Roast beef

Hereford topside, seared and then roasted medium well on a makeshift trivet of carrots. It was good.

Triple-fat yogurt

Of course, I wouldn't normally go anywhere near anything with half-fat, or low-fat, or anything similar in its name. However, in this case I mentally rebranded it as not half-fat créme fraîche, but as triple-fat yogurt: no thickeners or additives, just cream diluted with milk and cultured. Viewed in this light, it was a tasty and sustaining impromptu snack lunch, with some banana chopped into it.

Gammon hash

From the remains of a gammon hock, I pulled enough shreds of meat for a hash: onions, cabbage, grated swede and some potato, all fried in lard from the cooking water; the gammon crisped and mixed in and a fried egg on top.

It's not much to look at, admittedly, but it was delicious.

Gluten free sourdough

I used to bake sourdough bread all the time. I had a good homemade starter, a baking stone, and over a few years I really had the technique down. What I'd make for every day was a white couche/bloomer loaf, but I also made ciabatta, baguette, pizza, and English muffins. When I went low carb and then gluten free, of course all that had to stop; and while I used to enjoy baking at the time, I must admit I didn't really miss it. It was good to have the extra time.

I've found I don't miss eating bread, either, quite apart from the gluten and carby concerns. However, I have occasionally and idly wondered whether it would be possible to make a decent gluten-free sourdough, and so for the sake of experimentation, and for the sake of my partner who occasionally wants a slice of gluten-free bread, I decided to give it a go.

I looked at pre-blended gluten free bread flours, but these seem to include potato and tapioca flours as well as rice and xanthan gum. Now, these things may be fine, and they may be there for good reason - to improve the crumb texture, etc. However, I do have slight concerns with potatoes, and I don't know enough about tapioca (derived from cassava) to be sure whether I want to eat it. Also I wanted to keep things as simple as possible for the first attempt. So I went for a plain rice flour, and xanthan gum, which supposedly replaces some of the stretch and spring of gluten.

The next step was to prepare the starter. Sourdough bread is yeast-leavened, but it doesn't use regular cultivated, 'domesticated' yeast. It harnesses the wild yeasts and lactobacilli from the surrounding environment. To do this, you simply mix a few teaspoons of flour with enough water to make a batter-like consistency. The usual advice is to add a few organic grapes or raisins; this is for the sake of the wild yeasts that settle on the fruit, which is incidentally how wine ferments - these wild yeasts get crushed into the juice when the grapes are pressed. I didn't have any grapes or raisins, but I did have some organic dried apricots, so I bunged one of them in instead. Then you just leave it in a warm spot for a few days, each day adding a little fresh flour and water. The water, by the way, should be filtered, or boiled and cooled - if you use water straight from the tap, the chlorine will kill, or at least inhibit the growth of, those wild yeasts you're so carefully trying to nurture.

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from the rice flour. However, within three days the mixture was bubbling and smelled very like my old sourdough starter. In fact, it was ready for use a lot quicker than I remember my wheat starter taking.

Once the starter is ready, you can mix the dough. I used a pound of flour and two scant teaspoons of xanthan gum, plus salt and olive oil. The amount of water to make a workable dough didn't seem significantly different from a wheat dough.

In consistency it was fairly different, though: pastier and less elastic. It didn't prove much like a wheat dough either; after 20 hours there wasn't much expansion, though when I slashed the surface it was possible to see pockets (the picture on the left is immediately after mixing; the right 20 hours later). The texture was still pasty rather than elastic so it couldn't be worked and shaped like a wheat loaf. I had to just kind of pat it into shape. I left it for a second proof in a makeshift couche; after a couple of hours it still hadn't visibly done anything, so I consigned it to the oven. I was so pessimistic, at this point, about oven spring that I didn't even bother to slash it. This, as it turned out, was a mistake. It did have a fair bit of spring, as the lunar cracked surface will attest.

And so the the vital question: how was the finished article? It actually tasted pretty good. I suspect you could eat it and not guess immediately that it was gluten free. Maybe not guess at all. At any rate, it tasted like something real in its own right, rather than a dismal imitation. And it held together very well, which was a pleasant surprise: gluten free breads are usually far too crumbly. It was dense, and moist, which wasn't necessarily a problem, though I would prefer a more open texture. But if the trade-off is between open texture and crumbly texture, I'd prefer the dense that doesn't fall apart.

A bigger problem was a dry, rough, unappetisingly pallid crust. A hotter oven might possibly have helped with this, as might spraying with water before baking. Aesthetically you might get a browner crust by brushing with sugar-water before baking. Some people brush with oil, but I've always found that gives a rather unappealing fried note to the crust.

All in all, though, I was very pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out. Significantly better than any other gluten free bread I've tried, and a fraction of the price. I'll experiment further with the texture and crust issues next time, though given that I don't plan on eating it very often, it might be a slow process.

Fresh coconut

First: sweet potato and chicken soup with fresh coconut.

Second: stir fry fish with fresh coconut. I nearly called this 'dry fish curry', but as it was quite a random mix of spices (ginger, garlic, chilli, cumin, Thai fish sauce) I didn't. The fish was haddock.

Medallion steak chilli

In supermarkets you sometimes see beef labelled 'medallion steak'. This isn't a term you find on typical lists of steak cuts, and it's cheap, which facts together made me rather suspicious of the claim 'ideal for frying' on the packet. It looks to me a lot like skirt, or onglet, which can be served as steak but is inclined to be tough. In England skirt is more usually used for pies and the like.

Given all this, I decided to braise it, and as I fancied something vibrant I went for a tomato chilli. The usual drill - sear, brown the onions and spices, and immerse the meat in this mixture in a low oven all day. It was still quite fibrous, so I think it would definitely have been tough served as regular steak. It was also rather dry, so another time I'd up the cooking fat.

Moroccan chicken

This is something I make from time to time, usually using leg portions. Normally I brown the chicken, then subject it to the slow braise treatment with assorted veg and north African-ish spices (chilli, paprika, cumin, garlic, ginger, caraway, lemon). This time I'd planned to do it that same way, but events conspired to mean I had to do it more rapidly, in a hot oven. It wasn't as good; the chicken didn't have time to get really soft and fall off the bone, and the flavours didn't mix and meld so well. Maybe, too, because I was in a rush I forgot some vital ingredient. Anyway, it was perfectly good, but not so good as it could have been, which is always a disappointment.

However, all was not lost. There were some dregs of vegetables and sauce left over. I mixed this with some beaten egg and chopped spinach and made a sort of frittata for breakfast. Now that was good.

Almond pancakes

Shrove Tuesday. Pancake day. Given the day I thought I'd try this out; it's just ground almonds and eggs, and beaten egg white (because I happened to have an extra egg white lying about). Don't need any extra liquid as you do with regular pancakes.

I don't think it would be possible to make the traditional thin pancakes that cover a whole pan by this method; they come out small and thick like Scotch pancakes, though lighter and fluffier with the egg white. A nice breakfast, occasionally, with cream and blueberries and maple syrup.

Lunch of random leftovers

Cauliflower, a little rice, mixed together and baked with an egg and cheese. Something between a gratin and a strange pizza on a plate, I suppose.

Caribbean style fish curry with plantain

I've never cooked Caribbean food, in fact I've haven't even eaten much of it. So I have to begin with the proviso that I am most definitely no expert.

So, that said, this meal started with the plantain. I've never cooked that before, either, but I'm always looking to try new things, and plantain sounds like quite a good sort of carb - high in starch and low in fructose. So I planned to fry it, sliced, in coconut oil. I thought I'd do some sort of curry to go with it, and given the plantain, I thought it would be appropriate to make it a Caribbean-style curry. So I after a few look-ups I made up a sort of jerk seasoning mix - cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, chilli, thyme - and used this for a curry base with onions, coconut and tomato paste, in which I cooked some white fish.

I can't say how authentic this was. I think it was a bit too sweet; I should have used allspice, but I didn't have any. Perhaps a bit more chilli would have helped, too. All the same, it was pretty good.

Sauerkraut

Real sauerkraut is not just pickled cabbage, it's fermented cabbage. That probably sounds a bit unpleasant if you're not used to the idea of traditional foods, but it's actually how all pickles were made, in days gone by. Rather than pickling in vinegar, the fermentation process produces lactic acid, which then does the pickling for you instead of the acetic acid, or vinegar.

Homemade sauerkraut isn't much like the stuff you buy at the supermarket. That may not have been fermented at all, and if it was it's been subsequently heated in the packaging process. That doesn't just affect the texture and flavour (it cooks the cabbage, and sauerkraut should be crunchy), it kills the lactobacilli. Yes, traditional sauerkraut is also a free probiotic!

All you need is cabbage, salt and a big glass jar. Plus flavourings - caraway and juniper are traditional, but you can also use fennel or coriander seed, black pepper, even chilli. I used red cabbage, rather than white, simply because it looks pretty. Simply shred the cabbage, mix it with plenty of salt (three tablespoons per 5 pounds of cabbage is typical) and the flavourings, and then into the jar. Press it all down firmly. For the first day or two, check it regularly. If enough liquid to come above the level of the cabbage hasn't emerged by then, top it up with water and a bit more salt. It's important to use boiled (and cooled) or filtered water for this, to remove the chlorine - otherwise you'll kill those lactobacilli.

Then you just leave it for a couple of weeks at room temperature. After that it's ready. Store it in the fridge or somewhere cool. It keeps for ages - I've eaten a batch that was at least eighteen months old and it was just fine.

Breakfast: eggs

My favourite thing to have for breakfast at the moment is still custard. I've been refining the recipe for that, but I don't have it every day. Eggs usually feature in some form. Today I baked a large field mushroom with butter and some frozen spinach, plopped in a couple of eggs, and back in the oven for a couple of minutes with a little cheese on top.