This week has felt like proper winter for the first time this season – actual frost on the roofs some mornings, a chilly wind that forced me to do up my coat for just about the first time this year. Sunshine, and showers, and clouds so dark and grey there might have been an eclipse, and evening sun setting into a perfect blue sky, with a whisp of a crescent moon. I’ve been pointing the moon out to E some evenings when we come home from nursery in the dark, and now she sometimes demands to see it – a tricky request to fulfill when it is new and hardly there.

A week into the New Year, and I feel like it’s going, tentatively, fairly well. I have stuck to my resolution and written at least 750 words every day. (Many of those words are nonsense, and certainly not publishable, but that’s not the point). I have been reading Bee Wilson’s wonderful ‘First Bite’ when I get a moment, and think it’s an excellent book, carefully researched and well written. And there has just about been enough time for work, for play, for writing, for laughing, and for cooking. A good week.

Recipes:

• Thermomix red pepper and tomato soup
• Edd Kimber’s 20 minute croissant dough (to be baked at the weekend) – from Patisserie Made Simple
• Cheese scones – Delia’s Complete Cookery Course [In looking up the link, Amazon reminded me that I bought this in February 2000 – I think that must have been one of my earliest Amazon purchases!]
• Pasta with broccoli – Rachel Roddy in ‘Five Quarters‘
• Banana cakes – The Baby-led Weaning Cookbook

Without a recipe:

• Lasagne, using the last of the rib of beef ragu
• Roast chicken, with roasted vegetables and broccoli
• Chicken pie
• Fish cakes/fish fingers and crinkle-cut chips
• Fish curry with potatoes and peas
• Slow-cooker chicken stock (that went into the chicken pie, the soup and some I’ve kept back to cook with beef shin this weekend).

Reading:

• FiveThirtyEight tells us what we should already know: you can’t trust what you read about nutrition.
• Rocket and Squash has digested the first newspaper food columns of the year.
• Bee Wilson describes the Problem with January. This should give you a good flavour of her new book, ‘First Bite’.
• On the ‘to make’ list: Chocolate Apricot Loaf cake from the Little Loaf; Rachel Roddy’s spaghetti with lemon; Green Goddess roasted chicken.