A week's review

A home-cooked Japanese supper and some excellent budget meals...miso aubergines definitely my favourite but look how good the soup looks! It tasted as warm and comforting as the picture.

We weren't mean enough to insist upon a £10 budget on C's birthday, so the added indulgence probably provided the highlight of the week. A fish pie (or two) made by T.M and melting flourless brownies made by J felt like good celebratory food, especially as the weather has got colder. We were hopeful that no endangered fish were used during the process.

However, T.G - as of this week a new addition to our cooking rota, competing with some hefty pies and and soups knocked up some Fajitas (spicy chicken, peppers, onion, sour cream). My documentation of this week has really been lousy, due to some long essays and a temporary internet failure.

A disappointing incident with a mince pie

Engrossed in piano playing too long = a charred pie and sad face

The girl who couldn't make scrambled eggs

One of my confidantes of this blog is C.N - someone who finds my constant ridiculous excitement about food hilarious but who is willing to take culinary advice because until she recently could not scramble eggs. I'd like to think I may have some part in inspiration, but I think unfortunately it might have more to do with her discovery of the Channel 4 food website . Now look! I've been getting more and more notifications of her increased foodie-ness.

Smoked salmon linguini in a text.

I am now about to go to her house for a Japanese meal prepared by her mother. I'll take my camera.

new challenge

I have decided to document, amongst other things, the cooking rota we have established in the flat I live in. How well, how much, how cheaply can we eat?

Six (sometimes seven) people

One person cooking each night

£10 per person, per week. Which means almost £10 per 6-7 person meal.

This has been going for a few weeks and is proving to be a success. Sometimes all the stops are pulled out (T slaving over a gammon roast for hours and hours), meticulous forward planning has resulted in feasts for not one night but a following lunch (C's risotto with home made chicken stock) and sometimes we have enjoyed the most homely of dinners which taste exactly as they should (M's perfect carbonara pasta).

So far we have established that: we will always underestimate the time it will take to cook potatoes in our gas oven without parboiling. £10 is rarely enough to cook a main and a dessert but when it is it's very good. More to come. I should start thinking about this week's dish.

I wonder what percentage of people who read last week's guardian weekend magazine actually got around to making Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's marshamallow recipe.

We did! I was curious to see how easy it would be to do this as an E-number free alternative to buying a packet from Sainsbury's (which we did anyway in case ours failed). We couldn't find powdered gelatine anywhere so decided to give it a go with leaves - and realised there was a reason for specifying powdered. They were more jelly-like than any marshmallows I'd eaten but it really just meant that they melted quicker into a slurpy sticky mess when we cooked them (over candles). No bad thing. A successful bonfire night experiment. The fireworks were good too.

How to do Halloween

The papers were full of step by step guides and tips for what to do on Halloween. I would have thought all you really needed to do was this:

1)carve a pumpkin

2) Get excited and put candles all around the house while your flatmate starts cooking with the pumpkin. Compile a Halloween music playlist.

3)Get more excited as all other flatmates arrive home and you can surprise them with newly decorated flat

4)Sit down to eat a tasty pumpkin noodle 'laksa' soup at candlelit dinner table accompanied by Halloween playlist.

5)Watch John Carpenter 's Halloween in bed with willing flatmate.

A gift of meat

My younger sister came to stay and brought gifts from home - not conventional, I suppose but a slab of raw beef on the rib and a half-metre chorizo sausage. My butchering mentor J had apparently instructed her to deliver this against all odds.

I was very grateful, and so was my sister as she looks here with her plateful of perfectly pink goodness. We finished up a good (Ottolenghi inspired) lentils and rice dish and made a spinach salad. An iron-overload if ever I saw one.