-1 tin of kidney beans;
-1 tin chopped tomatoes;
-about 250g lamb mince (I cooked mine straight from frozen – I’m sure quorn mince would be just as good);
-1 stock cube;
-about 200g mushrooms, chopped (any kind – I used the chestnut ones);
-some garlic (fresh or paste);
-some ground cinnamon;
-some black pepper;
-1 fresh red chilli, chopped and deseeded;
-some exceedingly elderly red wine (if you have more class than me, use actual red wine vinegar);
-oil to cook with.

Use a saucepan for this, not a frying pan. Start with your oil, and your fresh garlic if you’re using it. Fry the mince and the mushrooms in it together on a high heat until the mince isn’t very pink any more and the mushrooms are starting to shrink. Add the chopped tomatoes, the kidney beans, the stock cube, shake in some cinnamon and pepper, add the garlic paste if you’re using that.

Stir. Leave it on the high heat until most of the liquid has bubbled away. Stir occasionally so it doesn’t stick. Add the chilli and a good splash of red wine, stir some more. Bring down the heat to medium and let it bubble away until it’s chilli and not soup. Put in a bowl and eat.

(Wtih rice, if you’re classy, or bread, if you’re slightly less so, and just in a bowl, if you’re me.)

Anyway, I’ve been waiting to have a go at it myself. And it appears, contrary to every recipe on the internet, it is not that hard to whip cream through trial and error. I bought ordinary double cream, fished out my flatmate’s very nice Ikea whisk, and whisked. And whisked, and whisked, and whisked, and whisked. And got bored, and switched to a fork and took the bowl through to watch ten minutes of Deep Space Nine.

Nothing doing. I changed back to the whisk – apparently, you cannot do it with a fork, but you can do it without an electric mixer. Within about thirty seconds, it had turned pleasantly solid and fluffly. I chopped some strawberries into it, and they aren’t very nice – it’s only April, so they’re imported and a little tasteless, even though it was such a sunny day they were half price – but I am ridiculously pleased with myself.

That is all. Next time I will do it with someone else in the house – Andrew is away – so I am not loser girl eating her way through an entire bowl of whipped cream all by herself.

Oh, oh my god. I had no idea how this was going to work, but the tomatoes just came out of the oven and they taste like…. well, the original author described them as “twenty feet tall and made of sunlight”. The taste is indescribable: sort of sweet, sort of sour, sort of like the best pizza you ever had, sort of like dessert and somehow still savoury. It’s utterly delicious.

I altered the recipe slightly, as expected: my tomatoes took not quite six hours, not the recommended seven, and that includes twenty minutes earlier when my flatmate wanted the oven for a pizza. (I suspect this shorter time is because it’s a fan oven, and obviously all ovens are different, etc.) Despite the ridiculously long cooking time, they’re very simple: ten minutes’ preparation time, maximum, and although you should check them every so often just to check they’re not turning into little red leather scraps, but essentially it’s easy peasy.

I have this feeling I’m just going to eat them out of the jar, rather than use them in actual food, and that they might be gone tomorrow. I had no idea how much to start with, so guessed 750g of baby plum tomatoes: this has yielded one not-very-large jar (that is already looking depleted, sigh).

Mmm. Tastes like summer. And speaking of summer, it’s coming; the birds are singing, the glass is green, I’m drinking smoothie out of a wine glass and my landlord’s cat has just bounced through the window. Life’s good.

You need:

-four chicken breasts, boneless and skinless;
-an onion;
-three garlic cloves;
-three tablespoons of honey;
-half a lime;
-two handfuls of dried apricots;
-some ground cinnamon;
-black pepper;
-two chicken stock cubes
-some type of cooking oil.

Chop the chicken into bite-sized pieces and fry in your oil on a high heat, so it cooks through quickly. Once it’s done or nearly done, set it aside in a wee bowl. Chop your onion into half-slices, crush the garlic cloves and fry them up in the same pan until the onion pieces are translucent.

Slice the apricots finely and throw them in the pan, add a few shakes of ground cinnamon, a few shakes of brown pepper, and turn the heat down so the apricots start to get properly squishy.

Then make up the stock. You want it to be thick, so put two stock cubes into one mug of boiling water. Stir this, throw it into the pan and then put the chicken back in.

Stir this well, put your three tablespoons of honey in to thicken it all, and squeeze the juice of the lime in as well. Stir, stir, stir, stir, and turn the heat up so the liquid starts bubbling off. Once most of it’s gone, turn it right down and let it all jellify nicely until there’s no liquid left, just nice squishy apricot-y sauce.

Serve with rice.

This is much more complicated than my usual recipes, which is why I wasn’t going to post it originally – this series is meant to be based on a theme of delicious food you can make fast and simply – but it’s truly, truly tasty and not that difficult to make. It feeds two, if you have plenty of rice, and leaves a bit. The bit that’s left, you let cool and then put in a plastic lunchbox with two handfuls of chopped lettuce, half a chopped cucumber and the rice that’s left, plus another squeeze of lime. Eat after a long morning of classes and make happy, happy noises. So good, especially after the flavours have soaked in.

My next project: slow-roasted tomatoes. These look wonderful, but I haven’t tried them yet because I haven’t been home for seven hours together since I saw the recipe! But I will be soon, and in the meantime have done two dry runs: chopped tomatoes with black pepper roasted for an hour at 140 degrees. The first lot I put in pasta with feta cheese and olive oil (delicious!) and the second lot went in a sandwich with mozarella and honey-roast ham (also delicious).

Really, this eating-lunch lark is a dream.

(And while I’m here, a quick thought. Nightline, that bastion of journalism, did a televised debate about whether it’s “okay” to be fat. Er. Anyway, anti-obesity activist MeMe Roth said this:

“We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we’re behaviorally and neurochemically dependent upon food.”

Seriously. Seriously, she actually said that. Dependent on food. Like, I am so dependent on food, I can’t go a whole day without a fix of it. Sometimes my physical and emotional health suffers because I haven’t had any!

…ah, you get it. That people can actually say things like that – yeah. This comes entirely courtesy of Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose, which, for what it’s worth, is one of my favourite feminist blogs out there. I’m not much of a fat activist – to my sorrow and exceedingly large dollop of privilege, I pretty much resemble the societal ideal for how women should look in terms of body shape, only shorter, smaller breasts and a bit too brown – but certainly I agree with the central tenet that the media preoccupation with obesity, and body size, and the purported health dangers of the former, is not value-neutral science but comes with its own assumptions and prejudices. At its worst, it’s a well-disguised way to damage women, to make them sweat and obsess over their bodies, to drive them to constant distraction as a means by which they can be controlled. (Hey, the population is fifty-one percent women, the patriarchy can’t be everywhere.)

And more than fat acceptance, Kate Harding writes well about feminism, really well – unlike the mainstream blogs, she doesn’t tolerate racism, ableism, or in the case of Feministing a couple of days ago, just plain information fail. Consider this a rec.

This was going to be a recipe, wasn’t it? Normally I don’t approve as salads as main courses. Normally. But this one has lots of protein, and is tasty, and just about passes muster if you weren’t that hungry to start with. And, hey, it is tasty and you can always have some cake after.

You need:

-one large pepper, preferably red;
-handfuls of rocket, or baby spinach, or both, or anything else green and leafy;
-feta cheese, about 100g;
-a couple of slices of good ham;
-cherry tomatoes, a few;
-pine nuts or sunflower seeds or both;
-a small red onion or half a big one;
-nice olive oil.

De-seed the pepper, chop into rough chunks, halve the cherry tomatoes, cut the onion into slices. Put them all in a baking tray, douse well with lots of the nice olive oil, stick them in the oven at 180 degrees Centigrade for twenty minutes. (You’re not trying to roast them properly – just till the onion is edible and the tomatoes a bit squishy.)

Cut the feta cheese into chunks and crumble those into a big bowl. Rip the ham into small strips, and after the twenty minutes, add the ham to the baking tray and put it back in the oven for another five minutes, until the ham is curling at the edges.

Then, pour the contents of the tray into the bowl with the feta, mix well and be sure all the oil gets into the bowl, it’s lovely. Stir well, pour in some pine nuts or sunflower seeds, add handfuls of rocket or spinach, keep stirring until it’s alll mixed. Presto, done. And have some cake afterwards for the carbohydrate.

I am not entirely sure how this happened. Still, never say die. What can you do with a rabbit? We thought for a bit, and decided on stewing. After consulting with the usual oracles (thanks, Ewan), this is what we came up with:

Ingredients:

• One rabbit, skinned and cleaned and rendered visibly less fluffy

• Several slices of bacon
• A handful of carrots, an onion, some garlic
• A bottle of cider
• Honey, some dried mixed herbs (or fresh thyme & bay, if you have it), salt, pepper
• A large casserole dish, with lid, and an oven at ~120 degrees

First, start the bacon frying; when it’s lightly done, decant into casserole, and start on the onion and garlic ditto.

Meanwhile, prepare the rabbit. (…I suppose there are people who don’t want to read this…)

End result : one pile of rabbit meat (small), one skeleton fit for stock or feeding to any carnivorous animals you have around the house (small), one sense of achievement (medium). I don’t know if you can actually feed rabbit bones to small carnivorous animals, so you might need to check that bit first. Or bury it in the garden, dig it up in a year, and present it to a small child who wants to be a vet.

Anyway, when we went into surgery the bacon, onions and garlic were lightly sizzling. Decant them into the casserole, leaving the fat in the pan, and then fry your rabbit with enthusiasm. Get it nice and golden, and in it goes too. Chop the carrots into lumps, and in they go; add a couple of spoonfuls of honey, the herbs, salt, pepper, stir it all around. Top off with enough cider to cover it all; if you’ve not enough, then a little warm water to suit. (If you’ve too much, have a drink. Thirsty work.)

Pop it all in the oven at about 120 degrees for about two hours. (A little warmer or a little longer won’t hurt at all, of course). Serve with rice or bread or potatoes – something solid and absorbent. Serves two to four depending on whether you remembered to eat lunch.

Next experiment: do it with wine. Rabbit in red wine does sound delightful…

The problem was, we ended up with too much sauce. A small bowl of heavy, thick, gloopy passata-and-garlic-and-basil sauce which I salvaged for dinner today; nice and rich, but too thick to put on pasta.

So, take the sauce, bulk it out a bit with a small tin of tomato pureé and an equal amount of warm water; mix in chopped cooked sausages, chopped carrots, and some mushrooms. Cook for about thirty minutes at 200 degrees; stir, add some cheese on top, another twenty minutes. Serve with an enormous pile of rice.

Not bad, all told, but more filling than it looked at first! Two things that’d have improved it:

• parboiling the carrots before adding them, as they came out a little too crunchy

• using equal amounts of red wine and pureé, rather than water and pureé

We had red wine to hand, in fact, but vetoed using it because it seemed too nice to cook with and there wasn’t much left. I think that was the right decision, but it’s tough to say.

Ingredients:
-three sausages, good ones – I used pork and caramelised onion;
-one baking apple;
-one red onion;
-olive oil;
-honey.

Peel and chop the apple into rough chunks and throw into a deep baking tray. Add the onion, chopped into fair-sized chunks (not slices). Toss with olive oil, and stir some honey through it all. Put in the oven at 180 degrees Centigrade for twenty-five minutes.

In the meantime, grill or fry the sausages – I recommend grilling, because this is already a fairly oily mix. When done, the apple and onion ought to be done as well (check to see the apple is soft enough to turn into goo in your mouth). Chop the sausage into bitesized pieces, toss in a bowl with the apple and onions, mix well and add a sprig of parsley if you’re feeling decadent. Done.

This is enough for one hungry person, but it scales perfectly – just double everything. It really is rather nice.

Ingredients:
-three large baking potatoes, elderly, sprouting;
-one red onion;
-generic tomato sauce – the kind that comes in a jar, or one tin chopped tomatoes drained well and mixed with passata;
-peppered ham (or ordinary thick ham, and add black pepper to the finished product);
-stilton;
-niceish olive oil;
-sundried tomato paste.

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Centigrade. Peel and chop the potatoes into thin slices, and toss into boiling water for five or ten minutes until softened (I forgot to do this, and regretted it). Drain, and put in a flattish ovenproof dish. Pour over tomato sauce, stir until potatoes are covered, add sundried tomato paste to taste and a splash of olive oil. Stick into oven for twenty minutes.

In the meantime, chop the onion into small bits and tear up the ham roughly, mix them together. Take the dish out, and (carefully! – I burned my fingers, as usual) stir them into the mixture so they’re also covered in tomato gloop. Put in the oven for another twenty minutes, go away and do some hoovering.

Crumble enough stilton to cover the top of the dish. After the twenty minutes are up, make a layer of it on the top of the potatoes, and put it back in the oven. After five minutes or ten minutes or however long it takes for the cheese to brown and bubble and sink, you’re done. Serve with green salad, it’s nice. And freeze the rest, if you’re only cooking for one, it’s perfectly defrostable.

I like it – but next time I think maybe more sundried tomato paste, and maybe I’ll stretch to cooked bacon rather than ham.