Just over three years ago I wrote about a second hand storm in Ahakista. The weather brought a large part of the beach, seaweed and stone, onto the lawn and there were stories of the waves coming in over the pier and the the spray blotting out the lights. I wasn’t there for so had to imagine the force of it tucked up at home in Birkenhead. Fortunately The Cottage stayed dry.

This last weekend I have had to endure on a second hand basis a meal being had in one of the best, if not the best, restaurants in the world.

The eldest daughter was in Copenhagen for the weekend and I suspect more by luck than design had manage to book a table  at Noma for lunch on Saturday, a week or so before it closes for good.

Over the course of Saturday afternoon we were treated to a stream of photographs showing the food they were eating.

There was something slightly cruel with how they kept popping up as I worked in the kitchen to make rice to stuff into peppers. At least they didn’t have roast chicken as good as the one I ate later on that Saturday evening.

Maybe it is because it is February but yesterday’s Farmer’s Market seemed quieter than usual. There were less stalls and fewer people milling around. But the chicken man was there so I bought a good sized one to cook in the evening. He assured me he would be back in April.

One of the butchers was selling a couple of lamb kidneys which were difficult to resist. They are now in the fridge in the basement where I will no doubt forget about them. A different butcher was selling some stewing mutton so I invested in that to turn into an Irish during the week. As I write it occurs to me that the kidneys could go into the stew?

From the butchers I moved on to a veg man and bought a paper bag full of mushrooms and ten or so slender pink stems of  rhubarb that looked too pink to leave behind. If we didn’t eat them I could always turn them into pink vodka.

We ate the mushrooms, chicken and rhubarb that evening.

The mushrooms went on toast. Chopped garlic was cooked in olive oil before the mushrooms were added. They were given plenty of salt and pepper and then stirred until they started to collapse in on themselves. I then stirred in some more garlic, a squeeze of lemon juice and chopped parsley. They were tipped onto a large white plate and we helped ourselves slithering them over our toast.

In the meantime the chicken had been covered in too much paprika and dumped into a hot oven for an hour together with some peppers that had been stuffed with rice.

We had those with patatas bravas and a thick deep yellow garlic mayonnaise and rocket salad.

The rhubarb was cooked until soft with a squeeze of orange juice and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar. We ate it with ginger biscuits.

We then put ourselves to sleep with lumps of Lancashire cheese and too much red wine listening to Rod Stewart.

Book club is on this evening so I have been banished to a side room with only a tinny bluetooth speaker to keep me going. at least it is playing Animals That Swim.

Every so often I will find myself in the house by myself. This maybe for a stray 20 minutes whilst a lift is being done or, a few times a year, days at a time.

This provides an opportunity to play my music as loud as it ought to be played with no heed to the neighbours and anyone passing on the road outside.

Ideally I should be plying vinyl and if I am feeling reckless I might take hold of an air guitar and swing my arms through the air.

if it is vinyl then there are a number of favourites that deserve to be played the loudest. some of them I was playing more than 25 years ago when my bed was a futon and I could take stage dives into its middle.

1.  Freak Scene by Dinosaur Jr.

It’s so fucked I can’t believe it
If there’s a way I wish we’d see it
How could it work just can’t conceive it
Oh what a mess it’s just to leave it

2. Another Girl, Another Planet by The Only Ones. The great lost band and the great lost single. I think I may have snapped part of my futon collapsing to this.

3. Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones from Get Yer Ya -Ya’s Out! Whip smart.

4. Chronic Town by REM.

5. Miss Black America by Curtis Mayfield. If ever there was a song we need now this is it.

6. Rocks off by The Rolling Stones. Still the best start to an album ever.

7. Entertainment by Sleater Kinney. The best band in the world kicking off.

8. Negative Creep by Nirvana. I haven’t listened to this for twenty five years but next time I am in the house by myself I might shred my lungs to sing along.

9. In and out of grace by Mudhoney. I saw them with Tim in Edinburgh at about thirty years ago. There was little distinction between the stage and the crowd. They probably played this. I wish I could remember.

10. Patriots Heart by American Music Club. I am learning the words.

There has been a certain rhythm to my evenings since the New Year which has involved me disappearing down to the basement about 10.00 to bring out the ham. The knife was sharpened and ten minutes or so would be spent taking off sufficient slices for the following days lunch.

The ham was finally done on Sunday and I am now back on cheese sandwiches.

However the finishing of the ham did involve a near catastrophic  stomach meltdown.

I had decided that once there were no more slices to be had I would cut off whatever lumps of meat could be had and the bones would be cooked down for stock.

As I took away the last final pieces of meat I should have realised that the high smell from where the bones were pulling apart was less to of with the fact that this was a high end piece of Spanish cuisine but more do with the bones being a year or so past their use by date.

The bones duly went into a pot to be made into stock and soon the house was filled with the kind of smell that would have been done proud in a Spanish farmhouse sometime in the mid 17th century.

In the meantime a couple of varieties of sausage were cooked in oil along with chopped onions and garlic. A potato was added along with two ladles of the stock. As it all came together a jar of good beans was stirred in.

Once it was done it had the look and smell of something that Sancho Panza would have attacked with gusto.

I suspect that Sancho Panza’s stomach would have been more robust than mine.

I woke up at 3.00 in the morning with the sound of every possible gurgle in my stomach having a go at making as much noise as it could. I lay there for a while convinced that the remains of the ham were going to make every effort to repeat themselves as best they could. It eventually got so bad that I had to go down to the basement to find an orange bucket to put by the bed just in case the remains got their way.

In the event I fell back to sleep although the sour taste of the ham was still on the back of my tongue next morning.

Since then I have been back on cheese and dried bread for my lunch.