A very Happy 2009 to you all! I’ve already been recipe planning for the year ahead but before all that, here’s a few of my favourites from 2008.

From top left: Spring quiche - steak with salsa verde (a strong ‘death-row meal’ contender – well, last year anyway..) – fennel and orange salad with raspberry vinegar – wickedly indulgent omelette cake with ricotta, smoked salmon and greens – brussels sprouts with chorizo – rainbow chard and parmesan tart with carrot and oat crust – Stilton and pear tart with walnut pastry (which I since discovered is from 2007, oops) – thinly shaved asparagus with cheese and ham – watermelon, feta and olives with poppy seed dressing (I couldn’t get enough of poppy seeds last year) – Earl Grey smoked duck – smoky, sweet and spicy red pepper soup – rabbit lasagne with sage bechamel (now my ’signature dish’ and featured on the Channel 4 website!) – beetroot, squash and halloumi – lavender and honey lamb – amaretto scallops – stargazy pie – crab cucumber rolls – Polish cucumber soup.

And some favourite moments….Scotch eggs at the Heston Blumenthal food and sherry pairing – developing a serious taste for Stinking Bishop – eating dried fish with butter and drinking beer in Iceland’s national park (I also loved smoked eel in 2008) – discovering Brew Dog beer and wet garlic and the most amazing buttery olives (and then finding out where we can buy them!) – eating more oysters than ever in 2008 (although I will try to top this in 2009) – winning The Tipped Chilli cook off – discovering I love rosemary in cocktails-  a very unsuccessful but hilarious attempt at growing potatoes on our balcony and finally – 2008 was, without doubt, the year of the cupcake. To top it all off, Food Stories got a little bit of love with an article on the Channel 4 website and my cottage pie got a mention in Simon Majumdar’s ’school-dinners’ classics article for Word of Mouth. All of this aside however, the best part about food blogging in 2008 was undoubtedly meeting so many other bloggers face to face. Here’s to meeting many more of you in 2009. Cheers!

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Krista at Londonelicious came up with this corker of an idea – write a post about your perfect day in London (or anywhere else). At first I thought this might be quite a simple task – food-centred (obviously) – but I had no idea how often I would change my mind, I agonised over it! In the end I realised I would need an infinite amount of energy and stomach space to really make it work but this is my perfect day and so I wake up with both.

The day starts in our flat. Now of course I realise there are many wonderful places in this city to get breakfast and coffee (Monmouth being a personal fave) but I want the rare treat of breakfast in bed and so that is how we start. I will eat boiled egg with marmite soldiers, eggs benedict or florentine or scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, depending on my mood. Chris and I will then catch a train to London Bridge (reeeally early) where we walk along the bank of the Thames, so that I can hopefully catch one of my favourite London landmarks, Tower Bridge, in the mist (there will be morning mist followed by bright sunshine on my perfect day).

I am a little obsessed with the fairytale bridge, massively incongruous against the modern skyline of superslick buildings and cranes. I think it is a masterful piece of architecture and when I see it surrounded by morning mist, it never fails to take my breath away. OK, so this is a bit of a crap photo but it was a cloudy day and she is opening, which caused me great excitement. Yes, I do refer to the bridge as ’she’ and I also follow her on Twitter which gives me no end of amusement as updates consist of ‘I am opening for the HMS blah blah to pass upstream’. I feel like I have embarrassed myself enough now and so will stop. talking. about. the. bridge.

We will take a look from the high level walkway and then amble on down to Borough Market (here’s my review) – of course. Remember, it’s still early at this point and so we are beating the crowds and getting first pick on the produce. It’s time to visit some of my favourite places so first up, the cider man. Yes, we are a couple of hours shy of midday but the man is so nice and jolly (how is it that I don’t know his name?) that we will stop for a chat even if we can’t face the hard stuff yet.

Then we join the queue for a chorizo roll from the Brindisa BBQ. This roll is so worth the wait you won’t believe it! With the tried and tested sustenance of cider (maybe) and chorizo inside me, we head around the market to pick up the ingredients for a picnic, to eat with friends at another of my favourite places later on. There will be cheese from Neal’s Yard – probably some of the barrel aged feta, although this Milleens looks good (if a little tricksy to transport).

There will be some calzone from DeGustibus (below), filled with vegetables and mozzarella…

…some cakes, of course, along with some scones, clotted cream and jam…

…and perhaps some pies from The Ginger Pig – always great picnic fare.

I need a little rest after all that walking around and eating and so we will catch the train to Charing Cross and walk to The Sanctuary in Covent Garden for a relaxing massage, to rejuvinate before the afternoon (I’m not sure what Chris is doing at this point, as The Sanctuary is ladies only – probably massaging his beer buds in the nearby pub). With a new lease of life we head up to Regent’s Park to another of my favourite places -  the Inner Circle, for that picnic with our friends.

Super tranquil with weeping willows over the lake, immaculate lawns and of course, the totally stunning rose gardens. They have started to die off in the pictures below but you get the idea.

We save dessert for later because we are heading South from one park to another – St. James’s. We are going here partly because it is a gorgeous place but mostly because you can feed the squirrels (they eat right out of your hand) and I adore those little guys. Cute, and yet you know they could take a finger no probs if they fancied.

Next, we will head towards Battersea. I have always wanted to explore inside the now derelict Battersea power station. I find the structure awe inspiring and eerily beautiful. Apparently, the ever present London pigeons are quite interested too so the developers have introduced a couple of peregrine falcons, to try and keep the little blighters out. The BBC has some great pictures and titbits of info here and the Londonist ran a fab little article too. I have just realised I also refer to the power station as ’she’. Make of it what you will.

Photo from Jon’s Pics London set on Flickr

From Battersea it’s back to London Bridge and a drink in the not-so-secret wonder bar that is Shunt. Pass through an unmarked door into the dark tunnels underneath London Bridge station to be greeted by a strange fantasy bar, (a different theme each week, chosen and created by London artists) – this place is really quite impossible to describe, but there are some great photo sets on Flickr.

Finally, as if we haven’t eaten enough already, it’s time to go for a meal with a difference (I have limitless resources remember?). This is possibly one of the most ridiculously extravagant ideas for eating I have ever come across, I’m not great with heights but if I had the chance, I would go for dinner in the sky….now that is a restaurant with a view…

Picture from www.dinnerinthesky.com

This branch of Whole Foods Market is the London flagship store, situated on Kensington High Street. The size of this place is overwhelming and, although the selection of food is impressive, there is rather a lot. Of everything. This makes me feel slightly uncomfortable in a way – can they really manage to sell all that? Do they have gangs of bin raiders camping out the back?

We did enjoy the variety of goats milk cheeses (my favourite) although I resisted them this time round in favour of the brie with truffles (how exciting!) and the Blue Stichelton. This cheese is a collaboration between two leading cheese names (Joe Schneider and Randolph Hodgson) and is made from unpasteurised milk. As they say on the website, its early days for this cheese but ‘the flavours coming through are already promising’. Here’s what Matthew Fort thinks (for The Guardian).

We also bought some anchovies as we can never resist them. These are the Ortiz brand, fished from the Cantabrian or Mediterranean seas using methods that allow the fish stocks to regenerate. They come with a small pick for ease of eating which is the kind of thing that makes a sad person like me really excitable. The fig and anise bread caught my eye instantly, even though lots of great breads were available and it’s really good, there are little pockets of juicy sweet figs and a background perfume of anise that isn’t too overpowering. We also picked up a bottle of Greek extra virgin olive oil, now often cited as preferential to Italian as it is consistently good, whereas Italian oil can vary from region to region. Apparently, good Italian olive oil is often made from olives that have been imported from Greece anyway.

I even ended up buying another shopping bag – as if I don’t have enough already. ‘But they’re all different’, I said to Chris, ‘they are different shapes and sizes and suit different types of shopping’. It’s true. There are the everyday bags – the best kind, made of hessian that folds up easily so you can carry them in your handbag. Then there are the sturdier versions, which are great but thicker by nature and therefore not amenable to folding. We didn’t have to think about this kind of thing until recently, when plastic bags (quite rightly) became something to avoid.

I will say that the staff at this branch of Whole Foods aren’t always as friendly and helpful as you might wish (excepting the barmaid, she was lovely but she did give me alcohol.) Although observing the behaviour of some of the customers, I’m not surprised. There seemed to a be a lot of rude people in that shop. We enjoyed the visit, don’t get me wrong, but it is expensive and there’s a whole lot of it.

Roast dinners, I think, are the sort of meals that allow you to practice the art of preserving every single bit of flavour and always get me thinking how I can squeeze the most out of every ingredient. Just the thought of cooking a meal with so many elements – all needing to come together at the same time used to fill me with fear but practice has seen fear dissolve into excitement. Particularly in the winter months, it seems appropriate to cook warming, hearty dishes that can be shared among friends or grazed over for a couple of days afterwards; roast beef and horseradish sandwiches anyone? How about lamb and mint sauce? Recent adventures in Yorkshire pudding making have led Chris to perfect his method. It seems that, whatever your recipe, allowing the batter to rest, heating the oil until very, very hot and definitely not opening the oven door during cooking are all crucial. These sound like tips I always knew about, so how come it’s only just started working? We’ve started cooking Yorkshire’s in the iron skillet instead of individually out of necessity but they work perfectly and are great for filling with sausages and onion gravy…In fact, putting the entire roast dinner inside is a very tempting idea.

The past few months, we’ve roasted pheasant, lamb, beef and quails. I recently learned that adding a small amount of water to the roasting tray creates some steam which helps to keep the meat moist (particularly in the case of pheasant, which can be dry) and leaves you with a nice amount of reducible juice for graving making at the end. I suspect this may not be news to everyone else…..I love it when a good bird comes with heart, kidneys and maybe even the neck, a little gift for the gravy and a treat for the chef. The bones are then left for making stock, which we freeze for using in soups and sauces for example. This makes me feel particularly virtuous, especially considering the current emphasis on minimising food waste. We like to bring elements of the meal together and get flavours running throughout so we might make a celeriac and apple mash for example and then continue the apple theme by making a cider gravy. If something is fried, maybe some bacon to combine with spring greens as a side dish, the fatty pan is waiting to impart flavour into the next part of the meal. We can get a little carried away, trying to preserve every last bit of flavour. Having a small kitchen means that re-using pans is essential so I’ll steam the greens over the boiling potatoes and so on, in order to save space on the tiny hob! Of course, these are winter lunches in the main, in summer we would be eating something light and seasonal like rainbow tomato salad.

And afterwards there must be something sweet (and often chocolatey!). The baked cheesecake in the picture is a Gordon Ramsay recipe from his book ‘Sunday Lunch’, the best ’secret Santa’ present I ever had! It works every time and is served with a marscapone cream perfumed with stem ginger syrup and chopped stem ginger pieces. Chris is also a big fan of chocolate fudge cake – as you can see he specifically requested it for his birthday. This all sounds quite traditional and it is, but only because of what is available from the veg box and the butcher during the winter. Sometimes I like to change the menu completely and hop to a totally different cuisine, perhaps serving a middle eastern buffet followed by a baklava. Tomorrow, I am told, it is my turn to put my feet up (it’s Saturday not Sunday but I kept my mouth shut) and Chris will be cooking for me. I feel this may be a more regular occurrence if only I would get the hell out of the kitchen once in a while and let the poor man in!

Anyway, what I am wondering is – What do you like to cook on Sundays?