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.

Saturday night in and I persuaded the daughter that we should have pasta with seafood.

I am not sure she realised when she said ‘Yes okay’ that I was going to be cooking her fideas out of the Morito cookbook.

It had been a few weeks since I had been down to Wards and I felt the need to invest in some seafood. So I bought two good handfuls of clams, a similar amount of mussels and six prawns. I also bought some salt cod for later in the week.

I used the prawn shells and heads to make stock. Frying them in olive oil and then adding onion and carrots, white wine, bay leaves and water.

It was then just a question of cooking down down some finely chopped onions and leeks, with a few cherry tomatoes, lemon zest, bay leaves, red chilli and fennel seeds until caramalised. That was removed from the pan and the fidea (small pieces of angel hair pasta) were fried in more oil until just starting to brown when the vegetable mix was stirred back in and and the stock added. Clams, mussels and prawns were dotted artfully and it went into the oven for twenty minutes.

We ate it with Turkish bread from the grocers listening to some of the most sublime music recorded by a man wearing an enviable pair of yellow trousers.