Thursday night and one of the few evenings of the year when it is possible to have all the doors and windows in the house open and the night has been let into the house. Somehow I know that by the time we get to the weekend the clouds will be over and there will be a chill back in the early evening. In the meantime we are making the best of it.

We ate pizza making the dough last night.

Over the last few months the bread flour has become a mixture of white and wholegrain flour. We have, it appears, managed to get to the right combination of the two which basically means having just enough wholegrain to give some sourness to the bread. 

I spent twenty minutes or so on it last night. Mixing the flour with some sugar and salt and then pouring in milk and water from a jug into which i had stirred a couple of sachets of dried yeast. I always start these things with a wooden spoon thinking that will be enough to do the job. It never is. And so I have to get my hands in there stirring up the flour and water and then kneading it.

I measure kneading by whatever music is playing, get it started and then carry on until the next song is finished.

Having made the dough it went into the fridge for the night until early this evening.

There were three toppings for the pizza:-

– a mixture of tomatoes, garlic and oregano on top of some sliced onions with pieces of spanish had and salami in between and topped with mozzarella

– all of the above but without the meat

– onions cooked for twenty minutes or so with garlic, slathered over the rolled dough and topped with anchovies and chopped black olives.

Most of it went and somewhere along the line we listened to Virginia Astley.

In the meantime it is dark outside and there are people sat there under the night sky talking.

It was only later on Sunday afternoon that I remembered there had been more work with the whisk when I opened up the oven to find four meringues on a tray, they were perhaps a little brown.

It must have been late on Saturday evening that I decided to make them. There were the eggs whites left over from making the mayonnaise and meringues always seem a lot easier to make after a few glasses of wine. So the whites were whisked up into soft peaks with a drop of white wine vinegar. I then must have put then put them into a low oven which I turned off when I went to bed.

The shops were still open when I found them so I shot out to buy cream, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries and we had Eton Mess for pudding Sunday evening.

Tonight we had an easy supper. Water on to boil. In the meantime I chopped up a red onion, tomatoes, garlic, dill and coriander. When the water was boiling I tipped in a bag of pasta. Olive oil went into a pan to heat up. When hot the onion and tomato mixture was tipped in. I added a couple of packets of cooked prawns and heated them through until the tomatoes were just starting to give of their juices. By this time the pasta was ready and drained off. The prawn mixture was tipped in with a third of a chopped block of feta and a load of salt and pepper.

Listening to Let It Bleed.

We have an old friend coming for supper this evening which seems like a good excuse for making a pudding.

When we in Ireland at Easter I picked up a book called The Pleasure of the Table which is a collection of recipes by Theodora FitzGibbon who wrote a food column for The Irish Times for twenty years. She was a cook of the old school and the book is full of recipes for things like Rabbit Pie, or Devilled Kidneys or Stuffed Lamb’s Hearts.

The puddings and cakes are the best bit and so I turned to it for inspiration for this evening.

I decided on Blueberry Syllabub; mostly because of the picture showing the deep pink cream in clear glass bowls.

Fortunately they had blueberries at the Veg shop and it was easy enough to make; just a matter of cooking the berries slowly in a pan with some sugar and lemon juice until the berries split and their juices ran. The berries were then sieved and the sweet dark juice was stirred into a bowl of whipped cream.

I had some help making it and had to slap down the small fingers wanting to run themselves round the bowl.

There are five glass dishes of it in the fridge downstairs.

We had burgers for lunch and I then made some fish stock. The next time i get a head that size I will try roasting it!

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.