So with all this technology we have at our fingertips I found myself at 11.00 last night shouting loudly at a blank laptop screen that was refusing to do what only a week or so ago it had done without me really thinking about it. The small revolving ball waiting to happen seemed to be shrugging its shoulders and telling me, “What else should you expect if you go download an upgrade when you don’t know what you are doing and I am too old and tired now to run with all its bright new colours.”

I left it and went to bed and when I woke up it had got round to doing what I had asked it to do.

I took out some of the frustration on the cats ushering them outside for another night in the cold and rain.

They should count themselves lucky they are not dogs. I have found a recipe for dog.

Any trip to Oxford needs to fit in a quick ten minutes in a second hand bookshop to try and find an interesting cookbook. The good people of Oxford seem to be more than happy to pass on cookbooks interesting and quirky. This weekend I managed to pick up a book devoted to vanilla, another on stimulants and intoxicants and finally a book on Korean cuisine.

I have been told by people that know that I should be having a go at Korean cuisine and there is a small hole in the wall place in Liverpool that looks tempting.

I picked up the book without really giving it much thought. It is mostly a fairly scholarly treatise on the food and its history but at the back there are twenty five or pages of recipes including one for Dog-meat stew or Kaejang-guk.

I read the recipe expected that there might be a suggested substitute for the dog-meat. There wasn’t – instead it started with a clear instruction requiring 800g of dog meat but no instruction on where to acquire it. Reading more closely dogs are bred specially for the soup which is particularly good in the summer. But there was little clue to the type and size of dog presumably leaving the adventurous chef free have a go at whatever might be at hand be it the noisy pug that lives next door or a wandering labrador.

Happily the recipe starts by telling us that ‘dog meat is generally cooked with the skin intact, trim any fur and clean thoroughly. Often, fur is burnt off the skin with a flame’!

Fortunately I have another book of Korean cooking and from that I am cooking some chicken thighs braised in soy sauce.

It was very easy. The thighs were steeped for an hour or so in a mixture of soy sauce and sesame oil with some crushed garlic and ginger, spring onions and shame seeds and a dash of sugar.

The thighs were fried in oil until they took on colour and the marinade was stirred in along with a cupful of water. Twenty five minutes later it was done. A diced red pepper was thrown in and I ate with plain boiled rice listening to dodgy 1970’s reggae.

I suspect that will be better for my nights sleep!