Last summer we had a lunch at Manning’s Emporium as the rain came pouring down. We had a few glasses of dry sherry and plates of meat and cheese. As we left we were given a bag of small pieces of pasta shaped like flat pieces of rice.

Over the last year I have either come across that bag of pasta when not expecting to see it or remembered it was there and not been able to find it.

For two reasons today I came across the word orzo in relation to food. The first time was in a menu for The Open just down the road from here which someone had brought into work and the second time was on the twittersphere. I needed to know what orzo was so late in the day I put the words into google only to find a picture of something looking very much like the bag of pastaI had been given last year.

We ate it this evening. The pasta took five minutes to cook. Once it was done I mixed it with cherry tomatoes, garlic and parsley and then ate it with a couple of pork chops cooked on the barbeque.

Still listening to Dexys. 

Yesterday morning leaving the house for work my mind turned to what we might eat that evening and I remembered that a month ago I had overbought at The Farmer’s Market as a result of which there was a small beef pot-roast in the freezer. I took it out to defrost.

Having got home that evening I heated some olive oil in a heavy pan and as it started to smoke tipped in the beef. It sputtered and spat fat and oil as I turned it to brown. As it did so I added a couple of chopped onions, a chopped rasher of bacon and garlic. As the onions wilted I stirred in two chopped tomatoes and then half a pint of water and a few sprigs of thyme. Once it was simmering the heat was turned down and I moved onto something else.

Really I should have put it in low oven for a few hours but there were kids to feed so I left it to cook on the stove turning back to it every twenty minutes or so to turn over the meat. It was done in an hour.

I took it out of the pan to rest for a while whilst I boiled down the sauce left in the pan. 

To eat it I sliced the beef on a flat dish and sieved the sauce over it. We ate it with a salad made with pitta and lettuce leaves from the garden.

Listening to Luscious Jackson.

‘Can you remember your first mackerel and where you caught it?’

I tried to cast my mind back to where I had been. There are two fishings trips that I went on when mackerel might have been caught.

The first was on a glorified barge that went out into one of the slabs of water that the Dutch were claiming back from the sea. I might have been nine or ten and I guess it was one of the holidays we spent time in Renesse a small village cum summer resort that sits on the west coast of one of the islands down from Rotterdam a great swathe of sand facing out to the North Sea.

We sat on the black roof of the barge and dropped a line over the side but all I can remember are flat fish coming out of the watrer and there weren’t many of them.

Next it was a holiday in Cornwall staying near Polzeath. I was twelve or thirteen and we were there for my birthday and I was given a small cassette player and a tape of one double albums with all The Beatles’ singles on them. Stupidly one day we swam across the river Camel from Rock to Padstow and almost got washed out to sea and had to hold onto a buoy halfway across to get our breathe back and the next day we took a fishing boat out fom Padstow  and went fishing or the day.

As the boat pulled out of the harbour there were gannets in the air and they came down around the boat following us out until we a mile os so out and the lines went out. I can’t actually remember the catching of mackerel but I know that fish were caught and if fish are going to be caught in a place like that then some of them must have been mackerel. I caught a flurry of fish at the start of the trip and then there was an hour os so of catching nothing.

Whatever fish we caught were taken back to the cottage we were staying in and we had a go eating them that evening. We were given a small dogfish to take with us and its skin was tough and I am not sure we were able to eat any of it.

It would be another twenty years before I went fishing again and that was to throw a line over the side of a boat in Dunmannus Bay to haul in mackerel.

Everyone needs a few guilty pleasures in their life.

Mine include Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the very occasional bit ELO. On the food front I find that it is difficult to go wrong with a tin of Heinz Baked Beans and sometimes my eye will be caught by a Pot Noodle and nothing will be right again until I have it home with me and I am stirring it together with a fork.

This afternoon I was at the till and getting ready to pay at Sainsbury’s. The food was loaded on the conveyor and I was suddenly taken with the thought that there was no point buying a pack of pitta bread without having some bright pink taramasalata to go with it. So I had to rush back to the aisles to find a plastic carton.

I had it as soon as I got home. Toasting a piece of pitta, slicing it up still warm and then dipping each piece into the pink salty goo.

I followed that with another pitta stuffed with some of the lamb kebab left over from last night, slathered with yogurt and chilli sauce.

The marinade for the lamb kebabs came from the new Morito cookbook, it was just squashed garlic, cumin and oil. I sliced up some green peppers to go on the wooden sticks next to the pieces of lamb.

We ate it with an onion salad, made by roasting the onions on the barbeque and then sliding them out of their burnt skins and mixing them up with pomegranate seeds and olive oil and mint, and a tabbouleh made mostly with parsley, fried potatoes and quail’s eggs.