For the last three years I’ve used January to try and learn something new. Three years ago it was to try 31 days of exercise, two years ago it was 31 days of stretching, last year it was 31 days of learning to play the piano and this year it’s 31 days of… lunch.

Last night my mum made a stew. And by stew I mean she cut up some carrots, potatoes and meat and boiled it for 12 hours until one ingredient was indistinguishable from the next and the whole thing resembled mud.

It wasn’t beautiful but it was tasty – and it was authentic. My Mum is from the Isle of Lewis and everything she cooks is genuine Hebridean cooking as it comes with a distrust of all herbs and spices, a suspicion for anything not with meat and potatoes or fish and potatoes, and it she has a downright hostility towards cooking anything rare, medium rare, medium or even well done. Heston Blumenthal may like twice cooked chips but in the Hebrides that would only be the first step. We have dozen cooked chips, just to ensure they’re fully cooked.

This approach to Hebridean cooking, learned at my mum’s table over the first 18 years of my life, is why I’m suspicious of the man who calls himself the Hebridean Baker.

I have his cookbook. The first recipe includes a melon. The second involves flash frying a tuna steak. The third is a tiramisu. None of these things were ever found on my mother’s table.

So, when Iain TwinBikeRun sent me a lunch challenge of goats cheese with pomegranate seeds “just like Granny made on the croft” I have to blame the Hebridean Baker. Granny didn’t have goat’s cheese. She didn’t have pomegranate seeds. She didn’t even have a sandwich… unless it was stewed for 10 hours and served with potatoes.

But I had it anyway. Even if it wasn’t authentic.

Bread: Toast

Ingredient: Goats cheese with pomegranate seeds

Taste: Like a Greek restaurant in Inverness