You know how I feel about February: it’s all bills and work and tax returns and Valentine’s drivel. And now Holland has suddenly formed part of the Arctic circle and – as if things could get any worse – this February my passport is off in Paris somewhere being red-taped, which means that I can’t escape even if I manage to salvage the last remaining scrap of cash the government hasn’t swindled off me… Bah humbug.

My body seems to have given up all hope. As if on cue, yesterday my tonsils turned into the craters of the moon’s surface. It wasn’t pretty. I needed vitamin C. And probably a hot toddy.

I started simple: lime juice, honey and ginger in a mug with hot water. Fine, but there’s only so much of it you can drink before your body goes into toxin-deprivation meltdown.

So I started digging out some recipes that involve citrus fruits and other vitamin-rich ingredients. Here’s what I found…

Tuna, blood orange, fennel, carrot and avocado salad: ok, so it’s not exactly winter fare, but it’s certainly jam-packed with the good stuff. Use the leftover orange juice and the fennel tops in the dressing for added healthy loveliness. I stole the idea for this salad from restaurant Marius – thanks chef!

Chicken roasted with orange zest and juice, potatoes, fennel and olives: much more appropriate for a cold evening, and just as delicious. It’s a Jamie recipe, so you can find it online. It’s supposed to be made with guinea fowl, by the way, but traipsing across town looking for exotic poultry seemed to defeat the object of keeping warm and getting better, so I settled for a small chicken.

That accomplished, I’m now on the hunt for the ultimate kill-or-cure hot toddy recipe. Any ideas?

We went to Blauw for Indonesian, and A-fusion for dim sum, and various other tried-and-tested favourites of mine. But I didn’t want to risk anywhere new, and neither did I feel like making the lengthy recipes involving blood oranges and kohlrabi that I’d planned for January’s seasonal ingredients post…

So here I am making cocktails. Specifically, here I am making the Honey Badger – a sweet, citrusy, bubbly concoction drawn to my attention by my friend Andrea. There are various reasons why the name of this drink demanded for me to make it: starting with an actual badger, working through an American footballer who plays for Louisiana State University’s college football team, and culminating in my American visitor who has come affectionately to be known by me and my friends as the Honey Badger, too.

He was sweet enough (see what I did there?) to buy the honey and the St Germain required, while I supplied the oranges and the bubbly. And it was this rather fabulous website that told us (and now you) how to make it. A perfect January pick-me-up. Proost!

As are cocktails, so my first foray into purposing my pomegranates took the form of a ‘cosmo-pometan’. It was loosely (very loosely) based on an idea I got from Jamie Oliver for a gin/pomegranate shooter combo. But I didn’t fancy doing shots on a Monday night, so I lengthened the drink with some cranberry juice and lime (my buzz phrase in America: ‘more lime please!’) and served it in a martini glass.

The other half of my pomegranate I used with aubergine two ways (mainly because I loved the first way so much, I couldn’t resist a second aubergine-pomegranate coupling). In the picture below, I roasted aubergine halves with thyme and served them with a buttermilk sauce, ruby pomegranate gems, and a dusting of sumac.

In the second version, I scraped out the innards of blackened aubergine and mixed them with Greek yoghurt, pomegranate seeds, mint and lemon juice, and served it as a sauce with roasted baby pumpkin wedges and cumin-seared lamb.

For the first time this year, I’m celebrating Christmas in my own apartment in Amsterdam with friends rather than family (more about that nearer the time). I somehow suspect that pomegranates might be featuring on my festive menu…

I apologise. I think I’m having some sort of post-road-trip pre-Christmas come down. And as people’s parents tend to say: if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. So I’m going to shut up and show you what I’ve been cooking.

November’s seasonal ingredient of the month is horseradish, which was not only hard to find, but is also kind of a rubbish ingredient to blog about because you can’t actually see it in anything I’ve made. You just have to take my word for it.

First up, I made a sort of warm potato salad with horseradish, crème fraiche, mint and lemon juice. (I have my friend Renee to thank for this recipe.) Then I cooked something I’ve never made before: Salmon Wellington. I’ve never made a Wellington full stop, let alone a salmon one. (I’ve given it capital letters because capital letters – like Wellingtons – were cool in the 80s.) Despite its distinctly retro characteristics, it was pretty nice; I’d do it again.

Last night, I turned the rest of the horseradish into potato cakes, which didn’t go quite as planned. I blame Jamie. He told me to cut the potatoes into half-centimetre discs, when quite clearly mandolin-fine, dauphinoise-esque slices were called for. I layered my too-large potato pieces up with garlic, horseradish, seasoning and butter, and baked them for around 45 minutes, at which point the potatoes still looked much more like potatoes and not at all like cakes. But not to worry. I served my potato non-cakes with seared, flash-roasted duck breast and a red wine and rhubarb sauce. That last bit (the bit I improvised) went much better.

And on that note, I’m off to buy the ingredients for tonight’s boredom-busting baking session. Or to just find someone to have a drink with.

Only then I came across a savoury version involving puff pastry, which drew me to it as I like the combination of sweet and savoury. I’m also kind of avoiding desserts at the moment in a bid to lose the kilos I gained in high-fructose corn syrup along the way. I was reminded of a Nigel Slater recipe, which uses half a butternut squash cut lengthways, its cavity filled with spiced caramelised onions. That got me to thinking that I might be able to create a sort of open pastry-squash combo – kind of like a giant upside-down pie. And this logic brought me to what you see above: roasted butternut squash galette with onions, pine nuts and feta.

The rest of the squash I turned into gnocchi, which I served with homemade almond and parsley pesto. In the end, nothing I did resembled anything from the trip. But it felt good to be back in my own kitchen…

As well as the pre-Road Trip Gumbo I made back in July, I’ve since cooked Picadillo meatloaf, dirty cowboy rice (here’s hoping the cowboys are as dirty as the rice) and – yesterday – cornbread and polenta-fried fish with sweetcorn salsa. Yep, September is the month of the sweetcorn. And very satisfying it is too. I like the whole ritual of peeling back the leaves and the stringy bits from the actual yellow, kernel-y part. I also like eating it straight off the cob, although I challenge anyone to do that without burning off the roof of their mouth in the process. A distinct drawback.

But for this month’s recipes I decided to spare my gums and take on the kernels with a knife. I also used a lot of polenta, which (in theory) is made from ground corn, so I figured that was a double maize whammy. In the first instance, I made cornbread with chilli and cheese. The recipe said it comes from Arizona, which isn’t actually somewhere I’m going on my trip, but that seemed like a minor detail. It’s not like America’s very big anyway, right?

For my second trick (this one from Georgia, where I am going), I made a charred sweetcorn salsa with yellow pepper, red chilli, tomatoes, spring onions, garlic and mint. I bathed my salsa-dipping fish (I used haddock but any white fish would do) in a mixture of crème fraiche and milk (odd, I know, but the recipe called for buttermilk and I couldn’t be bothered to buy any) for an hour, before coating it in polenta and frying it. I served it with some wild rice to beef it up a bit.

Now all that’s left to do is pack my fat-pants (or rather my fat-trousers, because cooking American doesn’t mean I have to start speaking American) and get ready for some serious Stateside eating…

For some reason, I’d never really cooked halloumi before, so Nigella’s recipe scored a double-whammy when I was looking for new things to do with beetroot. And last weekend was Gay Pride in Amsterdam, so making pink food seemed appropriate… (Beetroot is in season, by the way, just in case you thought I’d gone completely mad.)

Slightly less pink are the chioggia beets, which I must admit I didn’t get from Bario Market. They’re the ones with the pretty concentric circles of pink and white when you cut into them cross-wise. Only when I cooked mine the effect was rather like a cheap T-shirt: the stripes just ran into each other and the whole thing became a pale muddy pinky colour. Still, it tasted the same, so I turned it into carpaccio (well, I just thinly sliced it, but everything seems to be a carpaccio these days, doesn’t it?) along with some smoked mozzarella. Admittedly, I didn’t find that in Bario Market either, but one of the cheese stalls at the Noordermarkt does sell it. I finished the dish with toasted pine nuts, rocket, lemon juice and olive oil – much as I’d dress a regular beef carpaccio. A perfect post-Pride weekend supper.

So, in preparation, I got my hands on a copy of Jamie’s America and started flicking through for inspiration… I then spotted okra in my local corner shop, which is apparently in season in the summer, although I doubt it grows in Holland… et voila: 2 + 2 = gumbo.

I don’t think I’d ever even eaten gumbo before, let alone cooked it, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I was aiming at. I also made some fairly significant substitutions, because I didn’t have any crab or lobster lying around the house, so I decided to add chicken and sweet potato to my prawns and spicy sausage (in my case, Spanish chorizo). I think the recipe called for too much flour and too much stock (which gave it that slightly Campbell’s tomato soup consistency), but all in all, it wasn’t a bad first attempt.

I fully expect, however, to learn a lot from my time in Louisiana. And I plan to try this again once I’ve eaten the authentic version to see if I can improve it.

*If you’d like to offer any restaurant recommendations, food tips or general travel advice to an adventurous foodie abroad, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to add it to my itinerary! The rough route I’ll be following is as follows:

Chicago – Kentucky – Tennessee – Georgia – Alabama – Mississippi – Louisiana – Texas

Thank you!

For years after leaving home, I shunned potatoes in favour of the sexier and more cosmopolitan carbs: rice, pasta and cous cous. I didn’t mind baked jackets (someone really needs to introduce a baked-jacket potato bar in Amsterdam – seriously), nor roasties on Sundays, nor sautéed spuds for breakfast, nor even mash with gravy and chips with mayo. But plain, boiled potatoes struck me as beyond dull.

They do, however, have one redeeming feature: when it comes to summer picnics, the potato salad comes into its own. It’s rained like Noah’s flood here this week, but assuming the sun returns at some point, these two majestic potato numbers achieve the seemingly impossible: they elevate the status of the boiled spud to its rightful position as a sustainer of nations and one third of the magic trio of meat ‘n two veg. It comes from the Solanaceae family apparently – now that sounds much more regal, doesn’t it?

The Royal Potato Salad, from Ottolenghi’s Plenty (sorry, I know). Essentially, you make a pesto (from basil, parsley, pine nuts, garlic and parmesan) and mix it with the boiled, ever-so-slightly-crushed potatoes while they’re still warm, throwing in a good handful of defrosted baby peas and some chopped mint. It should be served with quail’s eggs on top, but that would rather be defeating the object of my economy drive…

Silvena Rowe’s Russian Potato Salad, nicked from the BBC. For this one, you make your own mayo, and then flavor it with Worcester sauce, horseradish, mustard and ketchup. Once the potatoes have cooled, add some chopped radishes, gherkins, spring onions and dill, and mix through your mayonnaise dressing. If there’s one person who wouldn’t tolerate a bland potato, it’s Silvena Rowe.

An ostrich egg apparently holds the equivalent of two dozen chicken’s eggs, so it was one big mother of a frittata I had to make. Fortunately, it was koninginnenacht and I have hungry friends, so we had an ostrich egg-stravaganza…

The pictures were so good, I thought I’d turn them into a photo story. You know, like they did in Just 17 in about 1993. Retro.

Titus (big, strapping Dutch guy) gives us a comparison for the size of the egg:

It takes not one, not two, but three people wielding power tools to bore carefully through the shell at either end.

The yolk – the largest single cell that exists, according to Wikipedia – starts to fall. There’s something weirdly primal and birth-like about it…

An asparagus, cherry tomato, goat’s cheese, herb and truffle frittata starts to take shape…

And it’s ready to be served by the chef!

Cue happy friends sitting down for dinner. Eet smakelijk!

Oh, and then some drunken egg antics with the shell (inevitably) ensue…

PS. A bit of Googling has now confirmed that spring is indeed the season for ostrich eggs! Well, whaddya know: I’m on seasonal brand and everything.