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. 

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.