Comfort food in December

It's been unseasonably cold and wet here in Melbourne over the past few days - lovely! (Well, except for discovering that our bedroom ceiling has leaking at 2am on Saturday morning...)

The cold weather has meant a return to comfort food, at a time when we're normally gearing up for barbecues and summery pasta. I've made two lovely winter-ish, but not too heavy meals over the past two days.

One is an old favourite; Tessa Kiros's lamb and green bean casserole from Apples for Jam, which is my favourite of her beautiful books. This is just delicious with feta crumbled on top and a green salad. It's very easy too, but it needs a long time to cook (the secret is to leave it in the oven to cool completely, and then heat it up the next day).

The other dish is new - chicken pot roast. I've been looking for a good recipe for this for years, and I discovered it, appropriately enough, in David Herbert's Complete Perfect Recipes.

This is a book that I keep forgetting that I have, but I have liked almost everything I've made from it - and this dish most of all. The vegetables were delicious, the chicken was melt in the mouth, and the gravy was just yum. I'll make this a lot come next autumn. Or this summer, if the colder weather hangs around (unlikely I know).