I now have a new favourite sauce. So far it has worked well with lamb chops and fish and I am sure there are any number of other good things out there it will compliment.

It comes from a book of Basque cooking that was given to me as a belated birthday present My Basque Cuisine by Ash Mair. I half have in mind that you could use it as the basis for some sort of food business.

So how to make it. Put a red pepper and a couple of plump red tomatoes under a hot grill. Turn them every so often as they blacken and burn. When they are soft and the skins black take them out and leave to cool. You could at this point put them in a bowl and cover with cling-film as this will help loosen the skin but not so it makes any great difference.

Skin the pepper and tomatoes and carefully scrape the seeds away from the pepper. As you do this some juice will leak from the pepper and the tomatoes. Try to keep this.

Put them into a food processor together with a couple of cloves of  garlic, a tablespoon of crushed cumin, some sweet and hot paprika, a wine glass worth of olive oil and a dash of olive oil. Blend until creamy seasoning with salt, pepper and a dash of sherry vinegar.

It will all keep for a week or so in the fridge.

If you are feeling peckish you can dip bits of toast into it.

We booked the ferry to Dublin a couple of weeks ago and this morning we booked a table at The Good Things Cafe for Easter Sunday lunch. In two weeks time we will just about be on the way and some of us are looking forward to it. Kids are worried about being bored and separated from internet access for more than 24 hours. It’ll be good for them.

In the garden the tadpoles are about to hatch. They are a dark mass on the surface of the pond and as each of them struggles against their thin wall of jelly to get out the water seethes with their movement as if it is about to boil up.

Elsewhere I looked out anxiously over the veg plot to see how the onions were doing. I planted the seeds at least four weeks ago and I was worried there was no sign of life. Then I spotted a thin green shoot no more than an inch long pushing through the soil and having spotted one I saw the rest, four neat rows of them, my first onions.

For the first time for a long time I made a tomato soup for lunch. The tomatoes came from the veg shop on Oxton Road. They had a large bag going for 50p and a couple of punnets of cherry tomatoes for 69p each.

There wasn’t much time to make it. Onions, celery and garlic were cooked in hot olive oil until soft. I added a chopped aubergine and let that go soft as well. For heft I put in some chopped chilli and a tablespoon of ground black cumin. Then in went the tomatoes – the larger ones cut in half. They stayed on a good heat with the occasional  stir until the tomatoes had turned to a mush.

It all then went through a mouli and into another pan to heat up. We ate it with pesto and good bread.

As I left the office this evening I reassured Bill I would be cooking something good with aubergine when I got home. I knew there was a spare one in the house and I thought that I would be able to think up something good to do with it as I made the journey under the Mersey.

It then transpired I would be cooking for two and so by the time I got to the supermarket different thoughts took over and I decided to leave the aubergine for tomorrow. All I needed to buy was some smoked haddock and eggs and I was done (apart from the beer).

At home I peeled four large potatoes and put them on to boil. I then went out into the garden. The cavalo nero has more or less gone to seed but there were still a few green leaves I could pick. I did that, washed them quickly, and cooked them in boiling water for five minutes. Once the potatoes were done they were mashed with butter and milk and I stirred in half a chopped onion, some parsley and the cooked chopped cavolo nero.

Two frying pans went onto the oven and I put a good pat of butter in each of them.

The butter melted. I shaped the too hot mashed potato into thick burger shapes and put them into one pan. The smoked haddock went into the other – skin side down.

With the benefit of hindsight I used too much milk in the mashed potato and the cakes were soft and difficult to turn. I just about managed it without them falling apart.

As the haddock cooked I poured in some white wine and as that started to bubble some double cream. There was some spinach in the fridge and I pushed some of that into the bubbling sauce.

Just before we were ready to eat I poached two eggs and then laid it all out on two plates.

The haddock to one side, sauce on top, potato cakes up on the right and poached egg nestled down to the left.

Very good it was to.

In Brighton – along with the books on how to fish and Hüsker Dü I picked up a book on Malaysian cooking. My eye was caught by the cover as we walked by the shop and I was obliged to go in, have a look and then buy it. £5.00 for the Persatuan Wanita Keristian Di-Malaya The Young Women’s Christian Association of Malaya International Cookery Book (Ninth Edition 1962).

Somewhat disappointedly  there is not much Malayan cooking. It was edited by a Mrs A.E. Llewellyn and the first chapter is entitled The Importance of Diet in Child Healt and it goes on from there. But there is a small section on Malayan fish including pictutes of the alarming looking Parang Dorab.

Some of the recipes are fairly alarming too including one for something called mince in batter which is just what it says. Mince mixed with batter and then baked until set.

There are small sections at the end of the book on Indonesian and Malayan cooking and there I found a recipe for Rendang Këring.

The recipe starts with ‘one katty of meat’ and goes on with very few concessions to someone trying to trace the ingredients in Birkenhead calling for such wonders as Jintan Manis, Lengkuas and 30 seeds of Halba. There is a glossary in the book which may help but in the meantime I have a recipe for Chicken Rendang in a book of Indonesian cooking and we are eating that tonight with rice, prawn crackers and a cucumber salad.

It is straight-foward to make as all you do is cook coconut milk with various herbs and spices (turmeric, ginger, garlic, onion, galangal,coriander seeds and lemon grass) until the coconut milk has started to thicken. This takes about an hour. You can then add chopped up pieces of chicken (or aubergine and chick-peas for the veg alternative) and let all that cook through. The idea is to cook it so that the coconut milk has all but disappeared and the chicken is left to fry off in the oil at the bottom of the pan.