I wanted to improve on my adventure of the previous year with this year's roast beef and yorkshire pudding. Consulted various cookbooks and recipes online for measurements but Delia Smith remains my mainstay for sheer commonsense advice. I let the meat defrost for a couple of hours, then patted it dry with kitchen paper before rubbing prepared hot english mustard on the fat side of the silverside with some pepper. Then I rubbed extra virgin olive oil over everything before sliding it onto the foil-lined baking tray into an oven preheated at 220 degrees celcius. Recipes suggested adding 15 minutes per 500g and since the meat was at 1.1kg I decided to play safe and cooked it between 45 mins to an hour. I took it out after the 30 minute mark to "salt" the meat, and basted it with some of the gorgeous dripping before removing some of the gravy into a bowl. I did this twice. This was around the time I started boiling the potatoes, sweet potato and carrots. The butternut pumpkin had already gone into its pan above the meat in the oven earlier. By the time the taters were ready to go in, I had taken the pumpkin out. Next, mashing up the small remainder of vegetables in the boiling pot with some onions, seasoning and stock. That was my soup and base for brown gravy. The yorkshire pudding was dead simple, one cup of self-raising flour and half a teaspoon of salt, then around a cup of milk with an egg beaten in stirred into the flour, then whisked. Line a muffin tray w/ muffin cups, add oil, pour the mixture, add some of that gorgeous beef dripping on top. Let it cook for around 10-15 minutes while your beef is resting outside of the oven. The beef dripping today was so unbelievably gorgeous I didn't want to overprepare the gravy. So I just poured a couple of ladles of the broth I made earlier, mixed in the rest of the dripping and some flour and stirred/whisked quickly to break up any clumps of flour. Seasoned, and it was ready. Heaven. Only problem is now I have to eat roast beef for the next 2-3 days. I may end up freezing half of it!

Now here,s another useful bit of kit that gets used an awful lot in our household our roasting tin . These things have been used for centuries and if you use one you will no why . We like it because it makes life easy if it goes a hour over all is,nt lost because it keeps the meat and veg moist ,and you get a great infusion of flavours . We use the juices for making the gravy too . Its a British lean silverside joint of beef with leeks carrotts brussels parsnips broad beans and broccoli . There is half a cup of water in there and two oxo cubes it went in at 10 am and will be served at 2.30pm with side vegetables for ten of us !!