The photo just doesn't do it justice. This soup is precisely the colour of raspberry coulis, which messes with your head while you're eating, I can tell you. But I like this combination of flavours very much - the intense sweetness of beetroot, sharp cut of vinegar mellowed a little by long cooking, caraway, and damp, sour yeastiness of rye. Lovely.

I should also mention that, when I rule the earth, caraway will be spelled carroway, just like it always is in my head.

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan, then saute the onions over medium heat for 7 minutes or so until they are softened and translucent. Add the garlic and caraway seeds and cook for a further couple of minutes. Add the potatoes, beetroots, vinegar, stock and a pinch of salt. Bring to a simmer and cook, covered, for 45 minutes or more, until the potatoes and beetroots are very tender (if you don't cook them long enough the texture of the soup will be grainy).

Blend the soup in a food processor or blender, and return to the pan. Bring back to a simmer and taste for seasoning. Serve with an additional pinch of caraway seeds and a spoonful of creme fraiche, and some rye bread. The rye bread really is essential! It is a beautiful synergy of flavours.

Serves 4 as a starter (we ate this as a main but it is probably better in smaller doses, lovely as it is).

This is an unholy combination of winter and summer squashes, brought to you by the global vegetable transport industry. Combined with garlic and two forms of walnut, and roasted, they make a perfect autumn dinner. You could add some grated pecorino, or a herb, if your kitchen was better stocked than mine was last night.

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Toss the squash with a skerrick of olive oil in a large roasting pan, and roast for 10 minutes. Add the garlic and zucchinis and roast a further 15 minutes, or until almost done. Toss through the chopped walnuts and the salt and pepper, and cook a further 5 minutes, or until the vegetables are cooked and the nuts are toasted.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in lots of salted boiling water, until al dente. Drain, then add to the vegetables in the roasting pan. Drizzle with walnut oil and toss well. Season to taste and serve at once.

Serves 2.

Sloe gin

First, find some blackthorn in your local hedgerows. Sloes are the fruits of the blackthorn, and are small (about 1-2 cm in diameter), hard, and deep purple-black in colour, sometimes with a white cloudy bloom.

Pick the sloes in September - October. Some say to wait until after the first frost, others claim that by then the birds and other pickers will have taken them all, and that the frost makes no difference to the taste anyway. Since I live several floors above the ground, quite close to the seafront, and rarely leave the house much before 8, I never know when it's frosted even in Brighton, let alone out in the country where I found the sloes. Damn city living.

When picking the sloes, watch out for the thorns, which can be two or three inches long. If you want to be good and traditional, break off a thorn or two to prick the sloes with later (although another tradition calls for them to be pricked with a solid silver fork, so if you have one of those hanging around, forget the thorn.)

At home, give the sloes a rinse under running water, then dry them well. Pick through and remove any which are wrinkly or squishy or otherwise unpleasant-looking (not that they will be particularly pretty after sitting in hard liquor for three months).

Now comes the rather tedious part, the pricking. I read on one webpage that you should gather round and do this with family and friends, sipping wine and chatting while stabbing sloes. It sounds lovely but unless you like spreading sticky sloe juice all over your wine glass it's not really the go. You'll just have to converse sober. Anyway, using a thorn, or a solid silver fork, or any other sharp implement you have handy, prick each sloe several times, to break the skin and let the gin in and the flavour out.

Once you've got your sloes pricked, start assembling the bottles. Into each bottle, place 1 pound (450 g) of pricked sloes, half a pound (225 g) of sugar, and 1 pint (600 ml) of gin. (Obviously, adjust the measurements to suit the size of bottles, but keep the proportions the same.) Screw the lids on tight and give them a good shake. The sugar will take a while to dissolve - ours did it overnight - but if you are anything like me you will help it along by shaking the bottles every time you walk past them because you are so thrilled you have finally got around to making something with fruit that grew on a hedgerow and you can't keep your hands off them.

The gin will gradually take on a lovely, deep magenta colour over the next few days. Keep shaking the bottles once a day or so for the first four weeks. After that, give them a shake every now and then for a further two or three months. At that point, decant the gin, straining it through several layers of muslin to catch the sloes, which can be discarded. Return the sloe gin to clean bottles. It can be drunk straight away, but it will continue to improve for several years.

Today we went out to E Ho for lunch, which was an delicious fresh tomato and lentil soup, with rosemary and potato bread rolls, followed by dark chocolate pudding. Most excellent. Then we took a postprandial, post-pudding perambulation (we decided against taking this exercise pre-pudding), and rambled across the countryside discovering along the way not only lots of blackberries but also a glut of sloes, hurrah. Tomorrow, a recipe for sloe-gin, including photos of the gigantic sloe thorn with which I will have to prick each and every one of the hundreds of sloes we gathered.

I sit on the couch and wirelessly surf the web by candle-in-pumpkin light.

Since I started eating fish a couple of months ago, Ted's been keen to try something seafoody from David Thompson's Thai Food, since we've previously been limited to the relatively few vegetarian recipes (or modifications of the meaty ones). Despite the fact that I've managed to update twice today, I am not massively time-rich at the moment, so we chose a simple boiled curry, which took about half an hour from start to finish to produce.

The curry sauce is quite thin, and tastes, as Thompson says, salty, sour and hot. It's a very versatile recipe: he lists the various fish and vegetables which can be included, and in the recipe on the previous page, for sour orange curry of salted fish, watermelon rind and egg, describes a series of other variations found in Thai markets. Tonight I used local trout for the fish, and sliced boiled bamboo shoots, chinese greens, and quartered apple eggplants for the vegetables. The final dish was very fishy, more so than any other seafood I've tried in the last couple of months, but the combination with the sour flavours and scents was delicious.

First make the curry paste. Deseed the chillies, soak them in hot water for 5-10 minutes, then drain and chop. Pound in a heavy mortar and pestle with the pinch of salt until smooth. Add the galangal and pound again, and then do the same with the shallot. Finally, add the shrimp paste and combine well. Set aside, but do not remove from the mortar.

Bring the stock to the boil, then add about a third of the fish. Simmer briefly until it is cooked, then remove. Flake the cooked fish into the mortar and work it into the curry paste - this will thicken the curry.

Return the stock to the boil, and add the tamarind water, sugar, fish sauce and curry paste. Bring back to the boil once again, then add the vegetables according to their cooking time. Finally, add the remainder of the fish, cut into pieces, and simmer for a further minute or two until it is cooked.

I love following tangled lists of links between cooking blogs, until finally you make it to a previously unexplored bit of webspace, via a blog which links a few sites you've read before, but almost as many you haven't. This happened to me when I came across tinyfork a couple of weeks ago. I like the food on tinyfork - parathas, polenta with honey and Vietnamese cinnamon, more polenta with mushroom and cider ragu, even the mock duck experiment - as well as the writing and the photos. Also, Fae has the most beautiful hand.

One of the links from tinyfork led me to Orangette, another blog I sat down and read from end to end this afternoon. (It's Saturday! I can take a couple of hours off from the thesis! It's myself I'm trying to convince, not you.) I was drawn in from the first by the subtitle, a Julia Child quote: "Life itself is the proper binge", and then by the excellent, personal writing. And not so much by the actual recipes, of which there are relatively few, but by the descriptions of meals, which make my mind start to whir. Take this entry, with descriptions of a salade Marseillaise, and of grilled sardines with greens, fennel, capers and pine nuts. Or the French cakes and tarts. Or the various entries talking about the transition from vegetarianism to omnivory again.

Other good things going on round here: there's an apple festival at West Dean gardens on the 16th and 17th of October. Nearby parks and gardens are about to show off their autumn colours. And you might want to check out Alias Hotel Seattle's Supper Club. Ted went to the last one, on matching wine and food, while I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago, and thought it was great. The next one, on October 25th, concentrates on local Sussex fungi, game and seasonal vegetables. Vegetarians beware, however: apparently Ted and Geraldine were asked as they entered whether they were vegetarian, and on replying in the negative, were told "oh thank heavens! Vegetarians just get whatever's lying around in the kitchen." The omnivores, however, found themselves very satisfyingly served.

I am so so busy - no time to chat! But here, quickly, is a brilliant recipe for pumpkin, cranberry and walnut muffins, adapted from this one posted by TraceyB in the Chicklit forums. The muffins are a lovely dark golden spice colour, with ruby cranberries scattered through, and are absolutely delicious. I made them with dried cranberries this time, but will try again with fresh when they appear in the shops in a month or so.

Preheat the oven to 190 C. Grease a couple of muffin trays well.

If you're using dried cranberries, soak them in hot water for 10 minutes to plump up, then drain.

Sift together in one bowl the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, ground cloves and salt. In another, large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Stir in the eggs one at a time. Mix in the pumpkin. Add the flour mixture in two lots, stirring until just blended. Finally, gently fold in the cranberries and nuts.

Spoon the batter into the muffin cups, filling quite high (the batter doesn't rise a great deal). Bake for 20-25 minutes. This makes about 18 regular size muffins.