We had a roast chicken tonight and I decided to attempt some home made stuffing. Instead of a classic sage and onion breadcrumb based recipe I adapted a cheesy oat recipe.

The original version is a potato toppped cheese, onion and oats recipe, which we normally do with leeks to give extra flavour. It's made by frying the onion or leek, along with some garlic, in a mixture of oil and butter. It's then allowed to cool and then herbs, toasted oats, grated cheese and beaten eggs are added and mixed together. The base of a tin is lined with sliced potato and the mixture is spooned on top. It's baked for half an hour and then turned upside down to serve, so the potatoes are on top.

Tonight I started off with the same ingredients but added some home-made kale pesto which was leftover from yesterday. I formed the mixture into balls and added them to the roasting tin which already had roast potatoes cooking in it.

We liked the original oat bake but the potato topping is always a bit disappointing so doing a stuffing version means you get the flavor and a crunchy coating so I think it's an improvement and worth doing again.

I was hoping to try to cook the Northumberland Threshing Day Barley Bread recipe for the letter N but I couldn't find any barley flour in the shops. I've found a source of it on-line but the delivery cost makes it quite expensive so I've put that recipe to one side and I'll try it when I manage to track down some affordable flour.

Instead I've decided to try a Nottingham Pudding, which is a batter pudding with spiced baked apple inside. The traditional method appears to be to cook the apple whole in the batter. I thought about slicing the apple and frying it first, which might make it easier to eat, but I decided to stick to the original recipe.

Of course there's usually no such thing as a single original recipe so I looked at a few sources, including modern websites and Cassell's Dictionary of Cooking, which I have consulted for many of these recipes. Most recipes seem to resemble the two versions from Cassell's so I decided to follow the first one, which includes butter.

I made a general purpose pancake batter using equal volumes of egg, flour and milk, along with a pinch of salt. I peeled and cored an apple, mixed together butter, sugar, cinnamon and mixed spice and put it in the middle of the apples. The apple was studded with a few cloves then placed in a buttered dish, the batter was poured around and the whole lot was baked for about 45 minutes at gas mark 6.

I didn't really expect much from this but it came out well and I think it was nicer than I was expecting. This might have been partly because I was quite hungry when I tried it, fresh out of the oven.