Ding dong ding dong

Okay so the plan was to get you a photo of me and Giles cutting the wedding cake. But the thing is that someone texted the photo to me and I can't work out how to get it off my phone (even though I've got all the appropriate cables) and onto this blog.

So no photos until the photographer - an upsettingly handsome young man called Roo - has deleted all the ones of me looking huge-toothed and red-faced and sent both useable photos to me. This is a shame as I bored you all to death so comprehensively with the wedding that I felt the very least I could do was to offer some kind of exclusive footage.

Anyway it all went very well. I told Giles that he was strictly not to use the word c*** or f*** in his speech, which meant he only used both words once.

Now, after a very, very tense half an hour looking for my passport, I'm going to pack for my honeymoon Greece, where the weather appears to be 16C and drizzling - but you can't have it all.

But before that, we are going for lunch at L'Artista, the pizza place under the Golders Green tube station railway bridge where Giles and I first met.

The carbs are back. Hooray!

Still no food

Okay, so the volcano didn't eat my wedding after all. Airspace opened and there's been another flurry of emails and phone calls to confirm that, yes, they're all going to be there.

But I'm still not doing any cooking. So instead here are some pictures of Hatfield House, where I went this morning.

How Eyjafjallajökull ate my wedding

So, there probably won't be much in the way of FOOD here this week.

a) my wedding is this Saturday, for those of you who for some insane reason aren't crossing off the days on your wall calendar, and so my diet has shrunk to emergency rations only and

b) the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, has stranded over 10% of the wedding guests abroad, meaning that I have to spend the majority of this week pacing up and down going "Fuck!" and not much time in the kitchen

Anyway, I didn't want anyone to think I had given up. I'm just on bridal high alert.

Slow roast pork belly and chinese dipping sauce

If there's one thing I love, it's a solution meal. You know what I mean? One of those recipes where you go "Oh my god - YES. Perfect for a snack/breakfast/lazy lunch. Not too many ingredients... not too complicated..." And then there are other recipes where you go "Yes looks nice but I'm never going to make it in a million years."

Well, this afternoon I came up with one of those. It's a delicious thing, to be sure, but it's no real use. It's too complicated to have a starter and it's too salty to have as a main. So here it languishes in my kitchen, occasionally picked at by me - waiting for Giles to come back from filming and demolish it.

It came about because I've been having trouble with my belly - my pork belly that is. The last few times I've cooked it, it hasn't been right. I've done a short, hot roast thing and it's not for me - I wanted to try out a long slow roast so I picked up £3-worth from the butcher and slung it in the oven, just rubbed with some salt, for 20min on 220C and then 2 hours at 170C. It worked! Which was a relief becuase everyone  bangs on about how easy it is and I've never found it so. The pork is even "melting", which I've never got it to do before. Although only as "melting" as pork ever gets.

To go with it, just for a laugh, I made some dipping sauce out of King Jamie's magic Chinesey ingredients, which were:

2 tbsp runny honey
4 tbsp soy sauce
1 2cm x 5 cm knob of fresh ginger, chopped chunkily
2 large cloves garlic peeled and halved
1 large red chilli de-stalked and chopped roughly - seeds and all
1 teaspoon Chinese five spice

I put all these in a pan with a large wineglass of water and then boiled it for about 20 minutes until it was reduced to a runny sauce. I then passed the sauce through a sieve to get rid of the scary chunks of chilli, garlic and ginger and was left with a spice-infused rich, brown... thing.

Delicious. But pointless.

The diet gets serious

I've started to get a bit hardcore about my diet. I thought I would never do anything as vain and silly as diet hard before my wedding but then suddenly your wedding's happening and you suddenly find yourself saying No Thanks to mashed potato and deciding not to purchase your usual walk-from-the-tube packet of Haribos.

It's probably because there are only about 10 days left to my wedding and after that I can cram bread and pasta and rice and pudding for the rest of my life. Or until I'm too fat to turn on the telly. Maybe it's because there's not much else to do right now. The wedding's done - thanks to Giles mostly - the replacement hot pink slutdress has arrived and so my remaining challenge is to see how much weight I can lose between now and the big day without passing out or getting osteoperosis.

So, dinner last night was steak and celeriac remoulade. Sorry, half a steak and celeriac remoulade. Even Giles, who at home is Spartan in his eating habits (what would he dine on in hell? I often wonder), was pretty alarmed at the sheer self-denial of dinner.

But by the same token it was really delicious. There's something about celeriac remoulade that goes really well with steak. And this was a nice steak bought, again, from our farmer's market - the Twelve Green Acres stall. But also purchaseable from their website: http://www.12-greenacres.co.uk/shop.htm

The shop section is down just at the moment, but do visit them another time if you're interested.

Anyway so the steak was properly hung and all that clever stuff and it really was spectacularly tasty, even more tasty than steak usually is, despite (becuase of?) there not being very much of it.

The celeriac remoulade went like this:

1 small celeriac, grated in a food processor
3 large dollops of mayonnaise
1 dollop of Dijon mustard
juice of one lemon
salt and pepper

I also added a carrot that needed eating, but it wasn't neccessary.