The second recipe this week is based on one from the BBC Good Food website (original link no longer available). Their recipe used lamb meatballs but I already had some homemade turkey meatballs, cooked and in the fridge from yesterday.

Since the meatballs were already made, the meal was incredibly quick to prepare. I chopped one clove of garlic an fried it in a little oil, then added a tin of tomatoes. I added the spices (1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp cinnamon, ½ tsp ginger, a pinch of salt, a pinch of chilli flakes) and left the sauce to simmer while the cous-cous cooked in a pan of hot chicken stock.

The meal left the kitchen smelling very aromatic and spicey even though the sauce was quite lightly spiced.

There are going to be 2 new recipes this week. The first is a sourdough loaf, made following a recipe in the River Cottage 'Bread' handbook. As usual with sourdough breads, this one took 2 days to make.

Last night I made the sponge by mixing sourdough starter with water (300ml) and flour, (250g) stirring together and leaving overnight to ferment.

This morning I added a teaspoon of salt, about a tablespoon of olive oil and the rest of the flour (300g) and mixed everything together, kneading for about 10 minutes. This was quite tricky to do because the dough was very sticky but the mix does need to be quite wet for this recipe.

The next 4 hours were repeated cycles of knocking back and reshaping the dough every hour which left it very soft and elastic. After that I shaped it into 2 loaves and left them to rise. I baked the loaves on our pizza stone, starting off at gas mark 9 then turning down to gas mark 3 after 10 minutes.

The resulting bread has a firm crust with a soft inside with lots of air bubbles. The bread had a slightly crumpet-like texture flavour, which I liked.

This weeks recipe was based on the chicken and ratatouille pie from three years ago, when I last tried to cook a new recipe every week.

The pastry was made exactly as I described but for some reason it came out fairly dry and crumbly so we put discs of it on top, like a cobbler, instead of a single sheet. It still tasted good though.

To make the filling, I finely diced one onion and a clove of garlic and fried them in butter until soft. I warmed about 200ml of milk with a pinch of nutmeg, some freshly ground pepper and a clove. I strained the milk through a sieve into the pan with the onions. I added the diced turkey and a couple of tablespoons of cream cheese. The asparagus was placed in the bottom of a pyrex dish, the turkey in white sauce was poured over the top. Finally the discs of pastry were put on top.

The pie was cooked at gas mark 5 for around 45-50 minutes until the sauce was bubbling and the topping was crispy.

After a couple of weeks of cakes, it's time to return to savoury main courses, although there is still a sweet aspect to tonights recipe. We are not normally fans of meat with fruit, I have never liked the combinations of pork with apple or gammon with pineapple. The sweet fruit would always feel unbalanced next to plain meat.

A couple of years ago I had a Lamb Tagine which contained apricots and the spiciness of the sauce worked well with the fruit. I had actually eaten half of the meal before I noticed that there were pieces of fruit in it. Tonight I attempted to emulate this meal, using turkey instead of lamb. The recipe here is based on several sources, I mixed and matched ingredients to fit what we had in the kitchen. Most of the original recipes included honey but I omitted that since the fruit made the sauce sweet enough for us.

I started off with 500g of turkey which I diced and fried in olive oil. When it was cooked, I removed the turkey from the pan and added three small onions and three cloves of garlic (all finely sliced). After cooking the onions for a few minutes, I added the dry spices (one teaspoon each of ground ginger and cinnamon, half a teaspoon each of cumin and turmeric).

I added a cupful of chicken stock and a generous pinch of saffron and gave the pan a stir, before adding about a tablespoon of lemon juice. I also added a couple of tablespoons of passata.

After a few minutes of simmering I added the apricot halves and a small handful of sultanas. The tagine was served on a bed of cous cous with some toasted flaked almonds sprinkled on top.

As I said earlier, we found it sweet enough without needing the honey. The meal was quick and easy to make, especially because cous cous cooks much faster than rice. We might omit the apricots next time.

We went to a birthday party today and took along a cake. This one can be considered a sequel to the Spotty Dinosaur cake from last week. The bottom tier was the spotty madeira cake. The middle tier was a sponge with lemon curd filling.

The top tier was two small chocolate sponge cakes with chocolate buttercream, Cadbury's Finger biscuits and Fudge Fingers along the edge, with a ganache topping and icing pigs lying in the 'mud'.

I can't take any of the credit for this cake. Emma made it all, including the decorations.