We've been here before. The owner/chef's obsession with eating many different breeds of chicken continues to great effect.

The first course was a poached egg served in a broth with trompette and chanterelle mushrooms gathered by the chef's mother. The egg was meltingly soft and full of flavour. Very good to have some fresh mushrooms.

This was followed up by coq au vin jaune, made with the weird Vin Jaune of the Jura region. The broth was incredibly strongly flavoured of chicken and was not yet another intense wine reduction. Some of the bits of meet needed serious gnawing to get off the bones, so much of the bird was in there, but the meat itself was tender and completely delicious. This was served with grated potato made into some form of cake, the name of which currently escapes me. This was certainly yummy scrummy in my tummy, but I did feel that the total volume available was a tad small.

Any lack of volume in the main course was made up for when most people in the restaurant had left and he bought out a stack of sugar crepes that he had forgotten to serve to everyone else. I like sugar crepes.

This is a great place, and the wine list is super with well-priced beauties. Cheap Clos des Lambrays is not to be sniffed at.

Contact: Ferme de la Ruchotte, 21360 Bligny sur Ouche. Tel +33 3 80 20 04 79 Fax +33 3 80 20 03 29

For breakfast today I had bacon chops from Sillfield Farm.

These are really just thick-cut pieces of back bacon, but I found them quite delicious. They just require frying for a few minutes so are terribly easy to prepare. Of course, they wouldn't be the same without being made from high-quality Sillfield Farm bacon.

Tonight we made goong cha nam pla again. However, this time we used the biggest king prawns we could find at Borough Market. Turns out this was not optimal, the smaller prawns we used last time tasted sweeter and had a more mouth-coating richness to them. We also used normal red chillies rather than bird's eye chillies and this was clearly a mistake. The fiery heat is an important part of the experience and with that diminished using weaker chillies the dish was not quite so exciting.

Friday's lovely meal at Addie's Thai Café gave us a recipe to steal: goong cha nam pla or raw prawn salad. For this you will need:

24 large raw prawns
A bulb of fresh garlic finely chopped
8 bird's eye chillies de-seeded and finely chopped
A bunch of coriander chopped
The juice of three limes
Two teaspoons of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

Shell and butterfly the prawns. Whilst you are doing this mix all the other ingredients together and allow them to infuse. Arrange the prawns artfully on a plate and spoon the 'salad' onto them. It'll look like this:

Obviously, you'll need fresh, high quality prawns, but when would you buy anything else? I suppose it would be fair to point out that this dish is extremely hot.

So after weeks of chucking chunks I managed to go out and eat food! And I didn't even blow bits repeatedly throughout the meal. My stomach is still in quite a bad way, but I greatly enjoyed my trip to West London to eat the best Thai food I've had in the UK.

Addie's Thai Café, a couple of hundred metres away from Earl's Court tube station, seems rather sedate from the outside. The inside is also well-designed but unremarkable; it could be any modern Asian restaurant. Yet the relative difficulty in getting a table and the frequency with which good reviews appear that perhaps what comes from the kitchen is more remarkable than the decor.

We started off with raw prawn salad which was one of the most characterful dishes I have ever eaten The prawns were peeled and butterflied, with minced chili, garlic, Thai basil and coriander piled on them drizzled with a lime juice and nam pla (fish sauce). I say 'characterful' because they were stunningly hot; sweat poured from our brows as we manfully consumed these hot little delights. Delights they were, the combination of flavours was most pleasing and even thought they did hurt, I wanted to eat more.

Our other starter was little rice pastry cases filled with chicken, pork, peppers, sweetcorn and spices. These were quite nice little, tasty, crunchy bites that provided a degree of relief from the screaming pain-fest of the raw prawn salad. Certainly enjoyable, but relatively speaking just lacking explosive pain pleasure. By this point we were feeling rather pleased with the meal and quite optimistic about what was to follow.

The first of our main courses was strips of roast pork neck meat served with a sweet soy reduction sauce. The pork was very tender and bursting with flavour, which was perfectly complimented by the sauce. The flavours were quite intense in this dish (although it was not hot) and you really got the feeling that high quality meat had been used that had been prepared with the utmost care.

The quality of the meat (and other ingredients) shone through in the duck curry. Thai curry in coconut milk is pretty ubiquitous these days, every boozer serves some knock-off of it. However, this example had a real depth of flavour and style one doesn't find terribly often. The duck meat was great and very well cooked whilst the sauce was complex and interesting. Afterwards we decided that this was probably our least-favourite of the things we ordered, yet this didn't stop it from being a very good dish.

Our final dish was Thai spicy squid salad. This is one of my favourite dishes and something I find it hard to avoid ordering when I see it on a menu. The squid was of a very high quality, tender, flavoursome and clearly prepared with great skill. The spicy herbal salad itself was very lively and refreshing. It was clearly the best squid salad I had tried.

So the food was great. The service was attentive but unobtrusive, too. It didn't bother me that the wine list was short, over-priced and dull because I drink Singha in Thai restaurants (as should you). We drank a reasonable number of beers, fruit juice and water, and ordered a lot of food for just two of us, but the bill was still a perfectly moderate sixty notes, which seemed excellent value for the high quality of the food. Addie's Thai Café was a hit all round. Should you want quality Thai food in London, I don't know of anywhere better.

Menu and contact details on the website.

The starter I cooked last night was incredibly easy and totally delicious. It helps that it is asparagus season here in England; English asparagus is, of course, the best in the world.

All you need is some fresh asparagus, some excellent olive oil and some top-quality Parmesan. All you do is cook the asparagus for as long as you like (I suggest boiling in a large pan of salted water for five minutes) then put it on a warmed plate. Drizzle some olive oil on top (you cannot go wrong with Ravida, it is my favourite olive oil) and sprinkle some Parmesan shavings on top. Don't skimp on either the Parmesan or the oil.

Simple and tasty fare that is, like all other food, made by the quality of the ingredients.

Dinner tonight will be Spaghetti Bolognese, something I haven't cooked in a remarkably long time. The ingredients are:

500g ground beef
250g dry-cure streaky bacon cut up into 2cm long pieces
300ml passata
250ml fresh beef stock
200ml Chianti or similar red wine
A large carrot, grated
A large onion, finely chopped
Two sticks celery, chopped into thin slices
2 bay leaves

Fry the beef, then transfer to a large pot. Do the same with the bacon. Fry the chopped onion in a little oil until it just softens then transfer it to the large pot. Same goes for the carrot and celery (do these at the same time). Add the bay leaves, stock, Chianti and passata to the large pot then bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and cook on a low temperature for 1.5-2 hours. By the time it is ready it should be a lot more reduced than when you first started. Check the seasoning then serve with the very best fresh spaghetti.

We have a couple of friends from Oxford days coming around for dinner tonight; there will be some hilariously fine wine consumed. Our starter will be salad with confit of goose gésiers dressed with my favourite dressing. Gésiers are the gizzard muscles of ducks and geese, they are delicious little bundles of meaty goodness. 'Confit' means they have been preserved in the bird's own fat. We will then have Tolosan bean stew with bacon served with Sillfield Farm black pudding. The stew is cooking as I type and the entire flat is filled with a wonderful aroma of beans and garlic. We will finish off with some British cheeses from Neal's Yard Dairy: Cheshire, Lancashire and Caerphilly.

Once again, Sillfield Farm have provided quality pork products that fill one with pleasure when eating them. Namely, last night's dinner of Sicilian sausages:

You can tell they are meaty because they go pink when cooked. Sicilian is one of my favourite flavours; they are flavoured with chilli, Parmesan and Chardonnay wine. However, if you should ever find yourself buying Sillfield Farm sausages and they have gluten-free Cumberland rings available then these are the ones to go for.

This news story on the BBC is reasonably interesting. Apparently research has shown that chillies have been cultivated, exported and used in cooking for over six thousand years. That is pretty much the dawn of agriculture, so nice to know that even ancient man enjoyed fiery food and would go to great lengths to make it.