After last nights chilli and garlic there has been a need for something soothing and easy on the tongue. So when soothing calls is there anything that does it better than smoked haddock, cream and potatoes.

I half had those things in mind when I came across a recipe in Diane Henry’s Food From Plenty for a smoked haddock stovie with fried eggs and mustard sauce.

Having looked it up I am not sure how close to a true stovie this was but it tasted alright despite the various things that went wrong.

The dish itself was basically a large fish cake made with potatoes, boiled leeks and smoked haddock cooked in milk. There was some grated horseradish from the the garden  for a warming background.

I overcooked the potatoes so they were too mushy but that didn’t matter too much.

What did matter was me burning the cream whilst I talked socks by the front door. I was able to rescue it but I could taste that it had been burnt.

I then managed to split the yolks of a couple of the fried eggs.

Notwithstanding the various things that went wrong we ended up with a plate of comforting food all bouyed along with the smoked haddock.

We ate it listening to The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band going through their paces with The Circle Will Be Unbroken.

Last night I was home alone with the food.

The son had decided that enough was enough with whatever I could feed him and he would go with the chicken and noodles along with his younger sister.

That left me to my devices. At that point there was a temptation to go for the lowest denominator and pick up a tin of Heinz Baked Beans and a suitable pasty with plenty of brown sauce. I resisted.

Instead there was the one poisson left on the shelf in the supermarket. So I took that home along with some beer.

I smothered the poisson in crushed garlic, chilli and cumin seeds and put it in the oven for an hour and ate it with half a plate of mograbhi.

In the meantime I have been thinking on how to go about rehabilitating Come On Eileen.

It has been the staple of wedding hoedowns for the last twenty years or so and for that reason alone there is a sinking in the heart whenever the strings at the start strike up.

But it comes at the end of an album that is an emotional rollercoaster and put there, after having heard that has all gone before, it takes on a life of its own (which it has done anyway) and there is a surprising punch to it all.

The message I had for this evening was that it would only be the son and me that needed food and I was free to cook what I liked. The son expressed no particular preference so I went down to the supermarket with an open mind.

I felt like some spice and the need for bread instead of potatoes or rice. I half had in mind a recipe from one of the Moro books for spiced lamb with hummus but wasn’t sure how well it would go down.

In the end I bought some minced lamb and made spiced lamb koftas from the Persianna book.

A pound of lamb was mixed with a finely chopped onion, a mixture of herbs, a very large bunch of minced parsley (with some garlic) and an egg. I spent some time squishing it through my fingers until I was left with a dark green gloopy mass I could shape into golf ball sized squashed lumps ready for frying.

We had them with hummus, salad, yogurt and pitta bread listening again to the John Grant live album.

One of the small criticisms I get writing all this is that it does not reflect well on what actually goes on in the house. The bad temper and general shouting that is inevitable in any place where there are parents and kids spending time together.

I should say that all that goes on. Some of it with bells on. But amidst all that I still do some cooking and pull up the dead weeds in the garden. In fact the cooking is probably a reaction against all the other stuff that goes on. A small way of retaining control and a semblance that I know what I am doing.

So today I made a stew of beef in red wine wine which we ate with slowly cooked red cabbage all of which came from Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. A desert island book if ever there was one.

Whilst the stew and red cabbage was cooking I made some beer. The first time that I have done it for about twelve years. There is a lot of beer for it to match up to.