Back in the summer in Ahakista we went for lunch on a very wet day to The Good Things Cafe. I ate a stew of squid.

I have been meaning to make something like it at home and I got round to doing it last Sunday afternoon and I ate it this evening.

We spent the early part of the day walking round West Kirby for the best part of two hours including a full circle around The Marine Lake and a visit to the very excellent Ship in a Bottle where I was able to but seven bottles of beer, including a bottle of God Lager, for the price of one and a half bottles of God Lager in Stockholm.

Back home I made the squid stew.  The recipe comes from a book called New Tapas  and is one that I have made before although not for a few years. It is a full expression of the maxim that squid needs to be cooked either very quickly or very slowly. Anything in-between and you end up with a piece of tough rubber to chew on.

I had bought one largish squid from Wards on Saturday morning. I cleaned it myself and then chopped it up into thin rings. These were tipped into a pan with hot olive oil. I gave them a stir and then chopped up an onion and some garlic and stirred them in as well. After giving them time to sizzle and spit I poured in a good couple of glasses of red wine, a tin of tomatoes, added a bay leaf and then left it for the slow cooking to do its bit for two hours.

It came out a deep dark stew that filled the mouth with umani type flavour just like the one I had in the summer.

A record arrived in the post today.  A proper record that came in a sleeve, pressed on black vinyl that needed a needle and turntable so that it could be played. It is by Silent Sleep who were the band we saw playing at the opening party for Homebaked last Saturday evening. I spent part of the Sunday evening trawling the internet for information on them and ended buying the album. We have been playing it today in between scaring the kids with bits of The Velvet Underground and Can.

Back in my day it was the parents who shouted to have the music turned down. Here it is the kids. Don’t they know that some  music has to be played loud otherwise it misses the point. A bit like how some music sounds better being played on a scrappy old record player rather than a bees knees digitalised and remastered so the life gets cleaned out of it CD.

Lunch today was carrot soup made with a bag of 50p carrots from the grocers with roast beef sandwiches. The roast beef was left over from last night.

We have an expanding patch of horseradish in the garden. I pulled out some of the roots last weekend but didn’t get round to using them. so we had them last night, grated and mixed with creme fraiche together with a small hunk of beef that I flash roasted for 45 minutes and very good it was to.

Tonights supper is going to be another attempt to keep the whole family happy. Potato gratin with smoked haddock. The gratin is done and ready to go into the oven.

I cleaned, peeled and sliced six large potatoes. The gratin dish was smeared with butter and I finely sliced a couple of onions and mixed them with some garlic and dill. I then built up layers in the gratin dish starting with a layer of potato, then the onion mixture, then some butter, creme fraiche, salt and pepper and then another layer of potatoes and so on.

As I was going I poured in some double cream and I used salt flavoured with truffles. A present from over the summer.

That will all go into the oven shortly to cook until the potatoes are more or less done. For the last half hour or so I will lay some chunks of smoked haddock on top. Hopefully the juices from the smoked haddock will add flavour to the potatoes. If I get two out of the three kids eating it I will rest easy.