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As mentioned in Day 35 of The Challenge This is a recipe which I very much enjoy, but full disclosure here, it isn't mine, it is my husband's. I had never had it before moving in with him, and he has developed and tweaked it and made it truly his own in the years since. I am always delighted when he decides to make it again, and it is too good not to share. As with almost everything I make (I seem to say this a lot), it is endlessly variable, with different vegetables being able to be included or substituted. Here's the one he made me this time, so moreish just before a night shift, I ended up not wanting my midnight lunch. Ingredients: 500g long grain rice (we used a wild rice mix) 500g kidney beans, cooked (or others of your choice. Traditionally it would be with black eyed peas, but those are hard to obtain here) 200g bacon cut into chunks 200 g cabbage chopped 2-3 chillies, sliced 3 onions, chopped 2 carrots, chopped 2 tsp chilli powder 1 tbsp olive oil Salt and pepper to taste 1) Fry onions in olive oil in a pan until translucent. Add bacon and stir. Once bacon starts to give off juices, add cabbage and carrot. Add any other herby notes here if you so desire. 2) Cook rice as per instructions. Reserve any cooking liquid from the beans and the rice. 3) Once the rice is cooked, add it to the bacon and veg mix with beans. Add any reserved liquid or about 1/2 c of water and stir. 4) Simmer and spice to taste. Serve hot. Very simple, minimal dishes but very versatile, tasty and filling.

Skip the toast and it's gluten free. Play around with it! This one came out beautifully.

I am not vegetarian, gluten-free or vegan (a glance at my other recipes should confirm that for anyone

As mentioned in Day 87 of The Challenge Butternut and chestnut seasons intersect! This was entirely experimental. I saw the title of this recipe elsewhere but didn't look at the recipe and then couldn't remember where I had seen it, so I made it up. I had no idea how this would turn out, but it was beautiful. The balance of sweet to acid with a little spice went very nicely. Ingredients: 1 butternut squash, halved and with the seeds scooped out 500g chestnuts, parboiled and peeled 3-4 tbsp olive oil 2-4 onions chopped 1 apple, chopped 1-2 tbsp apple cider vinegar 1 tsp sumac 1/8-1/4 nutmeg 1/4 tsp cloves 1-1 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp fenugreek seeds 2-3 c chicken broth 1/3 -1/2 c cream 2 tsp thyme Salt and pepper to taste Toasted pumpkin seeds to top 1) Place butternut, chestnuts, apple in a heavy skillet or a roasting pan ( I used my cast iron skillet) and drizzle with 2-3 tbsp of olive oil and the apple cider vinegar to achieve good coverage. Sprinkle the sumac, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and fenugreek seeds over it all and roast for 45 min-1 hour, until the butternut is tender. 2) Sauté onions in the remaining olive oil in the bottom of your soup pot until translucent and even a little charred. Add the contents of the skillet and mix it up ( the butternut should break up easily. Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes, allowing the flavours to meld. 3) Blitz until smooth, then taste test, adjusting any of the spicing or the vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste, and add cream to your taste too. I do recommend some, but how much you do is up to you. Serve and sprinkle with thyme and pumpkin seeds. I absolutely loved this and I am so glad I tried it! The roasting at the start lengthened the cook time a little, but then pulling the soup bit together went really quickly, so it's six and two threes really compared to other souping. The truly lengthy bit is peeling the chestnuts if you use fresh ones, but then I find it quite zen to settle into a task like that. The other option is to use frozen ones that come pre-peeled. In any case, this soup hit all the right notes for me (and hubby and Little Bit) and I hope it does for you too.

As mentioned in Day 80 of The Challenge Quinces are something that (aside from being seasonal! I know! So many seasonal fruits and vegetables in the autumn!) I had only really encountered in jelly or in preserves until recently. And then a couple of years ago a colleague came to work with a bucket of quinces from her garden for anyone to help themselves, and so I started playing around with them. They are like fuzzy green stones, pear-shaped wannabes when they are raw. They need a bit of cooking, usually boiling (I tried roasting one and it sort of worked) to make them edible. This is the first (or one of the first) savoury things I tried with them. As with so many other recipes, it is one I had seen the title of but then lost the recipe link before reading it, so I made it up. Ingredients: 2 onions, chopped 1 tbsp olive oil 600g of carrots, chopped 1 large quince, chopped 1 tbsp honey 2 tsp sumac 1 tsp garam masala 1 tsp cinnamon 1/4 tsp cloves Salt and pepper to taste Herbs de Provence 1) In a soup pot, sauté onions in the olive oil until translucent. Add carrots and quince and enough water to cover it all. Add spices and honey. Simmer for 45 min or until carrots and quince are tender. 2) Blitz until smooth (or almost. Quince won't go silky smooth like some other vegetables). Taste test and salt and pepper to taste. Serve with garlic and thyme croutons. This was very tasty but my husband said he found it too earthy and sweet. Adding the herbs at the end brightened it all up though and brought the flavours into alignment. Some lemon juice might also work. Let me know what you think!

Since first trying to candy and then chocolate cover orange peels last spring, I have branched out to ginger and other citrus fruit peels. Ingredients: Citrus peel or ginger strips - generally about 1 c worth 1/2 c sugar plus extra for candying 100 g Chocolate Optional: Cinnamon, cloves spices etc. 1) Place the (clean) orange peel in a saucepan with enough water to cover it and add sugar. Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer for about half an hour to an hour until the orange peel is tender but still retains its integrity and a little bite. 2) Remove and drain, spreading out on a drying rack to dry overnight. 3) Place the ones you want to candy in a jar with the sugar, seal and shake, coating them evenly. 4) For the chocolate coated peels, place chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water to create a Bain Marie. Stir regularly as the chocolate begins to melt. Dip strips of orange peel into the chocolate and lay on a cooling rack. (TIP: I find chopsticks very helpful in the dipping process!) The principles hold generally to the orange peels I did last year, but I thought I would share my thoughts and experiences. I have generally omitted the extra sugar shaken over the candied peels at the end, finding it unnecessary. I find that lime peel and lime slices work very well and have an excellent balance of sweetness and tartness to them when candied. I have also tried coating them in white chocolate, which worked excellently. Ginger, of course, works wonderfully. As with the others, I have not added extra sugar on top, but I have coated in dark chocolate, which is very tasty. Dark chocolate with a little orange oil added to it is especially delectable. On one occasion, I simmered ginger, orange and lime together. It worked nicely, but the citrus peel was done before the ginger, which had to go back in the pan for another go. Also, they shared flavours a little, the ginger imparting a little bite to the lime and orange peels. Not a bad experience by any means, but one to be aware of, depending on your intentions for the candy. Grapefruit peel was tremendously bitter. I tried adding a pinch of salt to the simmering syrup as salt counteracts bitterness a lot of the time, but it made for a weird bitter salty candied peel rather than anything else. I set it aside, therefore, and covered it in dark chocolate at a later date, some with a sprinkling of cloves over the top too, and the grapefruit peel was transformed! I highly recommend this form of candy! Orange peel with a little cinnamon over the chocolate works too. Candied lemon works very nicely coated in white chocolate with a little black pepper. It seems a little counterintuitive perhaps, but that is a combo I discovered when playing around with my chocolate tempering and flavouring. The black pepper's sharpness is mitigated by the lemon and the lemon's bitterness is evened out by the black pepper. I faffed about a little with tempering the chocolate properly before coating my orange and grapefruit peels, but I am not convinced of the necessity of this, and so have not included it in the description above. A caveat to bear in mind is that these keep extremely well in an airtight jar IF, and only if, you dry them long enough. If after the candying process there is any moisture left on the peels, it will go mouldy, which would be a shame... When they do keep, I am discovering that having candied peels around for use as ingredients in other things can be very handy, like in my updated Ginger Snaps. I really enjoyed making these (and eating them too) and prepped a whole bunch last week as Christmas presents for my parents. I didn't faff about with tempering all of the chocolate, and I have to say it is an incredibly sticky medium to work with, but it was certainly fun to play around with the different flavours and try different things out.

I only discovered rose-hips two years ago, My brother-in-law mentioned them as one of our rose bushes wasn't being pruned. My grandmother and I started harvesting them and turned it into a whole enterprise, cleaning them and prepping them. Rose-hips are the fruit of the rose which grows from the base of the bud after the flower becomes overblown - if it is not pruned. They grow wild as well as on domestic rose bushes and can be a treat along a walking trail. They are bright red when ripe and vary in size and shape, some being squat spheres, others being more ovaloid. Prepping them involves removing the seeds and small hairs attached to the seeds as these used to be used as itching powder - less than pleasant if left in food. Removing the seeds and hairs involves either turning the rose-hips into purée by soaking in boiling water then passing through a food mill or a sieve, or deseeding and drying. Both are a bit of work, the latter more so, but worth the effort I find. On their own, rose-hips are quite tart, and are very high in vitamin C. I like the idea of using a food that we had harvested from our garden. More local and organic would be hard to find. It was also a fun time spent together, just the two of us harvesting and processing buckets of rose-hips. Some of these we made jam with and some we deseeded and dried (excellent in porridge with apple juice and cinnamon). Only last year did I start expanding what I used them in, both sweet and savoury, This was an experimental soup, no recipe, just taste test and tweak as needed. Ingredients: 600ml Rose-hip purée 600ml water 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped 1 onion, roughly diced 1 knob of ginger, minced 3 carrots, roughly chopped 2 small-medium potatoes A handful of spinach or Swiss chard or some such 1 tsp honey 2tsp olive oil 2 tsp chilli flakes - I used Turkish Urfa biber -Smoked chilli flakes. A handful of fresh basil Salt and pepper to taste 1) Heat oil in a small saucepan. When it starts to shimmer add onion, garlic and ginger. Stir them and cook until they start to crisp. The browned garlic, onion and ginger add a nice-counter balance to the tartness of the rose-hips. 2) Add the potato and carrot and stir for a minute before adding the rose-hip purée and water, then the rest of the ingredients. Be sure and taste test as perfect tart-sweet-heat balance for me may not be right for you. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with crusty bread and enjoy! As an experiment this worked rather well. It was refreshing but flavourful, especially on a hot day, with mild heat and a well rounded flavour, hitting heat, tart and sweet notes.. We have soup most days for lunch and this provided a tasty variation to most soup bases. I hope you enjoy!

Feel free to add more sugar though if you feel it needs it for you.

Place a saucer in the freezer. 2) Stir occasionally to prevent the chutney from sticking. Taste test to check for sugar and spicing, and feel free to tweak to your taste! 3) Drop some of the hot chutney on the saucer from the freezer.

The Proto-Pesto then went in the freezer to await the end of the festive season, with all its traditional