Christmas is over, the tree and decorations are down and this evening we have cooked a moussaka. A suitably rich and warming dish for the day after going too late to bed and with   children picking up their pieces from the night before.

Moussaka does take a bit of time in the kitchen and I was left by myself to prepare it with a slab of records picked almost at random from the piles in the attic. Head of David and Pussy Galore made a good noise but also made you glad for the fact that a piece of vinyl was not going to last much more than 20 minutes.

Syd Barret just took me back to another time when I knew all the words to an Effervescing Elephant and my 18th birthday party and I painted a picture of the elephant on the wall at home.

This evening it was good to get back to some cooking after the food funk of yesterday.

Lunch was a sandwich made out out the mixture of ricotta, smoked salmon, dill and lemon zest that had been made for New Years Eve and never got eaten and was found early this morning in a bowl at the back of the fridge.

The children are away for the night. Ordinarily this would be an opportunity to indulge with something that would go well with a good bottle of red wine but not tonight. It was going to have to be quick as we we were going to the cinema. For me my first film since War Horse of which the best that can be said is that there were lots of nice sunsets.

Food had to be bought from Sainsbury’s on the way home. I remembered a recipe I had seen in the new Ottolenghi book for salmon steaks. I was fairly sure that if i bought a couple of good salmon fillets I would have the rest of the ingredients at home.

The recipe was salmon steaks in chraimeh sauce. The sauce is the lynchpin, a thick, sweet, hot, pungent tomato paste that is apparently the ‘queen’ of all dishes for Tripolitan (Libyan) Jews.

To keep it simple and quick I did not follow all of Ottolenghi’s instructions but it was still delicious. A teaspoon each of cumin and caraway seeds were crushed to a powder in my small hard metal pestle and mortar. Then using the heavy green stone pestle and mortar I crushed five cloves of garlic with half a chopped red chilli. I then added the cumin and caraway powder together sweet paprika, cayenne and ground cinnamon.

Having done all that I put on some moghrabieh to cook in salted boiling water.

I then cooked the salmon fillets in hot oil, skin side down first so it crisped up. Once they were starting to cook through I turn them over for another few minutes and then took them out to rest. Into the pan I scraped the garlic/spice mixture from the mortar. It spat and sizzled in the hot oil. I stirred it round with a wooden spoon as the kitchen filled with the heady sharp oil from the cooking chilli. Just before it started to burn I squeezed in some tomato puree and stirred that round before pouring in some water and seasoning it all with the juice of half a lemon, sugar, salt and pepper.

The sauce was left to seethe for a minute before I turned down the heat and retuned the salmon to the pan, skin side up.

By this time the moghrabieh was cooked. I drained it returned it to the pan loosening it with olive oil.

Some rocket salad was put on two plates with pieces of tomato and quartered lemon. The salmon fillets and their sauce and the moghrabieh were then arranged neatly around the salad and decorated with some finely chopped coriander.

The film was McCullin at FACT. It was not cheerful but was very good. A lot of questions were asked and a few of them answered as Don McCullin found his peace in photographing the English countryside in stark, haunting black and white, occasionally pulled up short as he did so by the sound of a distant shotgun.

Back at home the kitchen was still filled with the smell of the chraimeh sauce.

Listening now to Kristin Hersh on vinyl singing Your Ghost with Michael Stipe. I can remember watching the video on The Chart Show on a Saturday morning. You don’t get that anymore. Earlier in the evening I had listen to Vision’s of Joanna just in from work, loud, the only person in the house.

Second day back in the office sat behind my desk, in a day or so’s time we will be taking the tree down and I am still waiting for the cobwebs to clear. All day looking at the bits of widow I can see through the weather has been dark and oppressive, although it has not been raining, the colour has not really gone beyond grey. Lunch was stale bread and stilton cheese and this evening’s supper was the reheated curry from New Year’s Day.

But the good news is that I spent time this evening clearing the clutter of CD’s from around the turntable and have been playing some proper records. Most of my albums are in the attic where some of them are in some sort of vague alphabetical order, the rest are in various rooms and corners round the house in no particular order at all with there being a large pile on the floor near the turntable.

So this evening we have been listening to the soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in America, Scary Monsters, Super Creeps and Young Americans by David Bowie, the first Lynyrd Skynyrd album (both sides – air guitar to Freebird) and finishing the evening now with Bob Dylan and Highway 51 Revisited. I am not a huge Dylan fan but most of his albums are in the house somewhere including Down on the Farm and the live one he did with The Grateful Dead, a large number of them bought on the back of a throwaway comment from Nick Cave in an interview on the merits of bad Bob Dylan albums.

Listening now to the wired electricity of Tombstone Blues I am not sure we are going to be listening to much else over the weekend.

You know you are doing the wrong job when you pick up a tweet from Jay Rayner at 11.00am on the first day back in the office that reads,

“First review of 2013 written. I have fully earned the right to faff about on t’internet for the rest of the morning…”

…and that also begs the question as to how exactly does one go about becoming a restaurant critic.

Anyway – the first day of the New Year was spent picking up the pieces of the night before, feeding teenagers and waiting to go on a walk.

For the walk we parked at The Gunsite Carpark half a mile along the North Wirral Coast from where we had been on Boxing Day. The two walks could not have been more different. This time the skies were clear and a cold wind whipped in off the sea. The tide was high and the water reached all the way up to the concrete embankment.

Two windsurfers fought out on the waves. They must have been crazy and cold. Closer to shore a parcel of oystercatchers stood on the few spits of sand that had not been taken in by the tide. As we approached they hopped and hobbled nervously towards the sea, rising as one, three or four yards into the air, holding still against the wind, before they realised we were not going to get to close and they fell back down settling onto the sand.

It was the perfect way to clear the cobwebs from the night before, although we then added a few more cobwebs by going back for the exchange of more presents, tea and sherry. The sherry was one of those blue bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and was a particularly good note to end on.

That evening we ate a comforting, thrown together chicken curry. The chicken again came from The International Store, a mixture of legs, thighs and breasts. I do worry about the size of their chicken breasts.

I fried the chicken pieces in groundnut oil. As it cooked I finely chopped an onion, ginger and some garlic and chilli. That was all thrown in with the chicken and given a chance to soften. I then added a very good throw on mustard seeds, turmeric and cumin. Once all that was sizzling nicely I poured in two cans of coconut milk. The heat was turned down and it was all allowed to cook through for an hour.

We ate it with rice and nan bread listening to Beach House.