Pictures of food. Pictures of our dinners. Pictures of stuff we cooked. Are we still doing that?

Well, yeah, we are. Or at least this Prick is, because this was pretty damn good:

What you’re looking at is a plate of venison loin, done for about 45 minutes at 53.5 degrees and seared, with baby beetroot, watercress, pickled cabbage and the greatest where-have-you-been-all-my-life condiment we’ve encountered in a while, smoked mayonnaise.

The recipe comes from Colin Fassnidge’s Four Kitchens cookbook, which has become something of a Stately Prick Manor favourite of late. It’s not one of those manifesto cookbooks that promises the road to enlightenment, nor is it a big glossy Christmas coffee table number never meant to be cooked from. Recipes are short and concise, the food isn’t fiddly in an assemble-with-tweezers kinda way, and it assumes the reader is a reasonably competent home cook who knows what he is doing and is excited by the prospect of making vats of porky “hock stock” to use in various dishes or smoking a sandwich spread and incorporating it into what becomes a somewhat fancy-pants dish. (Especially when paired with an old bottle of Tannat that had spent years under the stairs just waiting for his chance to come out and play and enliven a Monday night.)

So take the Prick’s advice and buy this book. Use it for ideas and techniques as much as the recipes. The ham-and-cheese croquettes on p. 19 sound simple as hell but are alone worth the price of admission, so ridiculously good that afterwards you’ll try really hard to stay up and talk about how good they were but just wind up rolling over for a snooze like you always do.