I have hated eating fish all my life. It began as a childhood fear of swallowing a fish bone and fish does not taste very nice when you chew and chew and chew and chew a piece of fish in your mouth just to make sure you haven't missed that sharp fatal shard of bone that could slip down your neck and kill you. I never grew out of it!

I have been trying hard to grow up and eat more fish as I know that it is very good for you and Mike loves it. One of my favourite cook books is Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and I found this recipe on Page 225. The picture looks so appetising and if I'm honest reminded me of meatballs in a tomato sauce. Mike was delighted that I was going to serve up fish and went routing around his wine rack for a suitable bottle of wine to accompany the meal.

The fish cakes are made with cod and I am fortunate enough to have an excellent fishmongers who comes to the local market on Wednesdays and picked up a lovely piece of cod, boned and filleted for a reasonable price. The fish is mixed with onion, garlic, fresh parsley and coriander, ground cumin, egg and salt before being fried off. The tomato sauce is spicy with ground cumin and coriander, sweet paprika, chilli, garlic, sugar wine and tomatoes and simmered to make a thick sauce before the fish cakes are added and the whole thing is simmered for about 20 minutes.

I really like cooking these 'one-pot' dishes which leave you time to tidy up before sitting down for dinner. It was an easy dish to prepare and my only complaint was chopping up the fresh herbs. I don't know about you but I make such a mess when chopping up fresh herbs and I spend days after clearing up bits from the floor!

I served the meal with cous cous and crusty bread whilst Mike chose a hearty bottle of Bordeaux, unusual having a red wine I know but the wine really suited the hearty flavours of the meal. What's more I really enjoyed the fishcakes and didn't feel the need to over chew the fish cakes in search for bones. Another resounding success for this fine book.    

I don't know about you but this wet and miserable weather is starting to get me down. I get out of bed in the morning and it is dark and dreary. I don't seem to have the energy nor enthusiasm for anything anymore. Today was my first Saturday off for a while and I decided I would have a lie in and crawled out of bed at about 9am to be greeted by the lovely Mike with bacon and mushrooms simmering in the pan waiting to be put in a sandwich as a special breakfast to cheer me up. Lucky me! It was delicious but the choice of bacon is the key. We have found that bacon is being sliced more and more thinly as meat producers are trying to cut costs and the resulting bacon strips release so much water and foam that they shrivel into nothingness. Our producer of choice is Spoilt Pig which is only available at Morrisons. Well worth a trip into store to purchase. My bacon sandwich perked me up so much I went for a wander in the brief glimmer of sunshine which revealed itself in Cumbria this morning, but looking out of the window now the rain has returned. When will these winter blues end?

Having spent the last few weeks updating the cookbook section of my blog I realised, to my shame, how many cookbooks I have which have never made it into the kitchen so I was determined to cook my next meal from one of these and I opted for Vefa's kitchen. The book proclaims to share the variety of Greek cuisine and is 704 pages long, with hundreds of recipes. There are some pictures but only a fraction of the recipes are photographed which makes it difficult sometimes to decide what to try when there is so much choice.

I narrowed down my search by deciding I would cook fish, a medium I am experimenting with as I have avoided eating fish all of my life because of a fear of choking on fish bones as a child. To make matters worse I always manage to find a bone whenever I try to pretend to be a grown up and order fish, much to Mike's astonishment!

I settled upon Tuna Baked with Onions on Page 319 because I liked the idea of it being cooked in the oven and the recipe was really straightforward. Even I couldn't find a fishbone in a tuna steak! I sent Mike to get the fish from our local store on the outskirts of Carlisle but they had run out of fresh Tuna but had some frozen Tuna steak so we decided to give that a go. How different could it be?

The fish was washed and dried then seasoned with salt and sprinkled with vinegar. The onions, garlic and tomatoes were slowly cooked until thickened before I added the parsley and smothered the steaks with the mixture, seasoned with salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil then baked for 30-40 minutes. 

I served it up with a spinach salad and pitta bread, expecting to taste lovely fresh Greek flavours akin to those I enjoy at our local Greek Restaurant but I was disappointed. The tuna looked grey and I managed to find a bone in the first mouthful! I didn't like the fish at all, it was tasteless and unappetising, Mike was not as harsh and said it was OK. I suspect that the quality of the fish was more to blame than the recipe itself. The onion and tomato sauce was really tasty and chicken or a meaty white fish such as cod or monkfish would make a great alternative. I would only try Tuna again if I could get a really good fresh tuna steak and cook it for 10 minutes less.

I have to confess I was disappointed that my first recipe from this book ended like this but there are hundreds more recipes to try but I think I will wait for the summer and hope that the sweet taste of local ingredients that have seen the sunlight will help convey the flavour of Greece in wet and windy Cumbria.

"I want a Spanish themed evening," declared Mike over breakfast "I want to watch my new movie (The Spanish Musketeer if you're interested) with Spanish food and wine." I was speechless! I normally struggle to get them interested in food planning "Anything in particular?" I asked keen not to let the moment pass. "No not really, Keith Floyd perhaps?" So that was it, the challenge had been laid down and I got out all of my Spanish cookbooks, which only amounts to three, Spain on a Plate by Maria Jose Sevilla, Keith Floyd on Spain and Colman Andrews' Catalan Cuisine.

I finally settled on Catalan Cuisine as I know that I have had this book for over twenty years and never cooked from it. Today was going to be it's day to get off that bookshelf! I know it may sound rather pathetic but I find it hard to chose a recipe when there are no pictures in the book to help me out and this book has no pictures at all.

I finally chose Chicken and Prawn Ragu from Page 226. It seemed to be very authentic, although I am no expert at all, and I was intrigued by the way the dish was put together. The chicken pieces are sautéed and removed from the pan, then the prawns were given the same treatment before I had to make a sofregit (which is used as the basis for many Catalan recipes and in this case was onions and tomatoes gently fried into a mush). the chicken was added to the base and simmered for a while before I added Pernod and wine, simmered for some more before the prawns were added. I then had to make a picada (which is a Catalan roux) and this was made of almonds, parsley, fried bread and almonds. This was tricky to make as he recommends that you make it with a pestle and mortar. I made the mistake of putting the chocolate in before grinding up the almonds and bread and it took me ages! This was added 10 minutes before the end of cooking time to thicken the sauce. 

I served it up with cubed potatoes roasted in Olive Oil and Rosemary in the oven and Mike had sourced a bottle of Spanish wine. We sat and switched on the TV to watch the film in the kitchen. "Well," I asked "What do you think?" There was a pause as I held my breath for the verdict. "It looks spectacular," he replied " and tastes better. It is such a change to be served up Spanish food that doesn't have chorizo in it. I love it ... now be quiet I'm watching my film!" Nothing makes me more contented than a family enjoying my food, and I smiled away as they watched their film and ate everything on the plate. It's taken me twenty years to use this book ... what have I been missing? So far so very very good!

I have struggled with pastry for years.So much so that I have considered myself a bread making person whose hands are too warm to make pastry successfully, but I continued to persevere and discovered that my failure was as a result of worrying too much about the amount of water I put into the mix. I never put in enough and as such my results were too dry and crumbly. Several friends pointed me in the right direction and I boldly added more water until the dough became easier to roll out and found that my efforts improved with every attempt. 

I have tried quiches, Elizabeth David's Onion Tart is amazing and my son and I love the Hairy Bikers Chicken and Ham Pie but Mike remains unconvinced. "A pie," he declared "should be cooked in a plate and be thin enough that you can pick it up in your hand and eat it." There lay a challenge and with friends coming for dinner who are pie aficionados I rose to the bait and decided to work through my cook books until I found the right recipe. My friend Pam came to the rescue and loaned me the 'Hairy Bikers Perfect Pies" by Si King and Dave Myers which has a whole chapter on plate pies. I decided I would do the Mince and Onion Pie for the men who are carnivores and try the Broccoli and Cauliflower Cheese Pie for the girls. My friends arrived and we decided we would cook together and drink beer whilst catching up in the kitchen. There is something special about drinking, chatting and cooking together with friends. My idea of heaven! The recipes called for two different types of pastry, the one for the vegetarian pie was a cheese shortcrust pastry and the meat pie an ordinary shortcrust. I like to use the food processor to make my pastry and Val kneaded it whilst I worked on the filling. I have to confess that I was a little bit worried about the vegetarian recipe which consisted of broccoli, cauliflower and sweet potato in a cheese sauce. How was that going to work out? I was also worried that the mince and onion pie may be a little bit bland and grey. Hopefully the beer would make the taste buds more receptive!

The Hairy Bikers recipes make far too much pastry and there is a lot of waste. With hindsight we should have rolled the pastry a bit thinner as the final result was a bit thick but the vegetables were delicious and tasty and the meat pie had a great flavour and texture. We served the pies up with chips (or French fries) fried in dripping and enjoyed them immensely. The vegetarian pie was excellent and I was amazed how filling they were bearing in mind that they were cooked on an enamel plate, but I have to confess that I suffered rather badly with wind for the next few days and I am not sure I would make it again as a result but it is definitely a step in the right direction and I will continue to develop my  pie making skills.

I am sitting in my kitchen surrounded by cook books trying to plan our meals over the festive period. "Give me a clue!" I plead "What things do you want?" 'I don't really mind much." said Mike as he proceeded to veto every suggestion I then made. 

"Come on Andrew, help me out here!" "How about turkey?" he replied with a dead-pan face. 

Eventually we discussed and discarded turkey, capon, goose and beef. There was not much left as I started to leaf through Nigella Christmas by Nigella Lawson a book Andrew had bought for me a few years ago. On Page 158 I found Rolled Stuffed Loin of Pork with Rubied Gravy. "How about this then guys?" I asked and started to read through the description and ingredients. I was amazed as they both stopped what they were doing, pricked up their ears and listened. "OK, go for it!" 

At last we had decided the main event - hurrah. 

Normally I purchase a meat box which gets sent to my home a few days before Christmas but this year I was taking a more relaxed approach and didn't order any meat and just picked it up locally as the week progressed by the 20th I was getting a little bit nervous that I may not get the loin of pork required for Christmas dinner and asked my butcher to put one by for me to pick up on the 23rd. There was no problem and with the meat itself secured I was looking forward to a quiet Christmas with Mike and Andrew.

On Christmas morning we, like most of you, have a family ritual where my son comes to join us in the bedroom as he delves into his stocking full of little gifts to start off the morning. This is followed by a cup of tea and the opening of our gifts which have been carefully sorted into piles by Andrew who takes on the role of house elf! As both men in my life had been lucky recipients of computer games I was a solitary figure as I wandered into the kitchen to prepare dinner. Having just the three of us in the house I am in the lucky position to have no time pressures. "Dinner will arrive when it arrives" I casually call out to them but they are too lost in their computer simulated world to even notice my existance. "I must remember this for next year," I muse "No more computer games!"

I had already got my loin of pork out of the fridge to bring it to room temperature having bashed it flat with my rolling pin and marinaded it the night before. The stuffing was easy to make with bacon, onions, garlic, herbs, spices and dried cranberries and when it had cooled I rolled and wrapped the pork in bacon. It looked reassuringly like the pictures and I put it in the oven for a couple of hours. I reported my progress to the guys, "About two and a half hours to dinner." Silence! So I returned to the kitchen and poured another glass of fizzy stuff and continued with the vegetables. The supporting act for the feast were Nigella's roast potatoes from her book "Feast", "Parmasan Baked Parsnips" from Delia Smith's Christmas, Vichy Carrots from "At Elizabeth David's Table" and Horseradish Yorkshire Puddings from Gordon Ramsey's "Ultimate Home Cooking". Gravy was a spontaneous affair made by myself as I used the roasting tin and made it up as I went along. Not a sprout in sight ... the boys had decided this year they would not have one on the table!

By 3.30pm dinner was served and I had used every pot and pan in the house. The kitchen was not a pretty sight but who cares I can't see the mess from the dining table. We had decided against a starter as we just couldn't fit any more food as pudding was a steamed syrup sponge from an old magazine cutting.

The verdict was positive. The pork was delicious and we all enjoyed it immensly. Moist and a little bit sweet. The vegetables are all old favourites and worked perfectly but my yorkshire puddings were rather flat affairs but tasted delicious. The addition of the horseradish gave them an edge. I must confess that Gordon may not be responsible for my failure to get these little devils to rise but my use of a 12 hole bun tin meant that the puddings were too small and the oil may not have been hot enough when I put the mix in. I had it on my list to buy a more appropriate one but hey ... there's so much to do at this time of year that I never got round to it. It didn't spoil our dinner though as we munched our way through the christmas day feast and retired, replete, in front of the television to finish off our day in the traditional way. Though it was not long before the men in my life drifted back to their computers to re-join their virtual world. Will I never learn? No computer games next year!

I don't really know what happened to the last four months of 2013. My life went from busy to hectic and my blog seemed to be the thing that suffered as a consequence. I have still been cooking and testing out recipes on my long suffering family with mixed results but I have not been making the time to chronicle my efforts. It has been much harder than I thought to sit back in front of the computer and get typing but eventually here I am again and I hope to be able to coax you back to share my journey during the forthcoming year.

As far as travel is concerned we plan to go to Ireland in September for a week and hope to go to Cornwall in June if I can co-ordinate the visit with some yoga with John Scott in Mousehole. Keep an eye out on the travel blog to keep up with our adventures. On the culinary journey I am still working my way through my books and having finally overcome my aversion to fish, am experimenting more with this medium. 

Life is good and I am excited to see how this year unfolds ... let's dust off the cookbooks and get cooking.

I wish you and your families a happy, healthy and fulfilling year in 2014.

After my questionable result with Heston Blumenthal's triple cooked chips, my school chum, Jen, gave me her recipe for 'All Day Chips' named by her son Isaac because it does take all day .... but in quick bursts.

Andrew and I were in town most of Saturday as he was running a yoga workshop and this would leave me little time to cook when I got home. So I decided I would get the new deep fat fryer in action again and prepare the chips in the morning before we left. Stage 1 was to cut the chips into even pieces and then parboil for a few minutes before draining and drying off. I put them into a tea towel and then the fridge for an hour or so before frying them off at 150 degrees C until they started to colour and placed them back in the fridge in a bowl lined with kitchen paper with a tea towel over the top. I had decided to serve up Pork Saltimbocca from Gino D'Acampo's book Buonissimo! on Page 155. His recipe calls for turkey steaks but as you are now aware we don't really rate turkey very much so substituted pork tenderloin instead. This recipe is so simple. I cut the tenderloin into three, lay it between cling film and bashed it flat with my rolling pin before laying parma ham on top with a couple of sage leaves fixed with cocktail sticks, covered with cling film and left in the fridge until our return.

After a great afternoon we returned home and pulling the rest of the dinner was easy. I heated up the deep fat fryer to 190 degrees C and fried off the pork on the parma ham side for 2 minutes and reverse for 3 minutes until just about cooked through and removed it from the pan. Marsala was poured into the pork pan scraping up the pork bits from around the sides and reducing before adding some butter to the pan and the pork steaks. Chips were refried for about 5 minutes and all on the table within 40 minutes of returning home.

I looked anxiously at Mike as he picked up the first chip and ate it .... silence .... "Well?" I asked, unable to deal with the suspense anymore. "They're great ... much better than the others" Hurrah .... well done Jen ... what does Heston know anyway? Jen's All day Chips are now going to be a regular feature in our house ... as is the Saltimbocca, simple and delicious. 

Eat well and enjoy your culinary journey ... wherever it may lead. After all these years, mine has returned to the humble chip.

One of the reasons I like to eat out is my hankering for chips, or for my American cousins, french fries. I don't know if you agree with me but there is nothing like a freshly cooked chip, crispy and beautifully brown. Don't get me wrong, not everyone you get in a restaurant are great. I have had some howlers in my time and I especially hate those that have been refried and then left to hang around in a warm part of the kitchen before being served to you, the unsuspecting customer, in a soggy blackened heap. On several occasions I have failed to return to an otherwise promising restaurant after having been served disgusting chips.

To be honest I am bored with my efforts to make chips and decided it was time to buy myself a deep fat fryer. I have not owned one for 30 years now and the cooking of this humble dish has been restricted to oven chips either home made or directly out of the freezer. I have been seduced by the fact that these modern fryers cook in less oil to accurate temperatures so that the food is fried in less oil and doesn't get soggy.

But ... how to cook them that's the problem, my recipe books were not much use, so I cheated and used the internet and settled for Heston Blumenthal's triple cooked chips. The recipe comes from his 'Heston Blumenthal at Home' cookbook.

"How are you going to cook the chips then?" Mike asked so I explained that I was to cut up the potatoes, rinse them for 5 minutes to remove the starch, simmer them for 20/30 minutes until they were nearly falling apart and then carefully put them on a wire rack and freeze them for an hour. Mike looked at me with his mouth wide open with amazement as I then paused for breath and continued "I then fry them in small batches for about 5 minutes place them back on a wire rack and into the freezer for an hour" Mike's amazement turned to astonishment as I continued "and then I take them out and fry them for 7 minutes before serving" "You're mad!" he said 'Why can't you just buy some and put them in the fryer from the freezer?" "That's not the point" I replied "This is about serving good home made food not just pouring in processed rubbish from a packet" 'Don't see the point - they're just potatoes - just throw 'em in!"

Not to be deterred I carefully followed the recipe and the instructions for the deep fat fryer, filling it with groundnut oil and using Maris Piper potatoes in accordance with Heston's instructions. It was straight forward but time consuming and having one of those American style fridge freezers it was rather tricky getting a wire rack into the freezer. My first error was lining the rack with kitchen paper after I have boiled the potatoes and I struggled to get the paper off the frozen chips which resulted in much scraping with a knife amid some cursing on my part and stifled amusement on the part of my menfolk.

The chips were merely an accompaniment to shop bought Chicken Kiev's and frozen peas so haute cuisine it was not but it was a simple family meal in an otherwise hard pressed day.

The deep fat fryer behaved beautifully and the chips came out crisp and golden. Mike eyed them critically and took one bite and screwed up his nose. "What's wrong?" I demanded defensively " "They're really light and unsubstantial" I took a bit and they did have an interesting texture, at first I though it was nice as the crispy outside gave way to a mash on the middle but after a few bites I felt cheated. I reckon that if I boiled them for less time so that the potatoes were firmer then the result would also be firmer. Though perhaps I would look elsewhere for guidance on my second attempt. I have never made a Heston Blumenthal recipe before and have seen his efforts on TV which although entertaining are not really suitable for my style of no nonsense tasty home cooking. The result of this recipe has not convinced me otherwise but I am determined that it will be a long time before I just throw a handful of frozen chips into the machine. 

Can you suggest an alternative recipe anyone? Results will be posted on the blog.

On Friday evenings from 5.30pm you will usually find me in Carlisle in a Restorative Yoga class for 2 hours. It's such a great relaxing class and by the end I feel so chilled out I am walking on air. I am also ravenous and it's gone 8pm by the time I get home and I am not nice when I am hungry. Usually I make something before I go and it is heating up in the oven by my return, but we have actually had a summer in Cumbria this year and it is too hot to come home to a scorching kitchen and stew. Salads I find need to be be made and eaten straight away - so quite a conundrum.

"I'll cook something!" Mike declared. I nearly fell over in shock "Sorry, what was that?" "I'll cook something from my Jerusalem book, what time do you get back?"

So off I went and enjoyed a great class and return home in anticipation and a little bit of trepidation. To let you into a secret Mike does not like to cook and when he does he tends to choose a recipe beyond his skill and when I come home he is grumpy and muttering as he declares "Its over there, you can serve it up" before sitting down and taking a big swig of wine.

So I held my breath as I opened the door and entered the house to a lovely smell of meat and vegetables. "Hi" I shouted from the safety of the hallway 'Everything OK? Smells delicious" "Yeah, great" he replied with not a curse word in sight. This I had to see and I scuttled into the kitchen.  

The kitchen was a picture of calmness, washing up as he had gone along the food was nearing the end of it's cooking time and I was told to sit down and have a drink as he served up. I resisted the temptation to search the cupboards for a hidden chef and sat down and enjoyed the luxury of having my dinner cooked for me.

Mike had chosen his Jerusalem book and made Pork and Courgette Burgers which also had spring onions and other spices. These burgers are made with turkey in the book, making it a very low fat option, but as we are not keen on turkey pork mince had been substituted. The courgette had been grated into the meat with the other ingredients and Mike stated that it was very straight forward to do. What made the recipe even easier was that the meat patties were fried off to give them colour and then finished off in the oven. A great option when cooking a meal for a hungry family who may not arrive home exactly when expected and the burgers can be put in the oven as the family come through the door. He made Couscous with tomato and onion as an accompaniment and once the couscous has been steamed it is fried off in a frying pan so that the bottom gets a golden crust before serving.

It was all delicious, so much so I have asked for a repeat next Friday night, we felt that it could have done with a green vegetable or salad of some description and the pictures above really do not do it justice. What a relief and not even much washing up to do. Friday nights have just got even better.