Tonights tea was chicken and roast veg, using a jar of Marks & Spencer's garlic, lemon and parsley roast veg sauce. I think the cooking times might need to be increased a bit. Their instructions suggested adding the carrot after 20 minutes but I put them in at the start, so they had the full 50 minutes (at gas mark 6).

I do roast veg fairly often but I usually forget how long things take to cook, so this is as much for my information as anything else.

• Carrot and Celeriac: at least 1 hour
• Sweet potato: 50 minutes.
• Onion, Pepper, Courgette: 30 minutes.

All of my oven-based recipes use gas marks because we have a gas cooker. For conversions to electric, use this table.

Yesterday we went to the supermarket and bought a loaf of fresh-baked multiseed bread. We thought it would go very well with some soup for lunch but we didn't have any packets or tins of soup in the house. I thought I'd make a simple leek and potato soup but I realised we didn't have any stock (either fresh or cubes) so I would have to make everything from scratch.

I realised that we had a lot of vegetables in the house, some were 'staples', some were leftover from Christmas, others (such as the celeriac) were bought yesterday from the 'reduced' section of the supermarket.

I started off by dicing the veg and adding them to a pan with just enough water to cover everything. In went 1 sweet potato, 1 onion, ½ leek, 1 carrot, 3 cloves of garlic, ¼ celeriac, 1 cooked potato, and some of the leftover roast butternut squash from the freezer. I added a sprinkle of fresh parsley and 1 diced chicken breast, and simmered everything until the veg were cooked.

Everything went in the liquidizer. To serve, we added some jerk seasoning to add salt and spiciness (no salt went into the cooking liquid) and some double cream.

It ended up a bit more complicated than the simple leek and potato soup I intended to make but it was good, and there was enough left over to go in the fridge for another day.