We celebrated an anniversary last night and drank champagne that was thirty years old. It tasted slightly sweet and biscuity. Strange to think it has been in there so long.

I still have in the basement a bottle of wine from 1978. I was given two cases of it as a birthday present and for a long time we would have a bottle of it with lunch on Christmas Day. But now we are down to last bottle we have kept it to one side in the half expectation we should save it for something special but with a worry it might be heading towards vinegar. We shall find out one day.

The meal itself was a mixture of things from the Morito cookbook with perhaps the highlight being a kilo of mussels cooked in a thick garlicy tomato sauce with feta cheese and dill followed by lamb chops that had been marinaded in garlic and ground cumin cooked on a hot grill.

The only part of the meal not from Morito was pudding – a bowl of liquorice ice-cream. We had eaten it in the summer at The Good Things Cafe and the recipe then appeared in the Gubbeen cookbook I got given for Christmas.

The recipe suggested using Panda liquorice bars and rather to my surprise I found them in the supermarket.

I have got an ice-cream maker but it wasn’t big enough for the amount made so I made the ice-cream by putting it in a plastic tub and nestling the tub in a corner of the freezer. I then had to remember to go to the basement every hour hour or so to stir it up with a fork to break up the ice crystals. It was a good opportunity for cooks treats licking the fork after each stir.

There is some left as well for us to finish off tonight.