We seem to have gone through this week without cooking anything new or original. Today's lunch was something we haven't made before, but that was just a quick pasta meal using a tin of condensed chicken soup as the sauce. We fried some leeks and added those.

A couple of weeks ago we bought 2 bags of going-out-of-date chilli peppers - they were a mixture of red and green chillies. I dried some by cutting them in half and putting them in a foil tray. I put some of the trays in the oven, at gas mark 1, for a couple of hours. The other trays I put on the radiator and left them for a week. The oven-dried chillies had turned brown whereas the radiator-dried ones had kept their colour. I put the dried chillies in a food processor and blitzed them to make chilli flakes.

Today I decided to try to make a chilli sauce from the remaining chillies. I chopped the chillies, sprinkled them with salt and put them in the fridge for a few days. The next step was to put the chillies, 1 clove of garlic, some spices (mustard seed, onion seed) and a splash of vinegar in a food processor and blend to a purée. I simmered the purée for a few minutes before putting it back in the food processor to make a smooth paste. I added equal amounts of water and vinegar until it reached a decent pourable consistency. I've put the sauce in a jar in the fridge to mature for a few weeks before I try it.