Enough to serve 4 with rice and salad

• 450g steak – rump steak, sirloin or even frying steak
• 2 tbsp light soy sauce
• 3 tbsp pineapple juice
• 2 tbsp mirin
• 1 tbsp rice wine
• 1 tbsp sesame oil
• 1 tsp 5 spice powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp finely chopped spring onions
• 2 tbsp crushed garlic

Chop the steak into chunks roughly 1 inch x 2 inches. Mix the rest of the ingredients together and pour on top of the steaks in a non-metallic bowl. Leave to marinade for about an hour at room temperature.

Thread onto kebab sticks (either metal or if using bamboo, soak them in cold water for 30 minutes prior to using) and preheat your grill. When your grill is hot, put the kebabs in and cook for 3 or 4 minutes on each side.

동. 즐기다, 즐겁게 시간을 보내다.

Much as I love duck, a plain pan-fried piece of poultry (albeit a  rather delicious one), is not exactly a recipe. No, this recipe adapted from Joel Robuchon is for the equally delish side dish. It may be a bit early in the year for celeriac, but it does make a change from potato and is certainly healthier than the potatoes sauteed in duck fat that might otherwise accompany this dish. Serves 3-4, and would be equally yummy with lamb.

• 1 small celeriac – 300-400g, peeled and chopped up into 2cm cubes
• 1 medium potato, prepared similarly
• half a sprig of rosemary
• a good pinch of salt
• 175 milk
• 2 dessert spoons creme fraiche
• 10g butter, well chilled
• 50ml water + extra to cover

Pour the 50ml water into a saucepan, put the vegetables, salt and rosemary in and add the milk. If this does not cover the vegetables, pour in enough water to just cover, place the lid on and bring to the boil. Simmer for 20 minutes and the vegtables also removing any rosemary – there may be some rogue leaves hanging about so try and remove them too.

Put the drained vegetables into a food processor and whizz until smooth, add the creme fraiche and the butter and then whizz again. Serve immediately.

• 2 cod fillets
• juice and finely grated rind of one lemon
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 tbsp parsley, very finely chopped
• 1 tsp hot sauce (tabasco, west indian or what ever you have)
• 2 tsp paprika
• half tsps of ground cinnamon, saffron, turmeric and ground cumin
• 1  tsp sugar
• 2 tbsp olive oil

Take your fish fillets and lie them on a non-metallic plate.Combine the remainder of the ingredients together in a bowl and spread over the fillets. Do not leave this to marinate for more than about half an hour or the ingredients will begin to ‘cook’ the fish. Preheat the oven to gas mark 5 and transfer the fish onto a baking sheet. Put the fillets into a hot oven and cook for around 10-15 minutes depending on the thickness of the fish. Serve.

I do know what’s in haggis, and I don’t care, because I think it’s delicious. For the record, I also like faggots, chitterlings, kidney, and liver. I like trotters, and pigs ears and black pudding. I even like a Domino’s Meat Feast Pizza on occasion. But I don’t like to talk about that much.

I was tempted to save doing this until Burns night, but once I have an idea in my head, I tend to have to follow it through. So here it is, the closest thing to Scottish that a Scotch Egg will actually get. These, even if they were made purely with pork sausagemeat (just double the amount of pork and drop the Haggis) are a world away from shop bought scotch eggs, even the good quality ones have nothing on the home made. And these are really easy, if a little messy, to make. To make 6 scotch eggs.

• 250g good quality haggis
• 250g plain sausagemeat
• 6 cooled medium hard boiled eggs (plus  one raw beaten egg for coating)
• 2 slices of stale white bread, whizzed down to crumbs in a food processor
• 2 tbsp plain flour
• oil for deep frying

For the whisky sauce:

• 20ml whisky
• 100ml double cream
• 1 tbsp dijon mustard

A few hours ahead of forming the eggs, mix the sausagemeat and the haggis together by hand and store it in the fridge. It will probably be fairly sticky to handle.  When ready to make them, and you can do that in advance if you like, divide the haggis mixture into 6 balls. Sprinkle some flour onto a piece of clingfilm and roll out the ball with a floured pin/hand. You may find it easier to lift the partially rolled haggis mix onto your hand and finish shaping it there. The piece needs to be about 6 by 4 inches. Dust the egg in the flour and shake off the excess. Put the egg in the middle of the haggis mixture and shape around it, until the egg is completely coated. Seal the joins with your fingers and roll around on some more flour.

Dip the haggis coated egg into the beaten egg and then roll in the breadcrumbs. Heat around 4 cm of  oil in a deep frying pan (I used a wok) until it has reached 180-190 degrees (it’s hot enough when you can drop a small cube of bread in and it turns brown within a minute). Carefully (please be careful!) put the scotch eggs into the hot oil and cook for around 8 minutes, turning occasionally, until they are browned on all sides. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen towel.

To make the sauce, heat a small pan over a medium flame and pour in the whisky, and add the dijon mustard. Quickly pour in the cream and turn the heat down. Cook the sauce until the cream has reduced by around half and serve with the eggs. Serve both with a sharp salad.

I will, at the very least, taste your stuff)

Anyway, cookies. I am not the biscuit eater in my household. While I do have a thing for dark chocolate digestives, I don’t have the sweetest tooth. Greedy son and Mr Greedy on the other hand love biscuits and cookies so this wasn’t exactly going to be a challenge. Plus, my biscuit making attempts in the past haven’t been amazing, so I thought I’d give them a treat. We tried a range of cookies – Dotty (a kids cookie with chunks of milk chocolate and smarties on the top), Sticky Date, Walnut and Ginger,White Chocolate and Macadamia (pictured – my favourite by far), Triple Chocolate Fudge and Strawberries and Clotted Cream. Rather like the orange and strawberry creams in a box of Quality Street, the strawberry ones took the longest to go in our household, but if fruit in your cookies it is the sort of thing you like, they are creamy and light and undeniably strawberry-ish and not a bad cookie at all. Apparently they’re incredibly popular so I’m willing to accept my tastebuds are on the wonk (a bit). We had a mixture of gluten free and ‘normal’ biscuits and although I noticed that the gluten-free ones were slightly crumblier than the others, a bit sandy maybe, there wasn’t a great deal of difference in them.

The best thing about these biscuits are the generous chunks in them – especially the chocolate ones, and that they’re not too sweet. They’re made with free range eggs, which is really good and obviously made of very good quality ingredients. No trans-fats and no weird ingredients. As you might expect from a luxury biscuit, they are fairly high in calories, which slowed down even my consumption (I KNOW!), however in comparison to every other tea time treat, the difference is negligible.

If you’d like to find out more about these lovely cookies, you can have a look at the Byron Bay Cookies website here.

Makes 4 generous bowls, very easily doubled.

• 250g yellow split peas (follow instructions on packet if they need pre-soaking)
• glug olive oil
• small carrot
• small onion
• small stick celery
• 800 ml vegetable stock or water
• bay leaf
• 1 blade of mace, slightly toasted in a dry pan and bashed up or a good pinch of powdered
• pepper

Cut the onion, celery and carrot into a fine as dice as possible, or blitz in a food processor until finely chopped. Warm a heavy based saucepan over a medium heat and put in your olive oil. When the pan is hot, put in the vegetables and cook them over a low heat until they have started to soften. If they start to fry or colour, the heat is too high. Add your bayleaf and mace, and then your peas and give everything a good stir. Pour in your stock, bring to the boil and then turn heat down, and gently simmer for an hour with the lid on. Keep checking throughout the process that the water hasn’t all been absorbed by the peas – you may want to top up with hot water from the kettle. Serve with desired accompaniments, as above.

Marinade and cook the lamb chops as per instructions. Take blender, and add:

• 100 ml plain yogurt
• good sprig of mint leaves
• salt and pepper
• juice of one lemon
• pinch of ground cumin
• pinch of chilli flakes
• glug of olive oil
• half teaspoon of sugar

Whizz all the ingredients in a blender and serve, with chops and salad.

• 8 chicken pieces, thigh or otherwise
• 4 tbsp light soy
• 6 tbsp yellow oil – groundnut is perfect
• 1 tbsp rice wine
• 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped or grated
• 1/2 tsp finely grated ginger
• 1/2 tsp salt

Combine all the ingredients apart from the chicken in a bowl. You may find the garlic easier to chop very finely if you chop it along with the salt, as this helps break it down. Put in the chicken and leave to marinate for at least an hour (any more than about three hours, store in the fridge, but remember to get out to bring to room temperature). Preheat the oven to gas mark 5 and cook chicken in a roasting tin for 45 minutes to an hour, basting every 20 minutes or so with the marinade. Remember to turn the chicken over around halfway through to make it slightly crisp all over. Enjoy hot or cold, perfect for picnic workaday lunches.

The restaurant is clean and airy, the staff are friendly (and friendly to fussy son, which is important to me) if a touch forgetful. The menu isn’t long, or particularly varied, but what they do sell is of a high quality, very tasty and suited to most palettes.

We started with some bread and olives, which were delicious. The bread had been warmed in the oven and came with a lovely pesto which was gorgeously parmesany, and the olives came in a lovely olive oil and balsamic vinegar, which was also perfect for dipping the bread in.

For our mains, the fussy one had a margherita pizza (herby sauce, light base, stringy mozzarella), I had the half rotisserie free range chicken, with thyme, lemon, bacon and aioli. Tender chicken, and gorgeous thick bacon. Mr Greedy had the confit duck, which was very rich, with lovely cheesy creamy mash. Perhaps a little too rich for my tastes, but lovely nonetheless. I had ordered a bowl of fries with my main, which never arrived – I found this a bit irritating, but also a bit of a relief because it was all more than enough. Maybe they were subtly trying to tell me that my bum would only spread further with the addition of deep fried carb. Who knows?

We had to wait a long time for dessert – a touch irritating in a half empty restaurant with a son desperate for a chocolate brownie. I was  a little torn what to have, unusually for me as I don’t have that sweet a tooth I wanted everything but I settled for chocolate brioche bread and butter pudding, but it was tepid and badly warmed as it was fridge cold in spots and luke warm in others. Texturally though, it was a triumph. Mr Greedy won the prize for the best chosen dessert with a strawberry shortcake.

At £73 for three of us with wine and coffees, I don’t think it was fantastic value for money, but given its location and food quality it wasn’t terrible. Any cheaper than that and you’re going down to paper napkins and battery chickens. In all, I’d give this a 3.5 out of 5 – a good half a mark lost for serving my dessert poorly warmed.

Maybe not strictliest a pie, as this only has a pastry top and no crust. Still, we can kid ourselves that it’s better for us this way as pastry is hardly health food #1. Also, the cut of lamb I’ve used – shoulder – is a fairly fatty cut so I have trimmed as much obvious fat as possible off it, but there is nothing else really to be done. You could, I suppose, use leaner cuts like fillet or leg of lamb but they are more expensive, arguably less flavoursome and not as suited to long slow cooking. Personally, I think shoulder is the perfect cut for this dish.

Recipe will serve 4 generously.

• 500g lamb shoulder, chopped into large bite sized chunks
• splosh olive oil
• 3 tbsp plain flour
• glass of red wine
• 800ml lamb stock
• splash of Worcester sauce
• bay leaf and couple of sprigs of thyme
• onion, finely sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
• 300ml of root vegetables – I used carrots but you might like swede, turnip or parsnips or a mixture – chopped into bite-sized chunks
• 200g mushrooms, sliced
• 250g puff pastry
• 1 egg
• splash of milk
• salt and pepper

A good few hours previous to when you plan to assemble the pie, put the onion, garlic, bay and thyme in a heavy based saucepan over a  low heat with a splash of oil and a pinch of salt and pepper. Sweat the onions down, until they are golden and completely soft. Meanwhile, put the chopped lamb and 1 tbsp of the flour into a freezer or ziploc bag and shake until the lamb is dusted with the flour. Brown the cubes of lamb in batches in a hot frying pan, and do not crowd the pan as this will cause the lamb to steam rather than brown.

When the lamb is sealed all over, put it in the saucepan with the onions and add the remainder of the vegetables. Turn the heat up to medium and pour in the glass of wine. Let this bubble away for a few minutes and pour in the stock and shake in a few drops of worcester sauce. Mix another teaspoon of flour with a couple of spoonfuls of the stock until smooth and pour into the saucepan. Bring this to the boil, stirring, and then turn down to a simmer. And then just simmer for a couple of hours until the sauce has reduced down and thickened and the lamb is very soft. Pour this into a large pie tin or lasagne dish and leave to cool.

Roll out your pastry, and cover your pie. Cut a hole in the top to allow the steam to escape and then mix and egg with a couple of tablespoons of milk. Brush this mixture over the pastry and then put into a preheated oven at Gas 7 for approximately 30-40 minutes. Like me, you may wish to cover it with foil towards the end of cooking, in order to stop the pastry burning, as mine has started to do. Serve with mash and veg.