We were out all day last Sunday and ended up in the pub in need of something to eat. When this happens I always avoid the Traditional Sunday Roast since I don’t think it’s ever as good as the real home-cooked version. For some reason, last Sunday I broke my golden rule and was rewarded with a plate of food that was edible but by no means remarkable. It gave me a craving for a proper Sunday lunch so this morning, Stephen went off in search of beef while I got on with the accompaniments.

When he returned, he was clutching a large bag which contained a rib of beef, well two ribs actually. We followed Hugh’s instructions again but were taken by surprise at the speed the beef cooked which meant we ended up with meat that was just over the medium-rare we prefer. This was a tasty cut of beef though so the flavour wasn’t affected too much. We really must remember to pay more attention to the meat while it’s cooking though since this is a situation we find ourselves in all too often.

Great Yorkshire pudding (that wasn’t frozen like last week), crunchy roast potatoes, average parsnips and a decent selection of vegetables made for a good lunch. There was plenty of excellent gravy too, another bonus of eating at home and not a pub/restaurant.

The “This Week Last Year” plugin on the sidebar tells me that we ate roast beef exactly a year ago. A further search through the archives reveals that we haven’t had it since. Far too long.

This has been on my “things-to-cook-soon” list for ages. I’m a big fan of slow-roast dishes and thought this might be a good alternative to our favourite slow roast shoulder of lamb. Well, I’m not sure if we did something wrong (seasoned and braised in a couple of pints of stock and wine at 160 degrees for three hours. There were carrots, onions, celery, bay, garlic and some dried herbs in there too) or if we just had a poor piece of meat but we really didn’t like it.

The gravy had plenty of flavour but the beef itself was tasteless and dull. We bought a larger piece of beef than we needed for today’s lunch so that we could use the leftovers tomorrow which I’m hoping will be better. I can’t see us cooking brisket to eat this way again though.

Is there a patron saint of cooking? I’m not sure and Google was inconclusive. If there is such a thing and indeed, if I believed in such things, then I imagine she (it’s got to be a she, right?) was looking down on us this weekend. After not spending much time in the kitchen recently, we managed to produce the third really good meal in as many days. I don’t think we did anything drastically differently today and yes, I know roast pork isn’t all that difficult but for whatever reason, everything seemed to work brilliantly this time.

The meat (from Waitrose) had lots of flavour and remained juicy with super-crackly crackling. Having said I didn’t do anything differently, I did remember to cook the meat on the highest setting for the first 30 minutes before turning the oven down to 180 degrees which I don’t always remember to do. The potatoes and parsnips were crisp with lots of crunchy edges and fluffy insides (vegetable oil only today instead of a combination of vegetable and olive) and the vegetables were fresh and just interesting enough to compliment the meat without taking over (a dash of fennel seeds in the garlicky greens helped this). Oh, and that’s mashed celeriac in the middle which was wonderfully creamy and smooth.

I had planned to make stuffing but forgot so I guess that patron saint might have got distracted but otherwise, a glorious end to a brilliant weekend.

Slow roast shoulder of lamb is one of our most favourite things to cook and one of the things that gets the most hits on Dinner Diary. We’ve tried a couple of times to create something similar with pork shoulder but never really succeeded in getting anywhere close. It’s been a while since we last attempted it and it felt like a good time to try again. So, paying close attention to the mistakes we’ve made in the past, today we gave it another go.

And, we were successful! Sitting down to eat, I wondered why we had go this so badly wrong in the past. It was really easy: rest the seasoned pork (a quarter shoulder) on a bed of vegetables, sage and garlic with some water surrounding it (just enough water to cover the vegetables and stop them from burning but not enough to make much contact with the meat). Cover with some more sage and garlic (and poke some into any openings you can find in the pork) and cook for four hours at 150 degrees, basting every hour or so.

When it’s cooked, remove and rest the pork while you make the gravy: remove the vegetables from the roasting dish (if you like garlic then leave a few cloves in and squash them well), drain off the oil, add some white wine, some cider vinegar and bring to the boil. Thicken with cornflour and serve.

The pork remained beautifully tender and hadn’t dried out at all. There was a strong piggy flavour which was complemented really well by the cider vinegar in the gravy. A big handful of fresh sage would have been really good but we didn’t miss it particularly.

A good lesson is simplicity, no need to mess around with milk or varying temperatures like we have done in the past. Just roast the meat long and slow with a few aromatics and you’ll be rewarded with perfectly cooked meat that’s full of flavour.

As is now traditional, whenever we arrive home from a holiday, we cook roast chicken. It’s a comforting dish and one we always look forward to, particularly when we’ve been away and eating unusual foods.

Neither of us particularly wanted roast potatoes – it was hot and we had eaten a lot of bad foods while we were in Sweden so I opted for a salady dish of broad beans and peas with spring onions. I made a loose salsa-verde to dress the whole lot too.

This was just exactly what we needed, a good balance between comforting and interesting. The chicken looked after itself while I got on with the suitcases full of washing and I got a well-earned rest in the garden while I shelled the beans and peas.

The chicken would have been better shredded and added to the salad instead of sliced on top but it didn’t matter too much, we were both so grateful for something other than herring (well, I was) and Daim ice-creams (Stephen).

While staying with my mum, I remembered that last time I had visited, I froze a roast chicken. I can’t remember why, I suspect we just made other plans for lunch but, knowing it was there, I decided I would roast it on Friday night. I defrosted it slowly overnight but, when it came to cooking it, it smelt bad and I had to throw it out. Luckily, my mum’s freezer is ridiculously over-sized and I managed to unearth enough sausages to feed the proverbial army so I cooked those instead.

The roast chicken craving was firmly in place though so as soon as Stephen and I got back to London, he went off in search of a good-smelling chicken for Sunday lunch.

There wasn’t anything particularly special about the chicken, we didn’t season it with anything particularly exciting or employ any wildly different cooking techniques but, having waited two whole days, it was exactly what I wanted and therefore perfect.

PS From Stephen: Strangely enough, we put some sage leaves under the skin as we have loads of sage growing in the garden and then Kerri realised that about this time last year we had done exactly the same thing!

Stephen’s mum was here for dinner last night and since it was the last evening before she returned home to South Africa, we opted for a traditional roast chicken. I was a bit disorientated while cooking though (due to yet another visit to the dentist) and forgot about the roast potatoes. I’d been thinking about potato and celeriac rosti for a while though and since I had both ingredients, decided to do that instead.

We’ve had intermittent success with rosti in the past and I almost gave up this time when the potato became almost liquid in consistency, this was largely due to the fact that the only grater in the house is a Microplane that I bought to replace our cheap, dangerous metal effort that’s supposed to be suitable for cheese (and therefore potato I assumed) but is actually only any good for very fine Parmesan. Knowing I couldn’t serve my future MIL just chicken and parsnips though, I persevered. I managed to squeeze a lot of water out of the potato which boosted my confidence and the celeriac behaved a lot better.

By the time I’d combined the two together (quite a long time after I’d started, note to self: buy a bigger grater), Stephen was home and he shaped the mixture into rosti-like patties and began to fry them. This was the second mistake: the patties were too big which meant the ratio of crunchy outsides to soft insides was skew.

We fried the rosti until they were browned on both sides and then finished the cooking in the oven, a technique I think would work well if your mixture wasn’t hideously glutinous to begin with. Since ours were, the insides ended up resembling wallpaper paste in both texture and colour. So, quite a large failure really. And I burnt the parsnips. The chicken was good though.

I planned something using leftover lamb for tomorrow night’s dinner but a later shift means I won’t have enough time to do it now so it’s gone on the “to cook” list, (which should be renamed “where ideas go to die”). Since we don’t need enough for tomorrow but still fancied lamb, we opted for a half shoulder which we stuffed with garlic and anchovies and roasted.

We really should learn not to rely so heavily on the meat thermometer though as the lamb definitely wasn’t pink, it was still tasty though so it didn’t matter too much.

And, as it turned out, there were plenty of leftovers anyway so that other lamb dish may make an appearance later in the week.

It was Kerri’s birthday today, which was very exciting. We went out to Chez Bruce last night and had a wonderful dinner there, so decided to stay at home today and cook something ourselves. Roast pork it was, which we bought from a local butcher, Parsons Nose, which we were hoping would be open on Sunday and luckily was! We had to wait a while, because just as we arrived the butcher was boning and tying a pork loin for another customer. That customer ended up buying just over half of it, then we took just over half of what was left and the butcher looked at the remaining piece and said “I think I’ll have that for my dinner this evening”. So a whole loin prepared, portioned up and put to good use in a short space of time. Excellent.

The pork was lovely free range pork from Dorset and was delicious, but that wasn’t the end of it. We also managed to cook really good roast potatoes for the first time in a while (it seems that buying potatoes from Waitrose rather than Sainsbury’s was the key here as they were the same variety – Desiree – and cooked in much the same way) and the crackling was brilliant, so much so that it deserves its own picture:

One of the birthday presents that I had bought Kerri was a spotty jug from Emma Bridgewater, which is what we used to serve our gravy:

So two good roast dinners two weekends in a row now, which will make it all the more difficult to start on the being-sensible-and-not-eating-too-much regime which starts tomorrow.

Like most people, tomorrow we go back to work (I actually start a new job) after the Christmas and New Year Holiday. As a final fling before the inevitable new-year guilt kicks in, we chose a rib of beef for lunch today, served with roast potatoes, roast parsnips, Yorkshire pudding and vegetables.

We followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s method for cooking the beef: cook on high (230C) for 20 minutes before reducing the heat to 160C and cooking for a further 22 minutes* then resting for 30 minutes. This produced a slightly less rare meat than we were hoping for but the intense flavour of the well-hung meat came through regardless. It smelt faintly cheesy to me and reminded me of the difference in flavour between mutton and lamb.

The potatoes suffered a little from all the temperature changes but they were still pretty good. The Yorkshire pudding was the best we’ve achieved in the new oven, a perfect balance between doughy insides and crispy edges.

The vegetables looked pretty.

* These vary depending on the weight of the joint obviously, but the main idea was to give it an initial “sizzle” at high temperature before turning it down. For smallish (under 2kg) joints, it’s 20 minutes at 210C to 230C and then 10 minutes per 500g at 160C. He also suggests using a meat thermometer to keep exact track of it if you want to, and getting the temperature to 50C for rare beef. Ours went a bit over that due to inattention, probably 55C, which is likely why it wasn’t quite rare. It’s still less than the 60C that our meat thermometer suggests for rare beef though – Hugh says that the long resting time keeps it heating through for a while longer.