This is a comfort dish if I ever I saw one. The clocks have changed, it's dark by four and it's frosty in the mornings. This was going to be a pie but I didn't get to the pastry stage. So it is a sort of pie filling with roasted boiled potatoes, packed with grainy mustard and parsley.

Ham, pea and mustard hash

Serves four

Two packs of picked ham hock meat or boil up and pick one yourself (see Potato passim) or you could use a couple of cooked gammon steaks

One onion, diced

Splash of olive oil

250g frozen peas cooked through

About half a litre of white sauce

1 tablespoonful of wholegrain mustard

1 small bunch of flat leaved parsley, chopped

Two large potatoes boiled and chopped into fork size pieces

One tablespoonful of olive oil, one of vegetable oil

Fry the onion in a little olive oil and then add the ham and fry until it gains a little colour. Stir in the peas, then the white sauce and the mustard and parsley. Check the seasoning.

Fry the potato pieces in the hot oil, season and serve the two together, scattered with parsley.

It's dank and dark and I want comfort food that teases your tastebuds and leaves you with a warm glow. I adapted this recipe for a chilli beef from one I found in a magazine. The key difference is that this is made with minced beef so the finished dish was more like a spicey, meaty soup. I served this with garlic bread but you could have gone for tortilla or couscous.

One pot chilli, squash and sweetcorn beef

500g minced beef

two tablespoonfuls of olive oil

two small red onions, finely chopped

2 red peppers finely chopped

1 small can of drained sweetcorn

1 red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped

two cloves of garlic finely chopped

zest of half an orange

half a stick of cinnamon

1 heaped teaspoonful of smoked paprika

1 teaspoonful of ground allspice

half a litre of stock

1 small squash, peeled and chopped into cubes of about two centimetres

1 teaspoonful of ground cumin

In a heat proof pot, fry the minced beef and then put to drain on a plate lined with kitchen towel. Wipe out the pot and then heat up the oil and fry the onions, garlic, the spices and then the peppers. When it is all cooked through, add the mince back in and stir in the orange zest, cinnamon stick, the squash and the drained corn. Pour over the stock, season and put in a 180 degree C oven for about half an hour until the squash is cooked through. Serve with soured cream and coriander or flat parsley sprinkled over the top for a further splash of colour.

I have been a bit quiet on the happy p - partly overloaded with other stuff to do and partly because I went off experimenting in the kitchen and made something that I had to chuck in the bin. The reject dish was Farinata - a gram or chick pea flour sort of bread recommended by baker Mark Hix in his new book. My version was a nasty solid jelly like creation - not quite the bready texture that I imagined he would have been expecting.

Anyway, I recovered from failure and made this pear clafoutis for Sunday lunch pudding this week. Clafoutis (the 's' is silent, if you are saying this out loud) is a classic French fruit and batter pudding, one of the few hot baked puddings of French cuisine. It comes from the Limousin and is traditionally made with cherries. Whisking up the egg whites separately makes this a much lighter pudding than an English batter pudding.

I had pears, very pretty pears, sitting in the fruit bowl and so made it up with that but plums are wonderful too.

It was not a huge success in my household, to be honest, as my family don't like what they call 'wet food' and the batter is crispy on the top but just a little soggy underneath. I liked it, but principally because I love cooked pears and the one thing I can tell you is it was a lot nicer than my rejected Farinata!

Pear clafoutis

Unsalted butter for greasing the dish. You need a round fairly shallow dish and butter it well.

75g plain flour

75g caster sugar

300ml milk

2 eggs, separated, whites whisked to stiff peaks

2 tablespoonfuls of kirsch or other appropriate fruit based liqueur

400g prepared fruit - in this case pears - peeled, cored and chopped into mouthsized chunks

icing sugar for dusting over the top

Mix the flour and the sugar together. Mix the egg yolks and the milk together. Add the liquids to the solids and fold in the egg whites. Put the buttered dish into a pre-heated 190 degree C oven for a few minutes and then pour in a bottom layer of batter, arrange the fruit and then pour the rest over. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes until it is puffed up and, most importantly, set. Serve dusted with icing sugar, with cream.

I like to think this is the essence of 'Homeland' food, a series which started again last night on Channel Four and whose first episode was largely set in Beirut. Certainly, the inspiration for this kind of Middle Eastern bolognese came partly from Yotam Ottolenghi, as always with food like this. The dish was probably not very authentic as it was cooked in my Oxford kitchen, but I did use the za'atar which I wrote about last month to give it as authentic as possible a Middle Eastern twang. I thought it made a nice change from Bolognese and served it with cous cous...

One aubergine, cubed, salted and then rinsed off after half an hour

200g of minced lamb

One can of chopped tomatoes

One can of chick peas

A handful of chard leaves, rinsed and ribboned, the tough bits cut off and finely sliced

A dash of tabasco

Half a fresh chilli

Half a teaspoon of ground coriander

Half a teaspoon of ground cumin

One red onion, finely diced

Two finely chopped cloves of garlic

One teaspoon of za'atar or similar spice mix

Fry the onion, the garlic, the chilli and the spices in a hot pan in a little olive oil and then when the onions are brown, add the mince, keeping the pan hot and doing lots of good cheffy shaking to stop the meat from sticking and ensure it is cooked through. Pour off some of the fat if it looks a bit greasy - use one of the empty tin cans from the tomatoes or the chick peas. Add the aubergine cubes to the mix, then the canned chick peas and tomatoes. Cook on the stove top for a good half hour, add a dash of water if it needs it and then finally stir in the ribboned chard for the last five minutes. Season and serve with cous cous, quinoa, bulghur or rice.