you like.)

Preheat the oven to 190C. Roll out the dough on a nice floury surface, to about 1/2 cm thick. Cut shapes – I did a Christmas tree, a star and a bell – and use a smaller cutter (or the lid of a  screw-cap wine bottle) to make holes. Fill the holes with crushed hardboiled sweets* (S says they should be organic; I used Foxes). You could sprinkle some caster sugar over now, for a glittery effect, but I found I preferred a snowy dusting of icing sugar once they were cooled. Don’t forget to make a hole if you want to hang them – and you really do, else you can’t appreciate the stained-glass centres. Put in the oven on baking sheets covered in baking parchment, about 10 minutes: move the entire bit of parchment onto the cooling rack and leave until completely cold. Icing sugar; ribbon (cellophane bag for school fete).

Oh, and the book says this makes 12 cookies…mine were reasonably large (palm-sized trees and stars; slightly smaller bells), certainly as big as you would want, and I got about 30, plus another 15 toddler-sized plain stars when I ran out of sweets.

*My entire kitchen is covered in minute shards of hardboiled sweet. Ignore at your peril Sheherezade’s top tip of putting them in a (clean, recycled) plastic bag before bashing with a rolling pin: the individual plastic wrappers Do Not Do. Or, as I found rather late in the process, if you get your hole the right sort of size – say the size of the wine-bottle top – you don’t have to crush at all, just bung an intact sweety in. They melt just the same.

Melt 8 oz butter and stir in 8 oz brown sugar (soft rather than demerara). Beat in an egg then add some nutmeg, 10 0z porridge oats and 4 oz sultanas. Push into greased (and lined) tin and bake for an hour at 150 C.

I know you are dying to know the secret and I believe it is this, as explained by Mia: no golden syrup (and the egg probably helps). I am going to revisit my delicious yet intractable apple flapjack recipe later,  and see if I can persuade it to stick together.

*One hundred and eighty what? Elephants?

I was prepared to struggle with the early starts – but that has, so far, been easier than anticipated. Once I got my head round having to be out of bed by 7.30 (it is early for us) then we’ve just done it. I was unprepared for suddenly finding myself with a toddler to entertain:  I hadn’t appreciated just how much the girls play together and all of a sudden Tamsin wants me to play with her. She is delighted when Maggie gets home (she holds her arms up and says yay! when I say it is time to go and collect her). I have a few toddler activities lined up – mostly on a Wednesday which is just manic with swimming (T), rhythm time (T) and ballet (M) one after the other. We tried storytime at the library but I was a bit unimpressed (one story then they got out the instruments and bunged on a CD of children’s songs). I very much want to incorporate allotment visits into our week too: I just need to do it for a bit and it will (probably) fall into place.

We had a lovely anniversary night out in Liverpool: the streets were shut for la machine and we were half an hour early for the restaurant (actually half an hour late into town – we had intended having a drink first – because the roads were flooded) so we walked down and had a look at it, then had a gorgeous meal at Etsu. After a bit of to- and fro-ing they even made me an off-menu lemon sour (shochu, soda and freshly squeezed lemon). Most of the restaurant was occupied by the Japanese FA so it felt really nostalgic with Japanese banter going on behind us. Tamsin, little sod that she is, slept through the entire night 8-7 without a peep for her aunty Sara, then did the same for us on Saturday. (To put this into context: she has done this twice before in her entire little life, at 3 months old. So that’s, what, 19 months of broken sleep.) Back to normal since, with 2.30 the favoured time to summons me (yawn).

200g butter
200g caster sugar
2 eggs
150g courgettes
200g plain flour
pinch salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
large pinch cinnamon
100g sultanas

Set oven to 180C and line a loaf tin.
Cream the butter and sugar; mix in the beaten eggs. Grate the courgettes, squeeze to remove any excess juice then stir into the mixture. Add the flour, salt, baking powder and cinnamon and mix well. Add sultanas; put in tin and bake for about an hour*. Cool in the tin before turning out.

*The hour was definitely from the recipe – it takes about 40 minutes in my oven.

Back to the to-do list again once we got home, then on Friday I went into Liverpool with some friends to see the Klimt exhibition. It was not quite as I expected – my expectations being based almost entirely on this picture, which adorned the wall of nearly every student flat I ever lived in. It wasn’t there (but others were, which were similar and lovely, alongside some of his landscapes, which were lovely too, and a load of random articles by other members of the Viennese Secession, some of which were lovely and some not so lovely and none of which really seemed to have anything to do with Klimt apart from being made by people who knew him. And some other paintings by him, some of which were interesting and some not so interesting). Afterwards, dinner at Etsu, which has got all sorts of people talking. (The restaurant, not us having gone to it.) The word on the street, which I can back up now I have been myself, if that it is not posh but it is very authentic. We eschewed the Brit-friendly starter and main course set up and ordered plate after plate of starters; stuffed ourselves silly with gorgeous Japanese food and came home very happy indeed. Though I make better gyoza myself.

Japanese food again on Saturday as we went to the Hanyuda-sans’ leaving party. I feel very spoilt. And very full.