25/05/2008 – savoury chops (a family recipe, made with lamb chops), with garlic mashed potatoes and steamed green vegetables (broccoli and green beans). The carrots were cooked in the casserole dish with the chops, and they were sweet and delicious.

For dessert, Jac made what she called cheat’s trifle. We didn’t have any swiss roll, sherry or cream, but we had the other ingredients required to make trifle. She made the raspberry jelly with tinned fruit salad in it (the fruit salad was drained first), and then poured a layer of custard on top before refrigerating. Not trifle, but close enough. A very pleasant sweet with which to end a meal.

29/05/2008 – a chicken and vegetable stir-fry with rice. While Jac sliced the vegetables (onions, carrots, green beans and a little Chinese cabbage), I helped marinate the chicken thigh pieces, rubbing them in soy sauce, white pepper, sesame oil and a little corn flour. Jac fried the chicken in the wok until about three-quarters cooked, and removed it from the wok. Next, she fried the onions, carrots and beans. She then added garlic and ginger, and put the chicken back in the wok. The sauce was made using oyster sauce, soy sauce, Chinese vinegar and a little chicken stock, and it was superbly drinkable.

30/05/2008 – Jac made a tomato-based pasta sauce with bacon, green beans, garlic and chilli. She recently cleaned out the cupboard where she keeps the dried herbs and spices and discovered a container of dried chilli – a BIG container of dried chilli that she now wants to cook up. I don’t know how we ended up with all that chilli! It’s going to take a while to get through it all – it’s pretty potent stuff and you only need to add a small pinch or two to make a dish quite spicy. In the case of this pasta sauce, she added only a couple of pinches, and the chilli bite was just perfect. Definitely there, but not enough to create sweat and runny noses. Some people will say it’s not hot enough if you’re not sweating, but I prefer my chilli heat just before it hits that point.

She topped her pasta with curls of freshly grated cheese.

I love pasta dishes you can eat with a spoon! The beans still had a satisfying crunch to them. The bacon was… deliciously bacon. Can’t go wrong with bacon.