Scrape the carrots and cut into slices about 1 cm thick. Cover with cold water, add salt, bring to the boil, and cook for 10 minutes — they should still be a bit firm. Drain in a colander and leave to cool and dry out.

Meanwhile gently fry the chopped onion in some olive oil for about 10 minutes, till soft and starting to brown. Add the carrots and all the rest of the ingredients except the parsley/coriander and the yoghurt, and mix well. Season well with salt. Leave to cool, but don’t refrigerate — it’s better at room temperature.

Just before serving, sprinkle with parsley or coriander and drizzle a bit more olive oil over it. When serving on its own, you can add a dollop of yoghurt to each serving if you want.

No apologies for the gratuitous cat picture; he’s more photogenic than cabbage gratin

My version: I had no butter, at all, so I substituted olive oil, which was probably a good thing for my arteries anyway. I’m sure it would be good with butter, but it was just fine with olive oil. There was no St Marcellin in the cheese shop, so I bought a nice ripe St Félicien instead. St Félicien is bigger than St Marcellin. What the heck, I chopped up the whole cheese (except the bits I ate while I was doing it) and scattered it over. So if using St Marcellin I’d be tempted to use most of two cheeses. Other nice tangy creamy cheeses can be used — I think Reblochon might be nice, and Molly used Délice de Bourgogne (I think she’s right that Brie wouldn’t work).

Of course, if you use vegetable stock this dish is vegetarian.

3 tbs olive oil or unsalted butter
1 smallish savoy cabbage quartered, cored, and sliced into narrow shreds
1 bunch spring onions, white and green parts, thinly sliced
salt
400 ml mild chicken or vegetable stock
1 ripe Saint-Félicien cheese or 2 St Marcellins

Preheat the oven to 180C. Heat the oil or butter in a large frying pan, big enough to take all of the cabbage. Saute the cabbage and spring onions with a generous seasoning of salt on a medium to high heat for about 10 minutes; the cabbage should start to wilt, and can go brown in places. Add the stock, bring to a simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2 minutes.

Transfer everything to a large gratin dish, cover tightly with foil, and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil, and continue to bake for 20 minutes or so until much of the liquid has evaporated (it’s a good-tempered dish, no harm will be done if you leave it a bit longer). Remove the dish from the oven, cut the cheese into small pieces, and scatter over the cabbage. Turn up the oven to 200C and cook for another 10 minutes or so until the cheese is melted. We just ate this with mashed potatoes, but it would go really well with roast or braised meat, especially pork.

A la forestière in French cuisine invariably means the dish contains mushrooms, because in autumn every self-respecting peasant is out there scouring the woods for fungi while hoping to avoid trigger-happy hunters. All we’ve scored so far are a few piboules from the poplar tree in our garden, but luckily dried ceps are always on hand to add a secret kick to savoury dishes.

This Jane Grigson recipe (from her Vegetable Book) worked wonders with the woody organic carrots in our veggie box. She serves them in hollowed-out bread rolls brushed with butter and crisped in the oven; I just served them on toasted muffins. They make a good vegetarian starter or light lunch/supper, but would also be an excellent accompanying vegetable for a roast, with or without the bread.

You could just use common-or-garden cultivated mushrooms, but fresh or dried ceps (porcini) will take it into another league.

750 g carrots, sliced fairly thickly
light, not too highly seasoned stock (beef, chicken, vegetable…)
1/2 tsp sugar
a knob of butter
nutmeg
250 g fresh mushrooms, preferably including some ceps, or dried mushrooms soaked in hot water, or a mixture of both
150 ml cream
chopped parsley and/or chives
juice of half a lemon
salt, pepper

Put the carrots in a pan and just cover with stock. Add sliced dried mushrooms if using (I added some of the soaking liquid too, because it’s full of flavour). Add sugar and nutmeg and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes or so, until the carrots are tender and the liquid is reduced to a syrupy consistency. If you are using fresh mushrooms, slice them and fry in a little butter till lightly browned, while the carrots are cooking. Add them to the cooked carrots, then add the cream and herbs and stir over low heat for a couple of minutes to thicken and amalgamate the sauce. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste and serve immediately.

It’s the same basic idea as garlic bread — the flavoured butter is spread liberally onto slices of baguette, and then you can either bake the slices till crisp as I did, or use the classic method of wrapping the almost-sliced-through and buttered loaf in foil and baking it. It was much appreciated, and definitely a keeper.

“Must-stop-baking-cakes,” I muttered to myself as I browsed the blog of this month’s partner for Taste & Create, Happy Cook of My Kitchen Treasures. I seem to have baked a lot of cakes recently, many of them from my T&C partners or other bloggers, and the effects on my waistline are noticeable.

It wasn’t easy though; there were quite a few sweet dishes I fancied trying, such as Apricot-Marzipan Bundles, or coffee-craisin-mascarpone loaf. Or moelleux au chocolat. Or raspberry financiers. Well, you get the picture. HC likes making panna cotta too, and I love panna cotta.

But still, I tore myself away and decided that since HC obviously knows what she’s talking about when it comes to Indian food, I would make Kadai Murgh. Excellent choice — we both really liked it, and scraped our plates clean. I served it with a Basmati rice pilau and some yoghurt — sadly no Geeta’s mango chutney, because our local Carrefour doesn’t stock it any more — most upsetting.

This dish is dead easy to make; you can do it in little more time than it takes to cook the rice. Mine doesn’t look quite like HC’s, because I couldn’t get any tandoori powder, so I had to make do with a spoonful of paprika and some ras-el-hanout. When I tasted it at the end of the cooking time, it was a bit too spicy for me, so I just added an extra spoonful of crème fraîche to tone it down. Definitely a keeper, so thanks HC!

Visit My Kitchen Treasures for the real recipe. Here I give my own way of making pilau rice; I’ve been doing it this way for years and it always produces rice that is not soggy or stuck together. Of course you can vary seasonings to suit yourself.

For two not very greedy people, take a glass or cup of about 220 ml capacity and fill it about 3/4 full with Basmati rice. Finely chop a small onion or a shallot or two, and crush a clove of garlic. Heat some vegetable oil in a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Soften the onion and garlic in it for a few minutes, then add the rice and stir to coat it with oil. Fill the glass to the top with cold water, pour into the pan, and stir once just to loosen anything that might have stuck. If you like your rice a bit more cooked than I do, you can add a little more water — a tablespoon or two. Season to taste: I use salt, pepper, two or three crushed cardamom pods, and a bay leaf. Sometimes I add crushed coriander seeds or cumin too. Put on the lid, turn down the heat to very low, and leave to cook completely undisturbed for 15 minutes. Do not take off the lid or stir!

At the end of this time you can take a peek; all the water should have been absorbed, and you can test the rice by eating a bit. If it’s done, turn off the heat and stir it up a bit in case it’s stuck to the bottom of the pan. It will keep warm with the lid on for another 10 minutes or so.

Really it should be turned out, but a galette made with enough potatoes for 9 people was so large and so dense I just served it straight from the dish, using a slotted spoon so it wasn’t swimming in fat. If yours is smaller, do turn it out.

1 kg potatoes
150 g goose or duck fat
3 cloves garlic
leaves from a sprig of rosemary

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Peel the potatoes and slice thinly (my food processor had one of its rare outings for this). Put them in a colander and wash till the water runs clear. You can do this in advance and then leave the potatoes in a large bowl, covered with water so they don’t go brown. When ready to cook, drain throughly in the colander — you want the potatoes as dry as possible. Return them to the bowl.

Warm the fat in a pan just enough so that it becomes liquid, adding the rosemary leaves and chopped garlic. Pour the fat over the potatoes and mix thoroughly (your hands are good for this). Theoretically you should then arrange them in neat concentric circles in an ovenproof, flameproof dish. Life’s too short for this unless you are really trying to impress people. I just tipped them into the dish and squished them down. Pour over any remaining fat and put in the oven for an hour — no attention needed.

Remove the dish and press the potatoes down to compact them. Return to the oven for 10 minutes. Test the potatoes for done-ness, and if you are going to turn it out, carefully lift the edge with a slice or palette knife to see if the bottom is nice and brown. If not, put the dish on the hob and cook for a few minutes to crisp it up before transferring to a serving plate. Otherwise, just serve in the dish.

Preheat the oven to 200C. Lightly oil a gratin dish. Spread out half the potatoes, then half the onions. Season to taste with thyme, nutmeg and salt and pepper. Add half the tomatoes, then sprinkle over half the cheese. Repeat the layers, then pour over the wine or stock. Sprinkle generously with Parmesan and then bake for about 45 minutes, until the potatoes are cooked.

One more recipe for the cookbook challenge. I had just one question about this: would it be as good as Rossella’s fabulous pear and gorgonzola risotto? Answer: not quite. It’s a plain risotto with gorgonzola and parmesan melted into it and a garnish of fried onions and apples. We felt there wasn’t really enough gorgonzola, but I liked the slight crunch of the apples in contrast to the creamy rice. Nicky managed to take a presentable photo of hers; I tried, but I can’t say the same. Well, I’ve already established that risotto is not photogenic!

This recipe inaugurates a new tag of “frugal food”, which seems appropriate in these credit-crunch times. Made mainly of ripe tomatoes and stale bread, it costs almost nothing, and can make a light vegetarian main course along with a green vegetable or salad. Carnivores can have it as a substantial side dish with a roast — less meat needed! And of course I wouldn’t be posting it if it wasn’t delicious. The bottom layer of crumbs soaks up the juices, while the top is brown and crunchy.

I habitually whiz stale ends of bread to crumbs in the blender and then store them in the freezer in ziploc bags, as they are useful for so many things. So I used some of those for this, and the last of the season’s tomatoes. It’s really best made with the ripest, reddest tomatoes you can find. If they’re a bit pale, up the garlic and herbs to compensate.

For 4:
150-200 g brown breadcrumbs
2 medium onions, very finely chopped
1-2 cloves garlic, very finely chopped
flat-leaf parsley or basil to taste, chopped
1 tbs finely grated lemon zest
6 tbs finely grated Parmesan
4 tbs olive oil
25 g butter
1 kg very ripe tomatoes

Preheat the oven to 200C. Mix together crumbs, onions, garlic, Parmesan, lemon zest, and herbs, and season with salt and pepper. Use about a tbs of the oil to oil a gratin dish. Then sprinkle about a third of the bread mixture into it.

Peel the tomatoes and slice them thickly. Lay half of them on top of the crumbs, season, and drizzle over about half the remaining oil. Repeat layers of crumbs and tomatoes, finishing with crumbs. Drizzle the remaining oil over the crumbs and then dot with butter. Bake for about 35 minutes, until crisp and brown on top.

Taste & Create time, and I seem to be firmly stuck in the risotto groove. My partner this month is Cuisine Heart, and after browsing her blog I found several recipes to interest me. After the fabulous pear and gorgonzola risotto, I was tempted by her caramelized apple, onion and cheese risotto. Also I was running out of time, and it was easy and quick to do, using ingredients from the storecupboard. It’s basically a standard risotto method, except that you caramelize the apples and onions instead of just gently softening them in the oil, and use dry cider instead of white wine.

Verdict: OK, it is not up to pear and gorgonzola standards, but it was delicious and unusual. The only cheese I had was a stub of Comté and lots of parmesan, so I made do with those and didn’t add cream at the end. I loved the tart fruitiness of the cider and apple. We ate it on its own, but it would be nice as an accompaniment to roast pork. The photo is just further proof of how unphotogenic risotto is.