The pistachio, almond and carrot cake was fine a fine success. We ate it with dollops of rosewater flavoured cream. I now need to make three more of them next week.

Before the cake we had a rib of beef. Every time I go to The Farmer’s Market I eye up the beef without getting round to buying it. Yesterday the was a relatively small rib and I reckoned it would do for supper.

The oven has just been mended so it went on to its hottest setting. I rubbed the meat with olive oil and gave it a good coating of sea salt and pepper. In then went into the oven. After 20 minutes it had started to crackle and spit. It stayed in the hot oven for another 10 minutes then the heat was turned down.

In the meantime I had been making a quiche with peppers and onions and so that went into cook.

I took the beef out after another 40 minutes and covered it with some foil and a tea towel to rest for twenty minutes.

We ate it with fried potatoes, salad and a light gravy made in the pan the beef had cooked in. A a bottle of very fine Rioja.

I will not be waiting long before I get myself another rib of beef from The Farmer’s Market.

We have people coming for supper next weekend and unusually we have thought about the food a good week in advance. There was to be no pudding as such just bowls of fruit and cheese.

But then we saw a recipe for a pistachio, almond and carrot cake in the same Observer Food Magazine I seem to have been cooking out of over the last few weekends. It is another recipe from Sabrina Ghayour’s new book Persiana.

I was very good this week. I saw the book in Waterstones when I was in there one lunch time and managed to resist the temptation to buy. I was probably helped by the fact that they had the Morito book as well and I couldn’t decide which of the two I wanted most. So they both went back onto the table. I suspect I will have one of them at home by the end of next week.

I have had a practise run at the cake this afternoon.

The cake was straightforward to make. Just one bowl, starting with eggs, sugar and vanilla extract beaten together, and then adding ground almonds, desiccated  and cinnamon and then melted butter, grated carrot and chopped pistachio nuts. It all went into a cake tin and then into the oven where it is now.

Lunch was pitta bread stuffed with pieces of lamb coked in garlic and cumin and long thin green chillies. There was a plate of chopped veg and some of the mint flavoured yogurt from last weekend.

Having left the lamb to marinade overnight I cooked it on the barbeque yesterday afternoon. It took about 45 minutes with some time added on for resting. I turned it every 10 minutes or so and slathered more of the marinade over it as it cooked so that it formed a sweet dark crust.

We ate it with a yogurt sauce made by putting handfuls of mint and coriander through the Magimix  with garlic, green chillies, crushed cumin, lime juice and about half a pot of Total Greek Yogurt. The recipe for both the lamb and yogurt sauce come from Simon Hopkinson’s The Good Cook. I remember first seeing the recipe in the Observer Food Magazine and it was one of those that you read and then straight away want to set about cooking. There is no doubt that it works best on the barbeque.

We ate it with new potatoes (Simon Hopkinson would not have approved as I was too lazy to scrape away their skin), a chick pea salad, made with baby cucumbers and green pepper, and a tomato salad which came from Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana. I didn’t quite follow the recipe using up pistachio nuts instead of walnuts and introducing pomegranate seeds into the dressing which was made by mixing pomegranate molasses with olive oil, sea salt and sumac. This was poured over and stirred into a bowl of roughly chopped tomatoes, sliced red onion and green chilli.

Very good it was to although not quite warm enough to eat outside.

I will need to get the cookbook.

Two fifths of the family went to Ikea this morning. I stayed at home.

‘There’s a big bag of spinach in the fridge,’ I was told as they left.’ You could make some soup and there’s some sweet potato you could use up as well. ‘

Before doing that I walked down to Birkenhead to pick up some lamb from The International Store for a late lunch tomorrow. Hopefully the weather will be kind and I will get to cook it on the barbeque.

Down Oxton Road and opposite the old Birkenhead Brewery there are still great hefts of metal in a wall where the brewery had once stood. The offices are now a motorcycle shop although it is possible to make out the old tiles over the doors announcing its name. There are rumours that there were tunnels under the road the workers could walk through connecting the offices with the business end. The was a large heavy metal grate in the pavement that might have been part of it.

There is a new butcher in The International Store. I haven’t worked out where he is from yet. This morning he had a Bluetooth device in his ear and he was trying watch a programme on his phone as he went about sorting out his meat.

There was a woman in front of me with three small children. She had picked out of the freezer a four foot length of frozen fish. The butcher spent 15 minutes running the fish through his fearsome electric saw reducing it to hard chunks a couple of inches square. She kept turning to me to apologise for the time it was taking as her children watched me in bemusement.

Back home I made the soup by frying an onion in olive oil with some garlic. As it softened I tipped in the chunks of sweet potato. I seasoned it with salt, pepper and cumin poured on some water a brought it to a simmer for twenty minutes or so by which time the chunks of sweet potato were soft enough to squash with a wooden spoon. I then stirred in the very big bag of spinach marvelling again at how the mass of green leaves was able to dissolve into the pan.

It then all went through the Magimix but not before I had used it to make a marinade for the lamb.I had a steak sandwich for lunch. The steal was left over from last night when I almost set the kitchen alight setting alight to a ladle of Bell’s Whisky and pouring it over the cooked steak so that flames rose two foot into the air.