I'll do these in dribs and drabs, as I'm too lazy to sit down and write my gonzo version of Larousse Gastronomique in one go.

The toasted seeds are easy. I bought equal quantities of sunflower and pumpkin seeds -- 600 grams of each in this case, I think, but don't get that much unless you want to be living off them for the next week.

I preheated my big wok on a gas ring set to maximum. This may also work on a electric stove, but my experience of using woks on electric cookers has been uniformly miserable. The electric stove was obviously designed by someone who hates good Chinese food and wants to deny it to the world. Once the wok was about as hot as it was going to get, I put all the seeds in it and kept them moving with a spatula.

I'm not quite sure how long you should keep those seeds cooking, but if they go black then you've gone too far. As long as you keep stirring the seeds, you'll have a lot of control over this. I kept going until a good proportion of them were a toasty brown colour, and some were making noises like shy popcorn. At this stage I turned the heat off and added the shoyu.

Shoyu, in case you don't know, is a type of Japanese soy sauce. It's a bit different to Chinese soy, in that's it's sweeter and has a more subtle flavour. When I was first shown how to make this I was told to use tamari, which is a slightly more robust Japanese soy sauce, but I rarely have any around the house and find that shoyu works about as well. If you spot a bottle of Kikkoman in your supermarket, that's shoyu.

All your shoyu questions answered.

Anyway, working out how much shoyu to put in is tricky. I normally judge it by shakes of the wrist when I'm pouring, which is unscientific, difficult to communicate and largely unhelpful. With the 1.2 Kg of seeds I was working with, about eight shakes were required. You really just want a light coating. With the heat of the pan, the shoyu will dried almost instantly, so I had to keep stirring throughout the process and, off and on, for about ten minutes afterwards. This has the added benefit of separating the seeds and stopping the result looking like burnt rice.

Seeds prepared like this will probably keep for a week or more, but I've never kept them around for long enough to check this empirically.

Serving suggestion: pass them around in a plastic container while inviting people to suck your salty seed.

This one's a bit more complicated. I'm not really going to give you the recipe; I just nicked it from the BBC website, and you can too. Instead, I'm going to tell you how to achieve the end result I did, and with any luck we can all learn something valuable.

A few months ago I decided that I was going to make a bunch of cookies to take to Concrete Cow. I downloaded a recipe, bought the ingredients and then bottled out at the last minute. The problem was partly a lack of time, but also that I'd never made cookies before, and thought that I should playtest them at home before taking them to a con.

Apparently I never listen to my own advice. The day before Spodley, I decided that this would be the ideal time for a first attempt. I bought the ingredients that I was missing (like the white chocolate chips that I'd eaten in the interim) and left the ones that didn't need to be refrigerated sitting in the living room overnight. The following morning, after discovering that my cat had made a bed out of the packets of chocolate chips and fused them into bars with her body heat, I ran out and bought replacements, leaving me with a fraction of the time I'd planned on.

My mental arithmetic is normally pretty good. I say this now in my defence, as my attempt to scale the quantities of the ingredients fourfold was flawed. This was probably down to my insistence on mixing imperial and metric units, depending on which gave me rounder numbers when I multiplied. This led to me using somewhat less flour that I should have. The resulting cookie dough was tasty, though, and I deemed it a success at the time.

For someone who'd never made cookies before, let alone followed this recipe, I was pretty fast and loose with it. I spend enough time cooking that I can get pretty arrogant about it, and keep forgetting that I can't get away with this when baking. As a result, I placed about twice as many proto-cookies on the baking tray as indicated. Of course, they expanded significantly during cooking, and spread out into one giant tray-shaped cookie with the mocking parody of divisions running through it, leading to some emergency surgery with the edge of a spatula. It was also very doughy – possibly because it hadn't baked for long enough – and I realised that I didn't have time to let it set properly.

Sometimes the obvious solution is exactly the wrong one. In order to get this to set properly, I thought, it needs to cool. It will do that so much better in the fridge. In practice, this just made the dough colder and soggier.

The next two trays of cookies went slightly better. Not only did I leave enough space between the cookies that only about about a half were conjoined, but by the time I got to the last tray I even had the presence of mind not to put them in the fridge. This meant that some of the cookies actually ended up looking like cookies; I decided to try to pass the rest off as flapjacks.

Shortly before I had to leave, and long before the cookies had a chance to set, I put them in two big plastic containers, with sheets of kitchen towel separating the layers. I then drove to Long Buckby like a maniac, taking corners with my usual disregard for the laws of Newtonian physics. The cookies suffered for this, and gave up all semblance of form as they were tossed and battered.

Astonishingly, the end results still went down fairly well, despite being poorly thought out, half-baked, delivered in too much of a hurry and bearing little relation to the original design. There's probably a metaphor in here somewhere, but it's beyond me.

This one was really easy -- I just chopped a head of Savoy cabbage in fine strips and covered them in a couple of cups of Japanese rice vinegar, mixed with about four tablespoons of caster sugar. I left the resulting mess for twelve hours, tossing every few hours. It should have been served with sesame seeds, but I forgot.

When I normally make this, I don't use cabbage, which probably means that I'm making something different. My regular ingredients are very fine strips of carrot and daikon (a large white Japanese radish shaped like a knob gag -- I've seen them in Tesco) instead of cabbage, but it takes a lot longer to chop. It does have the advantage of looking much prettier, and the carrot makes it even sweeter.

Ideally you should leave it marinating in the fridge, but there wasn't room this time. It seemed nice enough at room temperature.

Still to come: miso soup and poultry infanticide, but they'll have to wait until tomorrow. I'd also like to see Andrew's fajita and brownie recipes, Claire's pasta sauce and Malcom's meat beat manifesto.

Thanks for these Scott! I know what I'll be trying over the weekend!

I'll post my recipes tomorrow. They're both pretty easy.