Recipe Rifle

I would say it had been a joyous year, but it hasn't. I mean, not especially. I would say that it has been an eventful year, but it hasn't. I would say that it has been an annus horribilis, but it hasn't been that either.

It's just been one of those years that goes from one month to the next. I have spent it mostly wiping down an Ikea highchair, opening the door to the Ocado man and marvelling at that thing where you spend 20 minutes tidying the kitchen only for it to still look like a fucking bombsite.

And it's been a year of TV suppers, eating off our knees in our 1.5 hour telly and dinner watching slot before our eyes glaze over and we can't concentrate and we simply must, must, must go to bed before we fall down. I have slumped entirely out of the habit of cooking for more than two people. We spent months and thousands on a kitchen extension only for us to have 3 dinner parties in 7 months. But Kitty likes it.

What of Kitty? She is a child now, almost no longer a toddler - though still toddlerish to her destructive habits, lack of reason, lack of responsiveness to bribery but she is at least old enough to sit quietly on the sofa watching Peppa Pig for nine hours.

So Merry Christmas, then. See you in the New Year. I've got a bread and butter pudding to tell you about and also a chicken, pork and apricot raised pie - if it works out.

My mind has gone. I felt it fading away about two months ago but it's really gone now. Bye bye. I can't read anything and am starting to do things like order 5 of the same thing on Ocado when I only wanted 1 and leaving the iron on.

When I was just newly up the duff I was reading Bring Up The Bodies and although I didn't really understand what was going on, there was no doubt that I was genuinely reading it, enjoying the, you know, atmosphere, if not actually taking on board any content. But then, like the bloke in Flowers for Algernon, I gradually ground to a halt, got stupider and stupider, more vague. I read fewer pages every night until my Kindle battery ran out and I just didn't bother to recharge it.

And that was the last literary thing I read. Now I read newspapers and Twitter and that's it. I can't even really concentrate on films. It's not forever, I know, but it is annoying. It happened with Kitty, too, but things were easy then. I just sat about humming to myself, eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and ordering things off the John Lewis website. Now, with nothing to read and nothing to think about all I do is obsess over when this will all be over and I don't have to be pregnant anymore - or ever again.

I am constantly struck by the pitifulness of the pregnant woman-with-toddler combination. Whenever I saw them in the playground I always used to think "Oh god, you poor cow." And now it's me. Yesterday, as I pushed Kitty's buggy through the freezing rain I was brought to mind of a character in The Mayor of Casterbridge*, the tedious Thomas Hardy novel, (which I hope for your sake you have not bothered reading): little Fanny Robin, pregnant out of wedlock by a scoundrel soldier and forced to walk for miles and miles through the snow, 8 months gone. I think that's what kills her. Or maybe she dies in childbirth. Anyway, it's grim and I dwell ghoulishly on poor Fanny Robin as I am forced, bookless, to focus inwards.

It will do that to you, being pregnant - it makes you selfish, self-pitying, green-eyed. It makes you covet things - slimness, agileness**, more help or the life of the woman whose children are all at school.

This is an inappropriate introduction to my recipe today, which is for bread and butter pudding - probably the antithesis of all this stark moaning. If stark moaning were a foodstuff, it would be a bad cheese sandwich from a motorway service station. Bread and butter pudding on the other hand, is the food equivalent of a really brilliant wedding speech.

I am not going to provide you with completely exact quantities for this because your pudding dishes will all be different and it's a very simple thing to make, so being very precise doesn't matter and you can judge things by eye yourself. And if I say that, you know it must be true.

This is based on Delia Smith's recipe, so if you can't handle the vague quantities thing (and I wouldn't blame you), do seek hers out online.

So here we go, Bread and Butter pudding.

Some white bread
butter
currants
sultanas
ground cinnamon, allspice or nutmeg or all three
some mixed candied peel might be nice? But don't go out specially for it
3 eggs (ok you really DO need 3 eggs here)
double cream
milk
50g sugar
some lemon zest if you have it

Preheat your oven to 180C

1 Generously butter your pudding dish. Then start buttering slices of white bread on one side, cutting them in half - rectangles or triangles, up to you, (crusts on) and arranging them in the dish.

2 You ought to be able to get about two layers of bread in here, and between the two layers, throw in some currants and sultanas and a sprinkling of spice or spices. Be generous. I used only Allspice, but a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg would be lovely as well.

3 Repeat this on the final layer.

4 In a jug beat the three eggs and then add to this the sugar, lemon zest then the double cream and milk in a ratio of about 2/3 double cream to 1/3 milk and mix.

NOW - this is the bit where you have to judge for yourself how much cream and milk you need. You don't want the egg-and-cream mixture to be slopping over the sides, but you want the top layer of bread to be soaking up the mixture from the underneath. Err on the side of caution and add less than you think you need - you can always top up the cream and milk afterwards.

Stir all this round and then pour over the bread. Give it a small jiggle. Mix some more cream and milk together and slosh over if you think it needs it.

5 Finish this off with a sprinkling of granulated sugar, if you have it, then shove in the oven for 30-40 mins. The eggy mixture ought to be just set.

Eat with custard or more cream, while staring into space.

*Fanny Robin is not, of course, in The Mayor of Casterbridge but in Far From The Madding Crowd - I TOLD you I'd lost it...
** agileness!! not EVEN a word!! Just give me some colouring-in to do...

I sometimes worry that I might be a witch. It would make sense - I am not totally unsinister, with my weird red hair, beady black eyes, fearsome straight nose and strong Welsh ancestry (full of witches, Wales).

And it would explain a series of terrible things happening to people I hate. Three people, whom I have had cause to dislike intensely, have come to sticky ends - one had a near-fatal heart attack and was then made redundant, another broke their leg in an horrific accident and the other one actually died of cancer. All completely true. All in the last 3 years.

I cannot deny that I wished bad things for all of these people. But at the same time I cannot feel too guilty about any of it, because that would be to acknowledge that I think I really might be a witch - and that question would bring the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields.

And anyway, terrible things happen to people I like, too - for example the woman I know whose newborn suddenly died last week, or my mother-in-law who had to have an emergency operation at Christmas. So if I do have any magical powers of Wicca, it probably isn't that I bring great pain and suffering to people who cross me - it's probably just that I bring shitty bad luck to everyone.

It is in this contrite mood that I turn to Celebrate, by Pippa Middleton. Everyone made terrific fun of this book when it came out, so furious were they all that she not only has a marvellous bottom and lovely swingy hair, but that she had landed a £400,000 book deal for writing about how to make paper chains.

But the thing is, this book is really terribly good and very inspiring and completely worth it if you are halfway inclined to throw parties but have, like me, little creative flair. And those famously obvious tips everyone scoffed at are actually perfectly sensible and not so obvious and stupid when you think of the awful, charmless parties you have been to where there's nowhere to sit, nowhere to put your coat and not enough to eat. If I turned up at any party even half as pretty as the ones shown in the pictures in Celebrate I'd be fucking beside myself with excitement.

So anyone who says this book is no good is just a bitter, miserable sour-face and I hope something awful happens to them.

It's also full of recipes, which I didn't realise. They are good, all useful classics like kedgeree, gravadlax and simnel cake and she has some brilliant ideas for inexpensive mass-canapes, like baking tiny baby new potatoes and finishing them off with a blob of sour cream and caviar (she suggests Sevruga, but there is nothing wrong with Lumpfish, frankly). AND she's got a twice-baked souffle thing, which I've been meaning to try for ages.

Pippa has also had the audacity to include a rainbow birthday cake, which caught my eye as it's Kitty's birthday quite soon and I do so like to present children with exactly what they want - i.e. hideous plastic toys with flashing light and noises, telly, full-fat, full-sugar, full-salt foodstuffs and enough E-numbers to blast them into space.

I was sceptical about the instructions for this cake, so I thought I would give it a go and possibly fuck it up, just to spread that essential extra bit of bad karma.

But even I didn't manage to ruin it too badly, although it didn't turn out anything like the picture. But that's my own fault. My complaint with this cake is not the method, which would be fine if you were a little more precise, artistic and meticulous than me, but that my blue and green came out as more or less the same colour. I think if I was going to do this again, I would know my limitations and maybe stick to only four colours - two in each sandwich half.

I might even, thinking about it, if I wanted to do four colours per sandwich half, fashion a cardboard cross to sit in the tin so that you could dollop the batter with confidence and whip the card away at the last minute to leave four reasonably even segments of colour.

I am also at a loss as to how one would present this without covering it with some sort of icing, as although the colours come out beautifully on the inside, the outside goes brown during cooking. Pippa helpfully includes a recipe for buttercream icing, which does the job: 125g soft butter, 250g icing sugar, 2 tbsp freshly boiled water and whisk.

The cake itself is delicious and the batter doesn't suffer too much from having the air knocked out of it when you mix in the food colouring.

Anyway so here we go:

Pippa's Rainbow Cake

the exact recipe can be found on p.312 of the excellent Celebrate, which I urge you to buy if you have half a mind to.

This mixture makes enough for a 20cm round or 18cm sq cake tin.

200g self-raising flour
200g sugar
200g butter at room temperature
4 eggs !! I know rather a lot
Large pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 180C.

1 Cream together 200g butter and 200g sugar. Add the salt.

2 Whisk in the four eggs one by one. You do this to stop the mixture from curdling. I must say, I have never managed to stop a cake mixture from curdling completely even when doing this - but at the same time it has never made the cake horrible or anything. Having said all this, best not to dump all four eggs in at the same time.

3 Now fold in the flour.

4 Now divide your cake mixture into as many separate bowls as you have colours and give each bowl its own teaspoon with which to mix in the colour. Add each colour until you are happy with the saturation and then spoon the colours into your (well-greased) tin.

I was worried about this as I assumed they would all merge together and create a hideous grey/brown cake. They do not, as cake batter is reasonably stiff, but a clumsy hand such as mine means that I didn't get a gorgeously even distribution of colour as someone more talented might have. But these things are all about practice.

3 Give the tin a little shake to even the top out and then bung in the oven for 30-40 mins.

After this has cooled you may find you need to level off the top with a knife in order to be able to sandwich your two halves together, with the prettiest cake bottom (eh? See what I did there??) facing uppermost. As I had buttercream on the outside, I filled the middle with jam.

And I was really very pleased with it. So if Pippa suddenly drops dead of a brain tumour, you will know who to blame.

I hope you realise how lucky you are to have me. How hard I work on your behalf. Do you know how much washing up there is involved in this little jig? I mean, I could just eat takeaway every night but I don't. I slaaaave away! Over a stove! Barefoot and pregnant! Just so you don't make a mess of recipes.

This is the sort of mood I'm in at the moment. Vile. Self-pitying. Martyrish. Rather than just doing whatever it takes to keep myself in a decent mood, I am tiring myself out, trying to do certain things, tick certain boxes and then snapping at everyone because I have run myself ragged or not had a nice time.

I've got to stop this. That way misery and divorce lies. I realised at some point last year that if you are a wife and mother, you control the mood in your house. It's not your husband, or your child, it's you. If you are in a rat, everyone suffers; if you are depressed, everyone suffers. Happy wife, goes the saying, happy life.

Take yesterday. I decided on a whim to cook a three-course meal for my husband from things picked out of Celebrate, by Pippa Middleton. They all looked tasty to me and I haven't been doing many new things recently, so I thought I would. The menu went as follows:

Mushroom cappucino
Gravadlax
Raspberry souffle

P-Mid did not, I ought to point out, put this menu together herself - these are just things I picked at random to make up a dinner.

And I ran myself absolutely flipping ragged doing it. By 8.30pm I was basically asleep on the sofa but hadn't yet finished the raspberry souffle, which was unbelievably complicated (although in the end a terrific success).

Anyway I recommend each of these dishes to you individually, (my husband said he had never eaten such good food in a domestic kitchen before, which makes rather a mockery of the last five years), but maybe don't do them altogether.

It would be too much to post all three recipes here, so I'll do each one in turn. Today it's mushroom cappucino, which is basically a little cup of delicious mushroom soup garnished with a froth. Giles says this is very early Nineties - Gordon Ramsay invented the soup cappucino apparently. But in 1993 I still hadn't been to a restaurant that wasn't McDonald's, so it all rather passed me by.

Generally-speaking I don't like soup, but what I mean by that is that I don't like a huge bowl of sloppy soup that you have to plough through. I'm always delighted with a little shot-glass amuse bouche of incredibly tasty soup that you gulp in one or two goes and go "yum yum". So this is what this is.

Mushroom cappucino
Serves 6

300g mixed mushrooms - chestnut/portobello mushrooms, for example
300ml milk
100ml double cream
dried mushrooms - wild or portobello or whatever
1 pint chicken stock
salt and pepper
4 spring onions
1 large clove garlic
butter and oil for frying
salt and pepper

1 Wash and roughly chop the mushrooms and spring onions. Melt about 40g butter with 2 tbsp groundut oil in a large pan and then sautee the mushrooms, spring onions and sliced garlic very hot for 4 minutes. Keep an eye on the time and keep everything moving around the pan. You do not want the garlic to catch and burn because it will taste filthy.

2 Now pour over the chicken stock and bring it all to a simmer for a minute.

3 Blend this however you can - with a stick blender or in a whizzer or whatever. Add 200ml milk, a long sloop of double cream and then season generously with salt and pepper.

4 To make your sprinkles, grind a palmful of dried mushrooms with a pinch of salt and about 10 turns of the pepper grinder in a peste and mortar if you have one. If not, you could probably just about get it all chopped up in a whizzer.

5 To serve put a ladleful of soup in a cup, topped with the froth off some frothed milk and a sprinkling of your dried mushroom powder.

To froth your milk, put about 100 ml in a pan and heat it gently then using one of those stick frother things, froth the milk in the pan over the heat. You will probably have to hold the pan at an angle and heat the cornered milk up over the flame.

(I am grateful to my sister Harriet for this tip as I had always tried to froth milk just heated up in the microwave and it doesn't work - at least, you don't get a foam.)

If you don't have a stick frother thingy, it's perfectly okay to just drizzle on top of the soup some more double cream and add your sprinkles to that. I'm sure you could still call it a mushroom cappucino. I won't tell Gordon.

Hello and welcome to part II of my Celebrate cooking odyssey, where I tell the tale of how I cooked three things from Pippa Middleton's book in one evening and almost had a nervous breakdown.

Today is gravadlax, which is home-cured salmon. I was really worried about this. I am terrified of supermarket raw fish. I think one ought to buy it, race home with it, cook it at 200C for 30 minutes and then eat it and throw the remains away in a council bin at least 300ft away from one's house.

(To all those who are on the verge of referring me to my home-made sushi phase - I used cooked, peeled prawns for that.)

So the idea that I was going to let some fish sit in my fridge "curing" for two days caused me intense anxiety. But not so anxious that I was going to go to a fishmonger for specially super salmon.

But I needn't have worried and you needn't worry either because it was just terrific and if I hadn't decided to do a moderately complicated starter and fiendishly tricky pudding either side of this, it would have been a complete doddle.

The premise is that you take some salmon, rub it with a lot of salt, herbs and GIN and then put something heavy on it and let it sit in your fridge for two days and it basically turns into smoked salmon. No, wait, it actually turns into gravadlax.

(Please see @emfrid, the associate-editor-at-large of this blog, who is a Scandi, for more information on an echt gravadlax.)

But this is vaugely how Pips does it. This is not her exact recipe as hers makes enough for 12 people.

Gravadlax for 2

2 salmon fillets
rind of one lemon
rind of one clementine or 1/2 an orange
2 tbsp gin - any old piss will do
1 small bunch dill
1 small bunch chives
2 handfuls maldon sea salt
a pinch of black peppercorns
1 tbsp coriander seeds

1 Put everything except the salmon in a whizzer and whizz. If your salmon has arrived with skin attached, remove this the best way you can see how.

2 Lay the salmon out on some clingfilm and then smother it all over with your curing paste. Wrap the fish reasonably tightly in cling film and then sandwich it between two chopping boards or other heavy flat things and stick it in the fridge for two days.

3 When you are ready to eat this, take it out of the fridge, take the clingfilm off (the gin will probably have slightly leaked out of the clingfilm - don't worry), and brush or scrape off with a knife most of the curing paste, just to make sure no-one bites down on a rogue still-whole peppercorn.

Give yourself a bit of time to plate this up as what you are going to do is slice it very very thinly with a fucking sharp knife and it requires a reasonable amount of care.

4 In advance, make up some condiments to go with this such as:

Toasted soda bread - essential

Pickled cucumber
In a pan dissolve 1 tbsp of sugar in 2 tbsp white wine or rice wine vinegar. Leave to cool and then drop into it strips of peeled, de-seeded cucumber - marinate for at least an hour

Dill sauce
1 heaped tsp dijon mustard
about 6-8 snips from a bunch of fresh dill
1/2 tsp sugar
2 tbsp light olive oil
1 tbsp white wine vinegar

Some capers

Some very finely-chopped shallot if you want

Ice-cold vodka shots????

Isn't this also sometimes eaten with boiled potatoes and sour cream or something? Em? Hello? Is this thing on?

These raspberry souffles nearly gave me a fucking heart attack while I was making them. They are absolutely the most complicated thing I have ever made. Anything that involves an instruction to "be careful not to scramble the eggs" sends me white with fear because I can scramble eggs just by looking at them.

But in actual fact although it was nerve-wracking, nothing went wrong and the result was absolutely terrific.

So please, if you have half a mind to do something like this, do give it a go with confidence; a recipe has to be so, so foolproof for me to attempt it for the first time in a bit of a panic and not to get it horribly wrong.

Most of the stages can be done in advance and I recommend you do just that to give yourself a break in order to cut down on Wild Hostess Panic Face.

Raspberry souffles
Makes 4

4 SMALL ramekins. And you must use ramekins here, not any other kind of ceramic bowl or any other size ramekin otherwise the souffle will not cook properly and you will get an eggy sludge in the middle.

some softened butter

For the coulis:
300g raspberries
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice

For the cornflour mixture:
90 ml double cream
100ml whole milk
4 tbsp cornflour
1 tbsp plain flour

For the custardy extra:
2 egg yolks
6 tbsp caster sugar

Also:
You also need 4 egg whites, so before you start, separate 4 eggs: in one bowl keep the whites and put two egg yolks in two separate bowls.

And, of course, 4 tsp raspberry jam. I used seedless because there is nothing more irritating than a raspberry seed in one's molar.

Here we go:

1 For the raspberry coulis, whiz the coulis ingredients in a whizzer, then pass the resultant sludge through a sieve to get the pips out. Have a taste and if it is unbearably sour then add some more sugar, but this will be mixed with a reasonably sugary thing later, so don't go nuts.

I missed a huge trick here and used fresh raspberries imported from, I don't know, Burkina FASO or somewhere, when I should have used frozen British raspberries instead, which are available now in great quantities in your local supermarket freezer section.

2 Brush the insides of 4 ramekins with some soft butter and coat with caster sugar and then shake out the excess. Put 1 heaped tsp of raspberry jam in the bottom and put in the fridge to chill.

3 Mix the cream, flour and cornflour to a smooth paste.

4 Warm the milk over a medium heat, until just threatening to boil, then gradually splash into your cornflour paste. Whisk until smooth, then pour all this back into the milk pan. Keep this over a medium heat and keep whisking until it has thickened. This is terribly good for your triceps. Take the pan off the heat when it looks sort of thick.

5 Put the egg yolks in a separate small bowl and add the caster sugar. Mix to a paste and then add to the cornflour mixture in the pan. Now put this back on a medium flame, whisking until it begins to bubble slightly around the edges. I was so terrified of scrambling the wretched yolks that I waited until there was literally one tiny bubble and then snatched the pan off the heat in a cross-eyed panic.

6 The mixture ought to now look a bit like custard. Take it off the heat and leave somewhere to cool completely. At this point, you could stick this in the fridge and forget about it for up to two days and just finish the souffles off before you're ready to serve them. I did the whole thing in one night, hence mega stress.

7 Now pre-heat the oven to 180. Put the egg whites in a large bowl and beat until you get soft peaks. Add 1 large spoonful of egg whites and 6 tbsp of raspberry coulis to your cooled custardy mixture and mix well.

8 Fold in the remaining egg whites until the mixture is just all pink. Fill the ramekins to the brim and level off with a spatula. Put them on a baking sheet and bake in the middle of the oven for 14 mins.

I'm sure you get the picture now: Celebrate is a pretty good book and you ought to buy it if you like the sound of it.

But just for laughs here's one last recipe from it, for a butternut squash lasagne, which is really great.

I don't especially like butternut squash but I often feel, especially at this dark time of year, that one really ought to make an effort to vary one's vegetable intake, or you can go for months just eating cheese on toast and baked beans.

This is a very good thing to do for an awful lot of people and it's also, if this is a factor, incredibly cheap to make.

Don't be scared of the white sauce involved in this (also called a bechamel). I will talk you through it. Now is as good a time as any to learn how to make one if you don't know how already.

Butternut Squash Lasagne
Serves 8
this is not Pippa's precise recipe, but it's very close.

1 large onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1.2kg butternut squash, peeled, deseeded and sliced into crescents about 0.5cm thick (that's about the width of a pound coin).
1 bunch sage leaves
4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
450g fresh spinach
some nutmeg
salt and pepper
12-15 fresh or dried lasagne pasta sheets
2 x 125g balls mozzarella

for the white sauce or bechamel
125g butter
125g flour
800ml milk
75 grated parmesan, plus extra for sprinkling between layers of lasagne

Preheat the oven to 200C

1 Put the butternut squash, onion and garlic on a baking tray and sloop over some light olive oil, a generous scattering of salt and pepper and a small handful of chopped sage leaves. Roast for 20 mins.

2 NOW - make your white sauce.

- Melt the butter in a pan. I know it seems like a lot, but this is how much you need, so just go for it. That much butter takes a while to melt, about 5-10 mins.

- When the butter is melted TAKE THE PAN OFF THE HEAT and then add the flour, a tablespoon at a time. Mix and mash together between spoonfuls until you have a thick paste.

- WITH THE PAN STILL OFF THE HEAT, splash over some milk and incorporate. Then splash over some more until you have a runny concoction.

- Now put this back over a medium flame and add the rest of the milk, whisking all the time. Keep stirring and whisking until this gets very thick, then take off the heat and add the 75g parmesan. Throw in a good pinch of salt and about 6 turns of the pepper grinder.

3 Put the spinach in a pan with about 1 cm water in the bottom and grate over a bit of nutmeg, about three swipes of the nut on the grater ought to do it as nutmeg is terribly strong and too much ruins everything.

Cook this for about 5 minutes until the spinach has wilted. Then drain in a colander or sieve and really squash it down to get all the water out. I also usually have a go at it with a pair of scissors, just to make it look and seem a less like a tangle of dead leaves caught in a drain.

4 If you are using dried lasagne sheets, you now have to blanch them for 3 mins in boiling water. Now, the minute I put my sheets into boiling water they stuck together, causing me to panic and burn my fingers off later frantically unsticking them by sliding a knife between the layers.

I have no idea how one is supposed to do this without the lasagne sticking together. A lot of oil in the water or what? All suggestions welcome in the comments box.

5 Now assemble your lasagne. Put a layer of pasta on the bottom, followed by the butternut squash and onion and the spinach. Then white sauce, then a bit of parmesan. layer this as best you can, it doesn't really matter what you end up with on top. Although if you finish with a layer of pasta, it's wise to make sure you've got quite a lot of white sauce left otherwise the pasta crisps up in the oven and crunchy pasta is a bit of a challenging mouthful.

6 Finish this off with sliced mozzarella. Stick in the oven for 25-30 mins. You can fry off some sage leaves in butter and stick them on the top if you're feeling really flash.

Alas, I just looked through my pictures and I can't find the one I took of this lasagne. Though I'm absolutely sure I did take one. Anyway I've written it now and I'm not writing up another bloody recipe for something I HAVE got a photo of - I've got SNOW to play in!!!! So you'll just have to imagine what it looks like.

Or buy Celebrate, it's there on p. 30 looking splendid.

In my brief but intensive 2-year study in parenting I have arrived at the conclusion that when it comes to children, it's all about picking your battles.

It is so easy just to spend all day shouting at your kid(s) but is that nice for anyone? No. One gets such a sore throat. So what I have ended up doing is spending all day wondering whether I should make a fuss about this or that thing that Kitty is doing or just let go. I don't always get it right. But neither do I end up shouting very much.

Here are some things that I have decided not to fight her about:

1 Drawing on the walls
2 Throwing marbles
3 Covering herself in fingerpaint when we are fingerpainting
4 Wanting to stand up while her nappy is being changed
5 Playing on an unattended iPad
6 Eating an unattended eye-level chocolate or biscuit
7 Finishing food

I even often, unbidden, let her behave like a complete animal, such as this evening, when she ate her dinner, standing up, straight from the pan with a wooden spoon:

Here are some things that I am a massive horrible strict bitch about at all times:

1 Bedtime
2 Physical aggression towards any Apple product
3 Pabbling her fingers in her water glass
4 Smooshing her hands into her food
5 Charging into the road
6 Snatching things off children we don't know. With the children of friends, it's basically every toddler for himself

Cooking is often about picking your battles, too. When asked about catering, I am always preaching on about making something simple that isn't going to stress your head, like spaghetti bolognese or shepherd's pie or toad in the hole. But then whenever we DO have people round, I leave everything to my husband, who makes some giant complicated thing with eight side dishes and all I have to do is the washing up and light some scented candles.

But it means I have come to fear mass catering again. So this weekend, after I had invited Katie Razzall off the Channel 4 news and her terrifically handsome actor husband Oz and their two children round for lunch, I said that I would do the cooking. After consulting this blog for advice, I decided to make a Shepherd's Pie and peas and also Spotted Dog, just because it was so incredibly popular last time I made it. The pudding was the battle bit, but I just bought the custard - Madagascan Vanilla something or other from Waitrose. Delicious.

But I decided that the Shepherd's Pie would also have an element of battle in it - the topping. I insist on a reasonbly time-consuming topping for Shepherd's and Cottage Pie, which involves passing the potatoes through a ricer or a mouli legume, which gives a crunchy sort of rosti top, rather than just mashing it up and spreading it on top.

(Incidentally, my husband had a mouli legume when I moved in, the like of which I had not seen since I last saw one in my mother's house. This was very surprising as he had no cafetiere, or food in the fridge and had long run out of loo roll so there was some kitchen paper in the downstairs bog. He also kept the Flymo in the kitchen. But he had this mouli, some pearl caviar spoons and a £300 Japanese sushi knife. It made no sense.)

I also decided to do battle with the peas. Just boring old peas won't do if you are dishing up such an unglamorous, although delightful, feast as Shepherd's Pie and a suet pudding. So I thought I would do that thing where you tart them up with bacon and onions and cream - and it was absolutely terrific and well worth the fight.

Posh peas
With thanks to Tom Parker Bowles, who's cookbook Let's Eat is brilliant. All this royal in-law puffing is getting a bit suspicious isn't it? As it happens, I can't honestly say I'd turn down a gong, just in case anyone is listening.

Frozen peas (1 ladleful pp)
Frozen baby broad beans (1tbsp pp)
1 packet lardons, or 10 bacon rashers cut up smallish
1 large or two small onions
1 glass of shitty white wine
some cream if you have it
a scattering of chopped mint, if you have it

1 Fry the lardons over a medium heat until coloured.

(If you have been forced, like me, to buy reasonably cheap lardons, they will release the most ghastly amount of dribble and spit - just pour this off, while puckering your face in disgust, so that the lardons don't just steam grimly in the liquid, and carry on frying until done.)

2 Add the chopped onions and fry all this up together gently for a good 15 minutes. Add your glass of shitty wine, turn up the heat and bubble down until the bottom of the pan is about 90% dry.

3 Turn the heat down and add about 2 tbsp of cream if you have it.

4 About 10 minutes before you want to eat, add your peas and beans to the onion and bacon mix and cook all this over a medium heat for about 10 mins. Scatter over the optional mint.

Eat, while ignoring the scribble all over the walls.

I had salmon en croute once at someone's house and it was absolutely disgusting.

The cook had failed to use any salt, because they are the sort of person who thinks that any salt kills you stone dead within weeks. My view is that you can either use a decent amount of salt in your cooking and run the extremely tiny risk of it doing you some damage, or you can use no salt and die of a) starvation b) boredom. And get some mean leg cramps in the night.

But there's no reason why salmon en croute shouldn't be a delicious thing. It's wrapped in pastry!! I mentally file this kind of thing under my "finishing school" category of cooking. Quiches and souffles are also filed under this category. Baked bone marrow and suet puddings are filed under "New British", curries and stir-fries go under "student", lemon meringue pie, soup, and devilled kidneys go under "yuk" and so on.

I consulted the internet for a good way to do this and came across something by Gordon Ramsay. I'm normally shy of things by Gordon Ramsay or Gary Rhodes or anyone who has spent more of their waking hours in a kitchen than they have outside; they make all sorts of insane assumptions about the domestic cook, like that they will have a fish kettle, or a sugar thermometer, or that they are cooking for 80 people.

But this looked really quite straightforward. And it was! And it was also delicious - I really recommend it. It looks fantastically fiddly and impressive but it was really very easy. It also has the tremendous advantage that you can do all of it in advance and then just shove it in the oven 1/2 an hour before you want to eat.

It also doesn't create a lot of mess and it doesn't stink your house out while cooking. So it's no wonder really that it was served at every dinner party during the 70s and 80s country-wide. So out, it's got to come back in soon. I say bring it back now.

Roughly Gordon Ramsay's Salmon en Croute
Serves 4 (with something on the side)

2 salmon fillets - if you can get the salmon from a fish counter or fishmonger who can take the skin off, otherwise you are going to have to do it yourself and you will most likely make a huge buggery mess of it. Trust me, I have a shimmering range of the most expensive fish-skinning knives available for purchase legally and I can't do it nicely

Small bunch of dill
1 tsp-ish chopped lemon zest
1 tbsp wholegrain mustard, yes I know this sounds weird but it works
about 40g butter at room temperature (this is important so just be patient with it)
salt and pepper
1 packet all-butter puff pastry from jus-roll (not just the puff, in the green packet, but the all-butter puff, in the gold packet)
*My sister has pointed out to me that in Waitrose, if there is no all-butter puff available in the chiller cabinet, Waitrose have their own all-butter puff available frozen. Thank you Harriet for this most useful tip.*
1 egg, beaten, in a small bowl

Preheat the oven to 200C

1 Make a herb butter by smooshing together about 2 tbsps of chopped dill with a large pinch of salt, about 7 twists of the pepper grinder and the butter.

2 Dry the salmon fillets well with kitchen paper to help the butter stick and then paste one upturned curvy fillet side with the herb butter and the other upturned curvy fillet side with the mustard. Then fit these fillets together to make a reasonably even shape - like a yin yang sign. Put this to one side.

3 Roll out your pastry to a thickness of a £1 coin. This is thinner than you think it is, so maybe just have a quick check. Put the salmon in the middle of the pastry. Brush the pastry with beaten egg and then fold the sides up over the salmon like you're wrapping a present (have flashback here to most awful Christmas present received). Don't overlap the two long ends of pastry too much otherwise you'll have a great ridge of pastry down the middle of the salmon, which will not look chic.

4 Trim the sides and ends as much as you need to and then tuck the ends in under the salmon. Roll your parcel over so the seam is underneath and place on a greased or non-stick baking tray. Mark three slits diagnoally across the back of the bundle to let steam escape.

5 Brush the whole thing over with more beaten egg and then sprinkle with sea salt and more pepper for good measure.

6 Bake in the middle of your oven for 35 mins. The recipe said 20-25 mins but it was still cool in the centre after that time and after 35 mins it wasn't overcooked or burnt - and I've got a mega mental fan oven that razzes the living shit out of everything - so you ought to be okay.

And that's it! When it comes out, slice on the diagonal and serve with something nice. A salad maybe, if that's not the most boring thing I've ever said.

I would say here that obviously this is nice because it's wrapped in pastry - how could it not be? But I know for a fact that pastry can only do so much.

My husband absolutely loves Chinese food. If you want to make him seriously happy, ring him up and say "Shall we go out for dim sum?" This year for his birthday I am going to make a thing happen that I've failed to every year we've been together to do, and organise a party at a Chinese restaurant, get one of those tables with a big swirly round glass rotating thing in the middle. It's all he wants really, ever - to be about to sit down to a big spread of Chinese platefuls.

But as well as dainty dim sum bites, he also likes the scarier aspects of Chinese food; he is completely down with the Chinese love of texture - finding a plateful of cold jellyfish or chicken's feet as interesteing as a steamed pork bun. Often even more so.

I've never had that much success cooking Chinese food. Curries are easy, but I start out trying to make something Chinese and it turns into a Thai stir-fry.

But the other day I stumbled across a recipe for an Aromatic (i.e. Chinese) pork belly hotpot. There is a very famous Singaporean restaurant in North London called Singapore Garden, which does something very similar and I thought I would re-create it for Giles last night.

Because he is a bit down in the dumps, my husband. He is so, so bored. It is dark. We are not in the middle of an exciting boxset. I am grumpy and fat and not interested in anything except lying down and not being spoken to or looked directly in the eye.

Anyway this thing, from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, was absolutely terrific. Really amazing. And very simple, in fact - it only required a few things and the prep was easy.

I had been considering doing a Massaman curry but the list of ingredients was quite bonkers. Reading it and losing more and more heart as the ingredient list went endlessly on brought to mind that thing of when someone suggests a night out and it all sounds great but then they start saying "... the restaurant's in Putney... then we could all go out dancing...." and you look outside and it's just started snowing again and you say "Oh actually I think I've got a bit of a throat coming on, might give it a miss *Click Brrrr.*"

So if you like the sound of this hotpot, please give it a go because it produces something really quite echt and marvellous. It is, because it is pork belly, quite fatty and glutionous, so if you've got a bit of a "thing" about fat, this isn't for you. I mostly mean you, Becky B.

The only other drawback is that, like a lot of Chinese food, that it makes you thirsty as hell afterwards.

Aromatic Pork Belly Hotpot
Serves 4

1kg pork belly, skin on
8 spring onions
dried chillies
1 fresh red chilli
1 pint chicken stock
100ml light soy sauce (absolutely not dark)
75ml Chinese rice or mirin wine
25ml rice wine vinegar
2 tbsp light brown sugar
3 star anise fruits (fruits??? have always thought that was stupid)
10cm fresh ginger peeled and cut into slim pieces. Yes I know it is hard with a knobbly bit of ginger to achieve this, but just do your best
1 nest of fine egg noodles per person
1 little whatsit of baby bok choi per person

1 Chop up your belly into chunks, leaving the skin on

2 Put it in a pot and cover it with boiling water and simmer for 5 minutes. Scoop off the yukky scum that floats to the top. Try to ignore the slightly nasty porky stench.

3 Drain the pork, give the pan a rinse and then put the meat back in. Chop 5 spring onions in half and chuck these in then add the stock, soy sauce, rice wine, rice vinegar, sugar, star anise, ginger and a good pinch of dried chilli.

4 Now simmer all this for 2 hours with a lid firmly on.

5 After this time, lift the pork out with a slotted spoon and put to one side. If you have a gravy separator, run the remaining liquid through it to get the worst of the grease off. If you don't, do your best skimming the top off the liquid with a spoon.

6 Now boil the liquid briskly to reduce it a bit. Keep tasting as it boils because what you don't want is to reduce it too much and just get a far, far too salty thing. Better it still be a bit runny but edible.

7 Put the pork back into the liquid and turn the bok choi in the stew for 5-10 mins to steam.

8 Serve on a bed of noodles with some fresh chilli (no seeds) and spring onions cut on the diagonal over the top.

Eat and try to look on the bright side.

I had a nightmare last night: it was that my husband said that if I didn't want to have any more than two children then he was going to go and have more with someone else. He was very matter of fact about it (in the dream) and sort of morphed into Tom Hardy in The Take - and not in a good way, ladies. In fact, it was ghastly. I woke up feeling uneasy and rather than barking at him and boxing his ears as is the usual way, was very nice all morning.

I have spent the entirety of this pregnancy feeling conflicted and inadequate for loudly calling it quits at two children. "I do not have the guts," I say to people, "for three." And I don't. At some point, you have to be realistic about what you are like. I am physically cowardly, mentally unreliable and morally slippery.

I just want to go on fucking holiday to somewhere hot and sunny and I do not want to have to buy a giant ugly car.

I don't want to do all this without children, you understand. I want to take children on holiday, take them to beaches and swimming pools, rub fragile shoulder blades with suncream, let them have two Cokes with lunch then pretend to lose count so they have three. Later, when they're older and if they're still talking to me, maybe we'll go somewhere crazy with them, like Cuba or India or Russia.

But I do not want to wait another six or seven years before we're able to jet off easily. And if we have three, could we even afford to go anywhere? We'd need three hotel rooms, five plane tickets, eighteen arms. An unlimited supply of benzos. Three children, to me, never seems like two children + 1, it seems like two children squared.

And yet... and yet... I am one of four children. Four sisters. One, two, three, four - that's us. A never-ending stampede of hair and teeth and nails and words. There are so many of us that we are rarely all in the same room at the same time. Our relationship with our mother is like the painting of the Forth Bridge. Once she's got off the phone with the last one, it's time to ring the first one all over again.

Two children is lonely. Suburban. It's neat and dreary. And what if - oh god, horror - one of them moves to live in another country? Worst nightmare. What if neither have their own children? What if neither turns out to be the life-saving scientist I secretly crave to bring into the world? What if it's the third one who would have found a cure for cancer, or discovered a clean, free, sustainable source of energy for the world?

I am being stupid. Three children would kill me. Kill. Me. And my marriage. And they won't be scientists - who am I kidding. They will be pointless arts graduates like me. And they won't be lonely, I say to myself. They will naturally end up being better at making friends than I was, what with no instant gang at home.

I say two children is lonely but there was no lonelier person in the world than me during the summer holidays as a 14 year-old, sitting out the long, friendless six week stint in our London house, never going anywhere, never doing anything; there were just too many of us, at such wildly different ages, to configure any sort of holiday that would suit everyone. That won't need to be Kitty; we'll be getting on a plane to Croatia, just to see what's there.

This pregnancy has driven me to the edge of madness as it is; I find nothing about it charming, or fulfilling or interesting. It is doing unspeakable damage to vital areas of my body. It makes me a poorly-motived and boring parent. Kitty has already had to suffer the mild neglect and lack of stimulation caused by one extra gestation, why should she have to suffer two?

This is what goes round and round in my head. Endlessly, day after day. I feel like I ought to have more than two children - for Kitty's sake. But precisely bearing her, and only her, welfare in mind, I also think the exact opposite.

I cannot win. I can only hope that it really was only a dream, not my husband whispering sleepy truths into my slumbering ear.

Continuing on the theme of Kitty, I have been forging on apace with her international gastronomic education (just so she knows what to eat when we arrive at teatime in, say, Bucharest).

We have turned recently - keeping things simple - to France.

I am always casting about for things to do with my round griddle pan as part of my resolution not to leave kitchen equipment sitting about idle; I thought I would capitalise on Kitty's love of croissants to introduce a filled croissant to our breakfast repetoire.

A split croissant filled with either Nutella or ham and cheese goes down extremely well and it's very easy to do on a hot griddle pan: split, fill, place on griddle, squash with flat implement for 4 mins each side.

Because if she's not going to be a scientist, she's might as well know what to order on a History of Art trip to Paris.

A small personality flaw both my husband and I display is haste. We fuck up otherwise simple tasks just by going at them fast, angrily, drunk, twenty minutes before we have to leave the house.

There are people in the world who do not do this. They plan everything out, get all the bits out of the box, remove all the plastic, smooth out the instructions, turn off their phone, put Classic FM on and proceed with great care and thought until the thing is done to a craftsman's standard.

I find these sort of people quite annoying. I am usually hovering in the background shrieking "Just shove it all in and turn it on! It'll be fine!"

Occasionally great haste doesn't mater. You CAN do something in eight seconds flat and it works out well. I have never planned a piece of writing, for example, and neither has my husband. We both attack our keyboards in a great fury, writing as if we're running after a bus on which we have left our wallet, phone, keys and firstborn. It's always worked okay for Giles. I admit that I am more of a work in progress - but what I will say is that any variance in quality in my writing never has anything to do with how long it took me.

But anyway, because about 70% of the time, great haste doesn't do you any damage, it's never been a flaw I've sought very hard to correct. But in cooking, especially cooking things for the first time, that great haste can get you in the most serious amount of miserable shit. Haste and a new recipe do not work well together - an awful lot of stuff ends up in the bin, down the sink and you are left exhausted, eating mousetrap and crackers for dinner. Be as hasty as you like with something you've done a thousand times, but you rush a new foe at your own peril.

Like this birthday cake, which I made for Kitty's 2nd birthday party this weekend. The base was a chocolate cake from Edd Kimber's excellent book Say It With Cake. It is a terrific cake: it is plain, but delicious and not too sweet. I was very concerned that it would have a too grown-up, almost bitter flavour (due to all the 70% cocoa solids specified),but it went down very well with the six children under six at Kitty's birthday tea.

The cake is also nice and solid, so takes icing and decoration well - and it keeps brilliantly and is completely edible for days afterwards, unlike a bloody sponge, which crumbles to dust within 24 hours and is fit for nothing but the bin.

The drawback is that it is not a dump-and-stir, there are various different moving parts, which require your attention for a few hours and must not be combined with drunkenness, childcare of the under 5s or a pressing need to be somewhere soon. It is not hard, you understand, but you do need to concentrate.

So here we go

For the cake
30g cocoa powder
50ml strong hot coffee (I used instant, which was fine. If you are very touchy about caffeine for children, just use hot water or decaf)
50ml hot water
200g butter
200g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids - I used Green & Blacks cooking stuff)
300g soft light brown sugar
4 eggs
175g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder

For the chocolate buttercream
NB - I baked the cake in one tin, rather than in 2 sandwich tins, so this quantity of buttecream was too much. If you are baking this in one tin, rather than two, I'd say to halve the buttercream quantities, or at least reduce buy a third.

100g dark chocolate, chopped
175g butter at room temperature
75ml double cream
375g icing sugar
a pinch of salt

1 Set oven to 180 and then grease/line either 2 x 20cm shallow sandwich tins or just one deep 20cm tin. Square or round, doesn't matter.

2 Put the cocoa in a little bowl and pour over the hot coffee AND hot water and mix it to a sort of creamy liquidy consistency and then set to one side.

3 Set a heatproof bowl over a pan of water on the hob - so just not a metal one. The bottom of the bowl should not touch the water and the pan ought to be on the lowest setting of your smallest plate or burner. Now pile in the 200g butter, cut into chunks and the chocolate, chopped.

Now just leave this alone. Don't turn the heat up, even if it looks like it's not doing anything for ages and ages. Butter-and-chocolate splits incredibly easily and when it does, it's completely unusable. I have seen otherwise excellent and competent cooks split butter-and-chocolate so it's not just me being a bellend. So just let it sit there melting very slowly. It might take about 20 mins but that's just too bad. You can stir it round a bit at the end just to encourage it to melt entirely.

An unsplit chocolate and butter mix

4 Whisk the sugar and eggs together until pale. Pour in your melted chocolate and butter and whisk to mix.

(NB do not bother to wash up this bowl now - just scrape it clean with a spatula because you might as well use it for the buttercream later)

5 Sift the flour and baking powder over this mixture and fold together until the flour has disappeared. Now stir in the cocoa mixture that you set to one side at the start of this little adventure.

6 Either divide this between two tins or put it in your one big one.

7 Two tins will take 30 mins to cook but one big one took nearly an hour. Start off with 40 mins and then keep testing with a skewer every 10 mins thereafter. Balance a sheet of foil over the top of the cake if you worry that your oven is too vigorous and that the top might burn.

8 To make the buttercream, melt the chocolate in your already-used heatproof bowl using the method described above. In a separate bowl whisk the butter for a few minutes until it is approximately "light and fluffy". Pour in the double cream cautiously and whisk all this together.

9 Add the icing sugar, one large tablespoon at a time. I have never found a way of doing this that doesn't leave your kitchen looking like a rock star's dressing room - you might be more clever about it. Add the pinch of salt and continue to beat until it all looks like buttercream - about a minute or so. Now pour over the melted chocolate and beat a bit more. Quite hard on the old arms, this, if you are using a hand mixer.

Rock star dressing room? No, my kitchen while buttercream is in progress

10 To put this together, you can either sandwich the two halves together with the buttercream or just slap the buttercream all the way round one big one. Leave the buttercream to set for a bit on the cake before you lay the icing over.

11 I have never used this Playdoh-like icing (sometimes called "sugarpaste") before, and I assumed it would be a nightmare, but it was quite straightforward. I bought one pack of white pre-rolled stuff, which was brilliant and one pack of ready-to-roll stuff, because I wanted to knead some food colouring into it.

Kneading food coloring into ready-to-roll is actually pretty easy BUT I found rolling it out in order to lay over the cake not so straightforward. It's possible that it was because it was a bit warm from having the colour kneaded into it and needed to be chilled before the final application. I found some icing sugar dusted on to my worksurface helped.

So you just splosh or scatter over food colouring and knead the icing like you would knead dough

Decorate at will.

Anyway so like I said: not a cake to do in a hurry, but excellent for any birthday girl or boy of any age.

NB: all decorations for this Peppa Pig cake came from Waitrose - including wafer daisies, sugarpaste, food colouring and sugar butterflies. Peppa Pig herself is a fridge magnet that came free with a magazine.

Every so often, I like to remind my husband exactly who is boss in this little domestic disaster we call home. I think he thinks it's him. And that's fine. Most of the time, I like to encourage him to think that it's him. I don't like to tell him exactly how long it would take him to die of starvation, unhappiness and the inability to locate his shoes, or keys, or wallet, should I suddenly vanish.

But once in a while, I like him to see things plainly.

Like the other day, he asked me what we were having for dinner. And I said, as cheerfully as I could (because it is one of my slight cop-out dinners) "A spanish OMELETTE!!!" I said it in the exact manner that Kitty suggests that we all go and watch Peppa Pig. ("I know! I know! Less WATS PEPPA PIIIIIIIIIIG!?!?!")

"Oh," he said, "can I not have any potato in my half? I mean, I like potato, but it's not much use to me steamed and then hidden in egg."

"I see," I said. And then that evening as a punishment, almost worthy of Mrs Twit, I set about making him a dinner containing all the things I know hates - celery, walnuts, dill - a recipe for which I just happened to have handily torn out of a magazine, although I'm afraid I don't know which one. I thought it was delicious.

So here we go -

Beetroot and celeriac coleslaw with goat's cheese "croutons"
Serves 4 as a light lunch.

(Sorry I have added that assholish "croutons" thing because it's actually just cheese on toast, but whenever I see that sort of ludicrous marketing caper on a menu it makes me laugh so much that I have vowed to use it here at least once.)

This is an awful lot easier if you have a food processor with a grating attachment, but I did it all by hand and it was perfectly okay and I am pregnant and in a terrible mood so you've got no excuse really.

for the slaw
1 small celeriac
2 sticks celery, de-strung and chopped
2 apples, skin on
2 small raw beetroot, peeled
handful walnuts, chopped

for the dressing
1 large tbsp greek yoghurt
small bunch dill, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dijon mustard
1/2 tsp white or red wine vinegar
salt and pepper
the juice and zest of 1 lemon

for the croutons
1 stick baguette or a petit parisienne
2 packs rindless goat's cheese

1 Grate the celeriac and apple and put in a bowlful of cold water with half the lemon juice, to stop it from going brown.

2 Grate the beets and mix with the chopped celery. Then drain the apple and celeriac well and add.

3 Mix together the dressing ingredients and mix into the veg - scatter over some dill leaves and walnuts to serve.

4 Slice the bread on a dramatic vertical and lightly toast one side under the grill, then load the other side with goat's cheese and grill for a few minutes

To his credit, my husband took it all like a man and has not made specific requests about dinner since.

There is a time in life that all mothers dread. It's worse than childbirth, because it goes on for longer, it's worse than breastfeeding, because it comes out of the blue. It's worse than looming housework, because housework can at least sometimes be soothing in its mindless repetition.

It's when your toddler drops their afternoon nap. Because right up until they are about two, or even two and a half (or even three if you're really lucky) the little suckers go to sleep for up to two hours after lunch, allowing you to do whatever the FUCK you want. I mean, you can't leave the house, but those two hours are yours, yours, yours and no-one can take them away from you.

The minute your child nods off at lunch also pretty much marks the end of the day because mornings are the hardest work with toddlers. As soon as they're a-bed, you've got two hours to do WHATEVER!!!! and then in the afternoon you can both just doss around eating fingerpaint until bedtime.

It's hardest on the mother if the child has been doing this nap strictly, in its bed, for 2 hours exactly, pretty much since birth. If you've been more relaxed about it, letting the child nap in a buggy while you sail off to, I don't know, Westfield or something on the overland the transition to no nap is less horrific - you are used to being flexible, you are used to just dealing with every day as it comes.

I am not like that. I am not bendy, like a willow - I am rigid, like an oak tree. Or maybe just doomed, like the ash.

It's not like I didn't know that Kitty was going to drop her nap. In fact, I'm surprised she's kept it up for this long. But now we find ourselves in a mid-nap-dropping slippery patch. She still needs to have a little kip but she won't pass out in front of the telly and won't go to sleep in her cot. She will only now nod off in the car, or in her buggy.

Which means I have to go out, somewhere, at about 2pm, so that she will sleep between 2ish and 2.30ish.

As the end of the nap loomed, I dreaded this. But in actual fact, it is oddly freeing.

(And I am lucky - some toddlers suddenly do a thing where if they nod off for even 2 minutes after lunch, they won't go to sleep until 9 or 10pm at night. Though that could well happen to Kitty I suppose.)

A thing that mothers who choose to be very strict about a routine sometimes complain about is that you are confined to the house, you can't really ever go out for lunch and you have to rush back from whatever you are doing in the morning so that the child doesn't fall asleep on the way home and thus ruin completely your two hours of peace. You are in a gilded cage. That's been me for two years.

So today, for example, as it's nice and sunny I'm quite looking forward to bundling us both up and going for a very relaxed stroll somewhere - because there is no more relaxing walk to have than when you are pushing a sleeping child in a buggy (and that child is supposed to be asleep). Maybe we'll go to Primrose Hill? Maybe we'll go to Hampstead? North West London is our oyster.

In other news, my husband is away in Canda until next week, which means that Kitty and I are even more loose, twisting in the wind really, with nowhere much to go and nothing much to do. We can eat our dinner in a fancy restaurant at a moment's notice. Or just come home and eat crackers in front of the telly in our pants. Not that my husband ever prevents this sort of spontaneity, you understand, just that it is somehow less likely.

I saw my husband off on his chilly cross-Atlantic adventure with a luxury baked potato, which is a baked potato loaded with sour cream, caviar, chopped egg and spring onions. Not expensive caviar, just lumpfish caviar from the deli fridge at Waitrose - although we did once do this with really expenseive stuff and drank champagne with it; possibly one of the best dinners of my life.

I only learnt how to bake potatoes properly in the last two years or so - I'd never really done it before. What you must do is bake them at the absolute highest temperature that your oven will go for 1 hour - not at 180 for 1hr 15 or 200 for 45 min or any such nonsense. FULL HEAT, 1hour.

Then split, butter, sour cream, caviar (one little pot is enough for 2 people) I boiled egg chopped finely, some spring onion. Whether or not you have champagne too is up to you in that moment. Because, sometimes, there's nothing quite like just winging it.

My husband has been away filming in Canada for the last week and I have surprised myself by not having a nervous breakdown and not having to go and live at my mum's house.

I really am surprised about this, I am usually absolutely terrible at being by myself, which is strange for someone who is mostly so antisocial and so unfriendly. I always think I will be much better, much more at peace if I were alone. But then that time comes around and I find myself adrift, mad, starey-eyed, jumping at small noises, unable to feed myself or get anything done. Give me one hour alone and I will give you the world. Give me all day and I will fall to drink and despair.

Anyway I have started thinking in the last few days that in fact being a single parent might be alright. People go on and on about how hard it is - but why? You can do whatever the fuck you like with your kids, you don't have to think about anyone except you and your children. You can go about looking an absolute fright. There is hardly any laundry, you can watch whatever you like on tv - or sit about painting your nails all night. People absolutely kill themselves to help you out and ring you up going "How ARE you?" and then you can have a 45 min conversation with them because no-one has had to pause a telly programme while you yak away.

Not that I haven't missed my husband. The house is dead without his machine-gun laughter, internal tussles, professional feuds, industrial gossip and home improvement schemes; it is too quiet without him clattering down the stairs in that particular way, ("DDDRRR DDDDR DDRR... DUD-DUD-DUD-DUD-DUD-DDDDDDUNT"), and too massive without him appearing suddenly round corners and through doors, shoulders first - an unstoppable wall of ancient sweater and curly hair and chatter.

No, it's not that. It's just that I just thought that on top of missing my husband's presence, the very fact of being alone would be terrible, but it hasn't been.

But, obviously, I'm being stupid. Being single is exhausting, let alone being a single parent. And I forget all the boring shit that my husband shields me from: tax returns, insurance, bills, car administration, other men, paid employment. If I had to do THAT all by myself, what with my weak veins and fear of paperwork and I would die writing and screaming in 48 hours.

This is without even mentioning that Kitty has been in both good health and in an uncommonly co-operative mood for the last week. She even stopped insisting - the day Giles left for Canada - that she be carried the four flights upstairs to bed. I won't go as far as to say that it was "as if she knew" that I just couldn't do it, because Kitty's empathy is still pretty nascent, but I'm certainly grateful for it.

There is no reason for me to make this chocolate cake, I'm simply curious about it - it was the cake that I was going to make for Kitty's birthday but then changed my mind. And I have time on my hands today as it is bloody snowing again, so we are confined indoors.

James Martin, whose recipe this is, is for me the culinary equivalent of Kim Kardashian or Emeli Sande: I don't really understand who they are or why I keep hearing about them, but I have accepted their place on the planet with resigned weariness.

This cake is actually very similar the birthday cake I made, but it was much easier. The critical difference is that this gives you a flat, tray-bakey cake, rather than the echt high birthday cake shape you're really after.

A Chocolate Cake by James Martin

For the cake
200g plain chocolate. Mr Martin recommended I use one with low cocoa solids, but I didn't have any, so I just used Waitrose plain cooking chocolate, which was 75% solids. On reflection, although the cake is good as it is, it would have been better to have used the plain Waitrose Belgian chocolate that Mr Martin specified. So do that.
200g butter
200g light brown sugar
200g self-raising flour
100 ml sour cream
100ml hot water
2 eggs, beaten
5 tbsp cocoa powder

For the icing
100g plain chocolate
170g can condensed milk - I could only find a 390g tin, so measured 170g out on some scales.
100 g butter

Preheat your oven to 160C normal oven and 140C fan oven
Grease and line a 22cm square cake tin

1 Melt the chocolate, butter and sugar in a pan with the hot water. Put it on the smallest burner at the lowest heat and just wait for it to melt. It might take 20 mins. Be patient.

2 Sift together the flour and cocoa powder into a bowl

3 Once the chocolate mixture has melted, set it aside for a few minutes to let it briefly cool and then whisk in the soured cream and then the eggs.

4 Now add the flour mixture to the chocolate in large spoonfuls, mixing to combine after each one. When it has all been incorporated, pour the mixture into your tin and bake for 55 mins.

5 For the ganache icing, put all the ingredients into a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of water. The bottom of the bowl must not touch the water. Now put the pan on your lowest burner set at the lowest heat.

Recipes always instruct you that the water must be "barely simmering". I say it need not simmer AT ALL. It just needs to be hot. Just think about how easily chocolate and butter melts in your hand, let alone in hot water. This sort of thing splits in the blink of an eye, so it's worth just letting it melt really slowly while you read some bit of the Sunday papers that you missed first time round.

6 Leave the ganache to cool for 20 mins and then spread over the top of the cake. I found that there was about 50% too much ganache in the end, so you could reduce the quantities if you wanted. Bear in mind that ganache doesn't look very nice even when cooked correctly - it goes sort of gluey and looks a bit split at the best of times, so don't worry if yours doesn't look luscious

7 Decorate at will. I love the look of these millions of tiny sugar balls all over the top - like a cake you'd get in a very old-fashioned bakery.

Now eat the whole thing all by yourself. After all, there's no-one to see.

I don't know why this photo has come out blue

It occured to me the other day that I might be a tiny bit of a control freak. I arrived at this conclusion while thinking the other morning about why is it that I hate being pregnant quite so much.

Because I suspect I hate being pregnant an uncommon amount - I think I hate it and find it more onerous and tedious than other people do. I think I hate it out of proportion to its actual discomforts and indignities.

And I think that I am this way because if you are inclined towards control freakery, pregnancy is like a worst nightmare: your body runs off in all directions like an errant toddler and does all sorts of things you would never allow in real life: it gets fat, it won't sleep, it twitches and jumps about at all hours of the day and night, it becomes tearful and exhausted for no reason, it is forgetful and irritable and slow and late. It does things that a control freak simply cannot laugh off or feel philosophical about.

I was initially rather pleased and smug at this self-diagnosis. Control freakery implies to me a level of organisation and "sortedness" that, as a control freak, I find wildly appealing. But control freaks aren't always successful. My friend the writer Olivia Glazebrook, (her excellent novel The Trouble With Alice is available on Amazon), once said to me "so you're a perfectionist?" and I laughed and said "I can't be a perfectionist- my house is a mess". And then she laughed (we were quite pissed) and said "You can be a perfectionist without having a perfect life."

I didn't really understand at the time, but what she meant was that seeking to control things, or to be perfect, is a psychosis, a sort of madness: and like the lunatic who likes to believe that he is St Jerome, (but isn't and will never be), just because you seek control and perfection, doesn't mean you get it.

It is the action of planning to control or seeking the illusion of control that control freaks need - not neccessarily the end result. It's why I stockpile butter and cleaning products and toiletries: buying and storing them is to me more important a ritual than the actual fact of them being there. And it's why although the last time I was pregnant I planned my hospital maternity bag down to the last can of facial spritzer, I failed to execute it in time and was left post-partum with no clean underwear, no nursing bra and no hairband. And no, needless to say, facial spritzer. I remembered the iPad, though.

Control freaks are often some of the most ineffectual people there are. Not to get too self-important about it, but Gordon Brown was a famous control freak and couldn't get anything done. We are like dogs chasing our tails. It's really quite sad.

All this self-knowledge doesn't stop me from trying. Making lists, hoarding, planning, doing everything in advance: it's soothing. It soothes me in the place of a repeat prescription of benzos.

But I have let go of certain things. For example, when Kitty is ill, which she is now. She has come down with a thing she had last year, which involves a high fever, red sticky eyes, luminous magenta cheeks, a stupendous amount of neon snot, resistance to infant analgesics and a lot of midnight wailing.

This would have traumatised me beyond belief this time last year, so insanely uptight am I about nothing getting in the way of my sleep. In fact, recalling Kitty's selfsame infection last year, I am staggered, in hindsight, at how mean I was about her having to stay in her cot, even though she was weeping and holding her arms out to me and saying "Mummmmeeee". My own mother, not a control freak in any way, was appalled by this. "Why don't you just tuck her up in bed next to you?" she said. My mother never, ever comments on my parenting - she only ever says "Kitty looks well" or "that's a nasty cough" - so she must have been shocked.

I didn't want to put Kitty in bed with me because I was crazy (DESPITE THERAPY) and I thought that if you have a baby or toddler in bed with you even once even for half an hour, they will be in bed with you until they are 25.

But I was wrong. I had Kitty in bed with me for three nights when she was ill last year, I didn't feel nearly as bad as I thought I would, and the minute she was better she went gladly back into her own bed and slept like she always had. It made me understand that there is just no room for absolutism when it comes to children. You have to be flexible. When they are very ill or very scared it's different. There are exceptions.

So now when Kitty is unwell we all three of us just knock about all night, drifting from one bed to another, in and out of rooms, my husband and I silently handing our hot, weeping child to each other as some shared internal timer tells us that a shift has come to an end, giving each other the odd pat on the shoulder. It's fine, we're fine. She'll get better at some point. Sleeplessness will age us, yes, but it won't kill us.

That doesn't mean that there isn't ample opportunity for benign control freakery in my life, like my passion for accessorising Kitty's experience of national holidays.

Kitty has been talking, for a while, about an Easter egg hunt, as this is a thing she has seen on Peppa Pig. Having children gives you a new perspective on the winter: cold wet weather is so particularly ghastly when you have a toddler that you feel as ravingly joyous at its conclusion as ancient farmers on Welsh hillsides must have done 200 years ago.

And Easter really means winter is over - so this year, we are going to go nuts. I am going to have an Easter table centrepiece (fashioned from blossom twigs and hung with decorated eggs and festooned with ribbons) roast lamb on whatever day you're supposed to have it and the most glorious Easter egg hunt you've ever seen.

And these chocolate nests, a forgotten thing from my childhood that I saw in a book. I do love Mini Eggs - with their dusty, pastel speckled shells they really do look like little wild birds eggs, don't they? Or am I just a credulous townie?

Anyway, you don't need a recipe. Just melt some milk chocolate in a bowl over warm water, then sprinkle in cornflakes, turn the flakes in the chocolate until covered (add a handful of raisins for extra pizzazz) then decant into fairy paper cases and dot with mini eggs.

If I can just get myself together to actually do all this and not miss the whole of Easter because I am too busy planning Kitty's amazing bucket and spade summer holiday, we'll be laughing.

There come moments in life when you have to be realistic about who you are and what you are actually like, rather than nursing febrile projections of what you hope and dream that you are like.

The first time is always when you hear a recording of your own voice. It is always traumatising. Always more high pitched and posh, or common, or flat, or regional or just otherwise terrible than you can possibly have imagined. One of the reasons I left my job on a newspaper was that I had to listen back to my stupid stupid buggery awful voice on recorded interviews.

There are many other moments after that, but that first moment of being confronted with the reality of what you sound like is always terrible.

I had another one today. I was beside myself with excitement at having a piece in the Guardian's Family section. I love the Family section of the Guardian nearly as much as I love Style, so being in it RIGHT THERE THERE I AMMMMM more than made up for Kitty's massive and terrifying nosebleed + 103F fever at 4.30am.

But then I opened the Times Magazine to see a piece they had on the "world's best food blogger", called Katie something; What Katie Ate, is her blog. She is beautiful and thin and her food looks fucking amazing. There was a glowing intro written by my husband's editor at the magazine, which contained a slightly disparaging comment about "mummy" food bloggers.

I looked back at my picture in Family. I looked a bit fat. My hair needs a cut. I turned to see that Kitty was still staggering around the kitchen in her blood spattered pyjamas because she screamed every time I tried to take them off to get them soaking in Napisan. I thought about my clumsy, unchic blog, my stupid shit photos, my total lack, generally, of style and I felt really quite ill.

I have recovered now, by telling myself that this is just one of those times where you have to confront the reality of who you are and what you are capable of. This blog is almost entirely a response to food blogs like What Katie Ate, which are so professional and beautiful and chic and purposeful. I can never, ever be like that or do that. So I do this.

That's another reason why I decided to go against most of what I stand for and feature a click-through to Lakeland at the top right hand corner of this blog. I love Lakeland. It's not the height of glamour, but it is useful and I happen to know an editor at Vogue who reads the Lakeland catalogue in bed at night.

So that explains what that Lakeland thingy is doing on my blog. I'm sure Katie doesn't have anything like that on hers, (I am literally too scared to look in case it gives me a nervous breakdown), but I've decided that I am that person. I am a Lakeland advertiser. If you click on the little picture and buy something off the website then I get 7% of your basket. And Lord knows all that germicidal soak we're getting through these days isn't going to buy itself.

There is this girl I know - not very well, I just follow her on Twitter - and the thing about her is that she is about to have her first baby, like any day now. And the reason that she is on my mind is that I am so appalled, really AH-PPALLED at the things that people say to her about the imminent arrival of her child.

Anything she tweets, anything at all - "had some toast just now" or "feeling happy today" - gets an avalanche of responses like "Ha ha! Forget eating toast once baby's out. You'll be living off dust bunnies! LOL" or "You'll never feel happy again after you have a baby! Best u know now! Ha ha ha LOL."

I mean what the fuck is wrong with people. Really what the fuck. The only correct response to anyone who is having a baby, first, second or whatever is "Oh that's so wonderful congratulations how brilliant." If the pregnant person actually presses you for more detail, (which they never do), then, and only then, you say "Yes okay look, life isn't really the same again, and sometimes it's better and sometimes it's shit and you wonder what the fuck you've done. But once they hit 18 months everything's pretty easy."

And they look at you like "18 months... 18 MONTHS?!?!" Because they haven't had a baby yet and they don't fully understand how glacial everything becomes. How s-s-s-l-o-o-o-w-w and b-b-o-o-o-r-r-i-n-n-n-g it all is when they are really small. But it's not their fault. And nobody, least of all my acquaintance on Twitter, ever declared or really seriously thought that having a baby was easy, (except Tanith Carey in that thing in the Mail the other day, but she just wrote that for money, like we all do).

I understand the motivation: I get it. When you are the parent of very small children, you are so vulnerable, you are in such a tight spot, so much on the back foot, that there is huge tempation to claw back a bit of an upper hand by laying into those lower down the food chain. You might not be having a glamorous time, your marriage a shambles, your hair neglected and your face a roadmap of despair, but you can - at least! - turn to those less experienced and laugh nastily and say those dreaded words "Just you wait," and feel briefly victorious before going home and spending the evening chipping Weetabix off your surfaces and sobbing into a tumbler of gin.*

The "just you wait" thing barely happens second time round. People keep their distance. Although there is a little bit of a thing where people say "With the first one you can carry on pretending that life is sort of normal but with the second one you just give in and it's all about survival."

And I'm like, I'm sorry - at no point have I ever with Kitty pretended than "life is normal". We live, still, as if we are under siege. (The deputy books editor of the Evening Standard, Katie Law, once said to me "You get your life back a bit once your youngest is three," and she is right about most things, so I believe her.) I can't see how having a second can possibly make me leave the house less, have less fun, curtail my freedom more.

It'll all be familiar. It'll be the difference, says my husband, between driving somewhere unfamiliar, and then driving back home. It'll be the easiest time I've ever done - I'm going to chew up the next three years and spit them out. Bring it on.

While I wipe the foam from my chin and repent my hubris, please turn your mind to cheese scones. These are a thing my friend Becky B makes all the time, as she says that she always has all the ingredients - and she has a very good point: in a tight spot when only something homemade will do, these will save your skin without, probably, having to dash madly to the shops.

This is not Becky B's recipe, but they are nice all the same.

Cheese scones
Makes 6 biggish ones

225g self-raising flour
40g butter at room temp or as close as possible
a pinch of salt
some milk - about 150ml
2 large handfuls of cheddar - reasonably strong - grated on the fine whatsit of a box grater

Preheat the oven to 200C

1 Sieve the flour into a bowl (or just dump it in and swizzle with a whisk)

2 Cut in the butter and rub together until it is crumb-like

3 Add the pinch of salt and 3/4 of your grated cheddar. Now incorporate this together using your hands, trying to distribute the fine strands of cheese evenly through the flour.

4 Now add a long sploosh of milk and mix in with a knife. Then add another sploosh and you ought to start being able to gather the mixture up into a sort of dough.

5 Turn this out onto a floured surface and roughly shape into a round. Don't worry if the dough looks a bit scratchy, just make sure it is at LEAST 1in thick (use a ruler because I guarantee you don't know how thick this is). Scones don't rise much in the oven and so you need a scone to be reasonably thick before it goes in the oven or you'll get some miserable little pancake. Cut out your scones, re-roll and cut until you've used up as much of the dough as possible.

6 Arrange on a greased baking tray and finish off with the rest of the grated cheese piled on top of each scone.

7 Bake for 15 mins

*In their defence - "just you wait"ers are often the most helpful, solicitous and kind once the baby is actually out.

These are amazing! Lamingtons, they are called, and they are squares of plain sponge sandwiched together with raspberry jam, covered in chocolate and dipped in DESSICATED COCONUT. I mean how much more could you ask for??

Lamingtons were invented in Australia and I have never seen or heard of them before I came across them in Edd Kimber's very useful book Say It With Cake. I cooed over them yesterday with my mother, who has borrowed the book because she has to make 50 "finger food puddings" ?? WTF? for a Distressed Gentlefolk's Memorial Fundraising Curry Buffet (or something) and needed ideas, stat.

Anyway, I left the book with my mother but this afternoon on a whim, thought I would make them.

They are quite straightforward and I made them reasonably successfully with absolutely no recipe at all, having not photocopied Kimber's recipe before I handed over the book to mumsie.

There are proper recipes you can get for these, Edd Kimber has one in his book, obviously, and Dan Lepard has one on the Guardian website, which I will not reprint here because he once got in touch with one of my readers (who has her own cooking blog - who doesn't?) and asked her to take down a recipe of his that she had reprinted there. And the Lord knows I've got enough trouble without being sat on by Dan Lepard and his beard.

So this is my recipe, but it really is MY recipe, literally made up - it is entirely inauthentic so please don't all start telling me that these are not real Lamingtons because I don't really care and they worked for me.

For the sponge
110g butter
110g sugar
110g self-raising flour
2 eggs

For the chocolate dip
75g milk cooking chocolate
75g dark cooking chocolate
I used Menier cooking chocolate from Waitrose

200g bag dessicated coconut

Some raspberry jam, not much - probably 3 tbs in total

Preheat your oven to 170C, grease and line a small shallow baking sheet - mine was about 30cm by 23 cm. If you don't have one you could use a square cake tin with a loose base.

You may have your own way of making a basic sponge mix, in which case do that. I do this:

1 cut up the butter and put it in a bowl with the sugar. Stick this in your preheating oven for 2 minutes then cream together (snore... so boring) however you usually do this. I do it with a hand whisk.

2 Now whisk in the eggs, one at a time.

3 Now fold in the flour with a metal spoon until it has all mixed in; turn out into your tin/baking sheet and smooth the top as best you can, although it will even itself out in the oven so don't worry too much about it being perfect.

4 Bake for 10 minutes then take out and leave to cool.

5 Break up the chocolate and put it in a heatproof bowl over a pan of water and put it on your smallest burner turned to the lowest heat and let it sit there and melt for 20 minutes. Once it has melted, set it aside to cool for a bit.

6 Now turn your flat sponge out onto a board and peel off the greaseproof paper. Cut with a sharp knife into even squares the best way you can see how. I didn't want mine to be especially big and once they are covered in chocolate and then coconut they seem even bigger, so don't be afraid to make them quite dainty, like about 3cm x 3cm.

7 Make little square sponge sandwiches by spreading some jam on one square and topping it with another sponge square. Then you assemble the lamington by dipping it all over in chocolate, then pressing into dessicated coconut and then leaving on a cooling rack to dry.

You can do this the best way you can see how - if there's one thing I know for sure, it's that my readers are far more ingenious at working out how to do these things than I am - but if I have one suggestion, it is not to tip all your coconut out onto a plate at once.

Dipping the squares in chocolate is a terrifically messy busines and what you don't want is to spread chocolate all over your entire plateful of coconut because what you want is the brilliant white of the coconut against the dark brown of the chocolate - not brown-flecked coconut against brown chocolate.

Wipe your plate of chocolate smears inbetween dipping sessions if neccessary.

For each lamington, shake out some coconut onto a plate, and then turn and shake, turn and shake, until it is covered, then remove to a cooling rack.

Then stuff them ALL in your face, growling and drooling like Fantastic Mr Fox.

I don't know why my photos are coming out so blue at the moment

I woke up feeling terribly gloomy yesterday morning. I felt awful and depressed and really unable to get out of bed in a way that I haven't since I had morning sickness, what feels like several hundred years ago at the start of this wretched pregnancy.

My morale up until now has been based on doing the following:

1 Not counting down the days left. I stubbornly refuse to think or talk about how pregnant I am. I just say "It's due in May" and pretend to myself it is at least three weeks later in the year than it is. I have been 7 months' pregnant for at least 6 weeks. Otherwise you are like a prisoner, trapped in your huge, ungainly body marking time until your parole date. You may as well just scratch lines onto the kitchen wall with a fruit knife and be done with it.

2 Reading anything to do with fashion, clothes and weight loss obsessively and every so often suddenly spending a fortune on a pointless accessory. Once I am no longer pregnant I will go back to slopping about in bootcut jeans and grandad shirts - but for now the image of a slim and fashionable me stops me from lying down on the floor and screaming "I don't want to do this anymore!!!!!!"

I am so obsessed at the moment with clothes and accessories that I'm like an horrific pastiche of what people fear a Western woman is: just a goggle-eyed grasping lunatic, who actually believes that putting together a correctly fashionable outfit is an achievement, or sourcing a pair of absolutely au courant neon striped gym shoes for Spring/Summer constitutes "work". I went on a special trip to Selfridges to pick out a ruinously expensive charm necklace for my husband to buy me, according to the fashion for a husband to reward a wife with a present after she has had a baby. I cannot stop thinking about this necklace because when I have it, you see, my life will change for the better.

It's as if I unconsciously believe that the right clothes and accessories will make all this go away. My back won't hurt, my facial bloating will subside, I will be able to sleep, I will be able to bend down, my varicose veins will disappear. If I am dressed correctly the first few horrendous weeks of leaking bosoms and traumatised knicker-area, followed backbreaking months of still being overweight and creaky while hauling around a glassy-eyed newborn, stopping Kitty from killing it/herself/me, won't be so bad.

Ha! Haaaa haaa haaaaaaaaaaa.

Then I come away from the iPad or the laptop, having found myself almost buying a pair of shoes with cat faces on them for £500, (because they might be the shoes that change my life for the better, you see), and I feel guilty and sick.

3 Doing stuff with Kitty, no matter how much of a hassle it is. I allow indoor play and general telly-and-biscuit wallowing in the afternoons, but in the morning, I try to go out.

But I think I have hit a wall. I can't do anything anymore. I have to leave stuff scattered all over the floor for someone else to pick up because I can't. You will think: "That's fine, you're pregnant, enjoy not having to pick stuff up off the floor!!" but I don't like it. I don't like having to rely on other people. I don't like having to be helped up out of chairs, (my husband responds by trying to pick me up under the armpits, like a cat). And I don't like having to say to my husband, when he comes downstairs from having put Kitty to bed, "Sorry but can you put away those Megabloks?"

No matter how awful I feel I'd always rather do that sort of thing myself and enjoy the warm glow of martyrdom. Occasionally when I am on my hands and knees clearing up some awful spill to rival Exxon Valdez, usually also involving broken glass, I feel so sorry for myself that it's actually quite fun. But now I really just can't do any of it. I honestly think one wrong move and something will snap, or get squashed, or fall out, or tear.

And there's two months to go. TWO MONTHS!! And it won't stop fucking snowing. I don't know why I'm even bothering to despair. My own raging voice floats about my ears, getting fainter and fainter, further and further away like a tiny person trapped under some floorboards, far away and you think you can hear a voice and say "Can you hear that?" and everyone shakes their head and says "no". That's how futile my complaining is.

Just to make myself feel worse I decided to make one of What Katie Ate's recipes, torn jealously and resentfully out of The Times Magazine two weeks ago. I don't hate Katie Ate, but she did make me feel grossly inadequate for most of a weekend. But then, that's what weekend papers do - they make you feel a bit shit about your life, whether your are pregnant and miserable or not.

Anyway, so I made this stuffed pork loin thing as a kind of penance to atone for my sins of pride and envy, sloth and too much online shopping.

And it was terrific! Although overcooked and slightly shoe-like. But that is not Katie's fault as her cooking times specified were for a larger joint of pork than mine and I, like most English people am too sccaaarrrred of underdone pork to be bold about reducing the cooking times.

The really wonderful thing about this was the amazing stuffing - really, really delicious and magical. Give this a go just for that.

2kg pork loin

For the stuffing
250g dried apricots
100g pistachios, shelled
2 apples, grated
50g butter, melted
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
chopped parsley, sage and thyme
salt and pepper
two handfuls of sourdough breadcrumbs (we happen to always have sourdough bread in the house but if you don't, I'm sure any old breadcrumbs would be fine).

1 Chop the onion and garlic and cook very gently for about ten minutes until just softening - don't let them take any colour at all and don't worry about them being raw because you're going to cook the shit out of them later. Take the pan off the heat and set to one side.

2 Chop up the apricot and pistachio reasonably small and put in a bowl. Then grate over the apple, throw in the herbs and the breadcrumbs, scrape in the onion and garlic, pour over the melted butter, season with a good pinch of salt and four or five turns of the pepper grinder and give it a good stir.

3 Unwrap your pork loin. If you can't see how in the hell you are going to get loads of stuffing in and then tie it back up again, you can always fillet off a bit of the underside of the joint with a sharp knife and put aside for another project (does that make sense?)

4 Flip the pork over skin-side up: if it has not already been scored, then score all over in a diamond pattern. Then rub with a lot of squashed sea salt.

5 Turn the loin back over and press in the stuffing. Roll up and tie as neatly as you can. The stuffing will inevitably clatter out of both ends, but just press it back in as best you can. I cooked my joint on its end, to stop the stuffing falling out and to get an even cook of crackling round the side but if you have a larger, long joint you won't be able to do this.

6 Put in the oven at 240C or top whack for 30 mins, then turn down the temp to 180C and cook for another hour. If you want to bake some apples alongside this for a kind of self-preparing apple sauce, put some small eating apples (naturally sweet so you don't have to faff about adding sugar to cooking apples) 30mins before the end of the cooking time.

This is hell to slice as the stuffing splurges out everywhere - you need a REALLY sharp knife, but it was very delicious.

Recipe Rifle's Christmas message

Bread and butter pudding

Pippa's Rainbow Cake

Mushroom cappucino

Gravadlax

Raspberry souffle

Butternut Squash Lasagne

Posh peas

Salmon en Croute

Aromatic pork belly hotpot

French breakfast

A Birthday Cake

Celeriac slaw with goat's cheese "croutons"

Luxury potato

Another chocolate cake

Chocolate nests for Easter

Lakeland

Cheese scones

Lamingtons

Stuffed rolled pork loin