Another Friday night and looking forward to spending my Saturday helping to prepare for an 18th birthday party in the basement. the last time there was a party my Guinness toucan got stolen and was pictured on Facebook before being returned on to the door step the following day. A bottle of Marie Brizard anisette was not so lucky and was found empty on the floor. I had bought for the sole purpose of making an Elizabeth David recipe for a sauce to go with boiled lobster so I still hope that whoever drank it spent a long time in the land of regret. It has taken two years but I am now able to be philosophical about it.

Over lunch there was a quick trip to Lunya to buy some ingredients for supper this evening. We will start in a few minutes with a plates of Padron peppers and tinned Don Reinaldo smoked mackerel. I will try put out my mind the thought that the mackerel will have been sucked out of the water somewhere off Iceland as part of the the mackerel wars.

We will follow all that with a great dish of sausages cooked in fat from the ox’s heart with cider and lentils. They are all cooking slowly on the oven and should be ready in about 20 minutes. I will be off soon to find a good bottle of Spanish red to go with the.

In the meantime I should mention that when I got into the car to go home I switched the ipod to shuffle and the first song to come up was Lady Day by Rod Stewart. Well you don’t get better than Rod back in the day when he was good. After that I had The Flaming Lips followed by electrlane. So I had a shiteating grin going through the tunnel. Given the good food I will be giving over the listening for the rest of the evening to Rod when was good. Listening to him now sing I would rather go blind.