You can definitely tell it's November here today. It's grey and overcast outside and the solar panels on the roof are putting out just over 600 watts, which is enough to run everything I'm using in the house at the moment and charge the storage battery, even if that's only happening very slowly. But I've got another hour of free electricity lined up this afternoon so it'll be used running another load of laundry while I noodle away on something in the studio.

There was a Met Office warning last night for "moderate fog" around here, and it was certainly cold and misty out there, but no more than that. Although the Clean Air Act was first introduced in 1956 which was well before I was born, pollution was still exacerbating fog well into the 1970s and I can remember nights when I lived in Stafford that were so foggy that if you stood at the base of a street light, all you could see of the top was a vague glow. Those pea-soupers are, thankfully, long gone and last night was nothing like as bad, but the video that my trail camera recorded of the local hedgehogs on the back lawn looked very trippy, all the same.

It feels like the year is beginning to wind down. There's a sense of things preparing for winter, both inside and out. Last week the leaves on my Amaryllis plants started to go brown, so I'll go round and cut them off this week; the Boston Ivy on the house has already turned a vivid red and I suspect last night will have encouraged most of its leaves to drop. I also need to finish off clearing the main bed in the back garden, so that's on the agenda for the coming week as well. The buddleia need cutting back, the cherry tree needs pruning, and it never stops, does it?

Yesterday afternoon I made the largest batch of curry I think I've ever cooked. I have a stainless steel stock pot that's marked with a quantity scale on the inside and when I'd added all the ingredients, it was full to the eight-litre line. There are now a dozen generous portions of pork Madras sitting in my freezer, which should keep me going for the next few months. I use pork belly and loin steaks for this recipe and this time I decided that rather than browning it in the pan, I'd cook it in the oven first instead. When I added it to the onions (which had been slowly caramelising on the hob for about 45 minutes—forget about all that "let the onions caramelise for about five minutes" stuff you see in cookery books; that's just bullshit. Caramelising takes time, folks) I also poured in a generous amount of the fat from the baking tray and the difference this made was astonishing. The meat was juicy and tender and the flavour of the end result was far richer and much more complex. I may have put on a couple of pounds this morning, but it was worth it.

Yesterday's session resulted in one casualty: somehow I managed to snap my favourite garlic press (which I've had for about forty years) in two. I had to consign it to the bin. Luckily I had a backup press available so I switched to using that.

It's been a while since I did a big cooking session like this and I had completely forgotten just how satisfying the process is. Eating the food I'd made is always enjoyable, but the work involved in preparing the ingredients and choosing the spices to use was as well. The anticipation of that first taste to make sure that nothing was missing, the endorphin rush from all the chillies (and the fact I'd used two whole bulbs of garlic certainly helped matters along nicely) and the sight of all those portions filling up the freezer all contributed to a real sense that I'd spent the afternoon doing something worthwhile.

It's the day after Halloween, and I'm facing a rare problem. If you find yourself thinking while you're having your elevenses that your pot of tea or mug of coffee would pair nicely with a few sweets or a bag of Haribo, I've got you covered. Probably for the rest of this week, if not for the entire month.

The number of trick or treaters who were doing the rounds this year was about a third of the amount I've seen in recent years. Maybe it was the weather; aside from the warning of fog, when it got dark it turned quite cold, dropping to just 2°C (36°F) but I think I only answered the door to about half a dozen groups of kids in total. They were all incredibly polite and none of them took more than a single sweet each. As I result of this restraint, it turned out that I'd significantly over-provisioned on the treat front.

Aside from one group of teenagers, most of my visitors were so small that they couldn't reach the doorbell. One kid was wearing a black witch's hat that was taller than she was and was so shy her mum had to ask for her. Adorable!