Having got my Tampopo scenes confused I should also give you an opportunity to see the other scene I had in mind where the office junior gets to order all the best food in a posh French restaurant.

I will have to watch the film again to see if he gets to eat it. I must have still been at university when it came out. I remember going to watch it two or three times and maybe that is where my occasional  hankering to make a good chicken and noodle soup comes from.

The film is showing late Sunday afternoon in camp&furnace as part of the Food for Real Film Festival that is taking place in an around Liverpool. the programme is strict in reminding us that it is an 18 Certificate. this no doubt means I will be getting it on DVD and embarrassing  the kids as we watch the inventive scenes that are intercut into the film making explicit some of the joins between good food and sex.

One of my favourite dishes. I had it last week in Morito – a small terracotta dish of spiced lamb, aubergine, yogurt & pine nuts. When it came there some pomegranate seeds on top as well. It was delicious the raw taste of garlic mixed with the smoothness of the aubergine and the slight crunch of the fried lamb, the nuts and the seeds.

I first made something like aubergine and yogurt when were living at 72 East Avenue in Oxford. I think it might even have been for the party I had for my 30th birthday. I have been trying to remember from which book I got the recipe. Going through the shelves I think that it must have been from either Claudia Roden’s book of Middle Eastern Food or the BBC book she did on Mediterranean Food.  Properly the dish is called either Baba Ghanoush in Arabic با غنوج or Moutabal   and I am sure that I read somewhere that one the translations has something to do with the harem.

The recipe out of the Mediterranean book is almost exactly the same as that set out below save that Roden adds lemon juice and tahini paste. There is no yogurt in the version out of her Middle Eastern book.

The important things are to have the smoky flavour of the the creamed aubergine and the raw brute taste of garlic to offset the smooth texture on the tongue.

Take two good aubergines, pierce the skin with a sharp knife, and place them under a hot grill. If it is summer and the barbecue is going put them on the rack. It doesn’t matter if the skin gets burnt and charred as you will not be eating that. Depending on the size of the aubergine they will take 45 minutes to an hour. Turn them over every so often until they are cooked through and the flesh gives when poked with a finger.

Take away from the heat and allow to cool so that they can be handled.

Whilst they are cooling crush a couple of cloves of garlic in salt. I use a large heavy bowl and a wooden pestle to do this.

Take up the sharp knife again and split the aubergines lengthwise. The pale cream coloured flesh should be soft and forgiving. Scrap it out with a spoon and add to the bowl with the garlic. Then using the same pestle break up the flesh until it takes on the consistency and smoothness of a thick double cream. Stir in a few good teaspoon of yogurt to temper some of fire of the garlic. You could also add some olive oil if you wanted. Check the seasoning and add some salt and pepper if you think it needs it.

Put into a serving dish and eat with flat bread warmed in a large frying pan.

You could decorate the dish with pomegranate seeds or pine kernels and perhaps some finely chopped parsley.

This evening we have been listening to a new compilation from Jonny  Trunk called Lard. 70 minutes of weird strange folk, jazz and nursery rhymes all wrapped in some Seventies Sainsbury packaging for Lard!

We had friends to stay last night so there was food to cooked. Saturday morning was the usual cavalcade from the greengrocers on Oxton Road onto The International Store and then down to Wards. Wards had run out of red mullet so I settled for Grey Gunnard knowing that they were far better value. But I do want red mullet next weekend so I will have to get out of bed earlier.

In the greengrocers they had a box of giant field mushrooms some of them at least six inches across. I had not been planning on cooking mushrooms but they looked so good I got a couple, together with a box of cherry tomatoes for soup, another half dozen quince because they were there, aubergines, peppers and beetroot.

Back at home the tomotaoes were cut in half and poured into a pot in which I had been cooking a couple of chopped onions, garlic and red pepper. For flavouring I stirred in a good few pinches of cumin seeds and a knifefull of ras el hanout. After 45 minutes the tomatoes had collapsed and I put it all through a fine sieve.

I cooked the mushrooms at the same time. I placed them in small roasting dish and they were doused well in olive oil. They were a couple of satsumas in the fruit bowl, so I peeled one of those and tucked the pieces under the flap of the mushrooms together with a chopped clove of garlic and some sprigs of thyme.

I covered it all in foil and put them into a warm oven for an hour. By then the mushrooms had started to collapse into themselves. I cut them into slices quarter of an inch thick and arranged them neatly on a white plate. There was some juice still left in the pieces of satsuma and I squeezed this out with the back of a spoon through another fine sieve.

We had the mushrooms as part of the starter. There was also a plate of peppers cooked down in olive oil and garlic for an hour, roasted aubergine with yogurt and the beetroot, boiled until soft then blitzed in the Magimix together with horseradish root and some walnut oil.

The Gunnard were baked in the oven and served on linguine.

The quince went into the oven as well, whole with water and sugar and then served in a bed of whipped cream.