A good dish can catch you unaware.

There was a suggestion we should have a prawn curry this evening. Rather than picking up a book on Indian cooking I decided to have a flick through my book on Persian food. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have half remembered a conversation in the veg shop about Iranian seafood and how it takes on some of the curry flavours of the East.

And so I found a recipe for prawn stew.

The prawns were frozen and allowed to defrost over the afternoon. The most testing ingredient for the stew was tamarind paste but I was able to pick up a block in The International Store.

The cooking of it took little more than half an hour.

An onion was chopped and fried in oil until it took on some colour. A couple of chopped cloves of garlic were stirred in. As they cooked I chopped some parsley and coriander. I didn’t have have any fresh fenugreek so I found the packet of dried that lurks in the back of the cupboard.

Some ground nutmeg and a teaspoon of curry powder was stirred into the onions quickly followed by the parsley and coriander. At this point the recipe said tomato paste but we didn’t have any so I chopped up same tomatoes instead.They went into the pan just as it was starting to stick.

In the meantime I had started the cooking process off by soaking half of the chunk of tamarind paste I had bought in boiling water. By now the water was brown and murky and I tipped it into everything else and turned the heat down and gave it a few minutes to cook.

As we were ready to eat prawns were fried in very hot oil and tipped into the the sauce.

We ate it with rice and although it was not strictly a curry it went down well.

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We had our first BBQ of the year today. It was a slow affair.

A couple of weeks ago I had trimmed back the sage from where it sits just out on the patio. It seemed a shame to throw away the trimmings, so I put them under the lid of the BBQ until such time as I was ready to put them into good use. That time came today.

There was some preparation before hand.

Garlic was crushed and then chopped into a mix of sage and rosemary, fennel and chilli, and then squeezed into the nether regions of a lump of pork. A coleslaw was made with white cabbage and carrot and a slick dressing of olive oil and garlic and chilli was made for some grilled veg.

Once the BBQ was alight I moved around the bunches of dried sage so it gave off good smoke.

The first thing to cook were slices of aubergine slathered in oil. They went onto the hottest corners and had to be turned over every five minutes or so to stop them from burning. Once they were done they went into the dressing of oil, garlic and chilli.

The pork then went onto the grill and was more or less left for the hour or so it needed to cook.

In the the meantime fried potatoes were made together with a bowlful of white beans.

We ate it with some smacking of lips and it was only a couple of hours after the event that I remembered the coleslaw!

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Last Saturday we had lunch in the Wright Brother’s fish restaurant in Spitafields. There was more eating (and drinking) to be done later in the afternoon so lunch was light. Some of us had Smoked Haddock Croquettes and there were so good I thought I might have go doing them at home.

They came out very well and all got eaten. And whilst there were some sticky fingers during the assembly process they were easy to make. I think the secret may be to try and make sure you end up using slightly more potato than fish.

The haddock was bought this morning from Wards. I weighed it out and then weighed up the potatoes making sure there was one to many.

The potatoes were boiled until they were soft enough to me mashed. In the meantime I cooked the haddock in hot milk until it just started to flake, finely chopped some parsley and laid out the assembly line – plain flour, egg and breadcrumbs.

Once the potatoes were cooked I mashed them with a smudge of butter and gave them five minutes of reading the paper time to cool down. They were then mixed with the flaked haddock and some of the milk it had cooked in, the chopped parsley, plenty of salt and pepper and a small teaspoonful of Colman’s English Mustard.

This mixture was then shaped into croquettes and taken through the assembly line; rolled in flour, dipped in egg and covered in breadcrumbs.

Once they were all done oil was heated in a pan until hot enough to make a breadcrumb sizzle and in went the croquettes until they were cooked through and crisp.

We had them with green beans and soft boiled eggs.

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I took some records down to London with me last weekend. They were due for onward transmission to Brighton where a new record player had been acquired and was sat in a kitchen waiting for something to be played on it.

The records had been extracted from the few thousand that reside in the attic. Over the years a number of collections have been passed on to me and I had been able to fillet out a few duplicates that would not be missed too much.

They were a motley collection and had amongst them a Liza Minelli live album, Making Movies by Dire Straits, a couple of Talking Heads albums and Ian Drury’s New Boots & Panties.

To get them down to London I used an old bag from Probe Records and took a silent bet with myself as to whether it would get a comment as it spent a day travelling around London.

I won.

We were on the Tube heading towards Liverpool Street when the man sat opposite cocked an eye at the bag and asked, “Is Probe Records still going?”

I was able to reassure him that it was still going strong. It transpired that the last time he had been there Pete Burns and his hair was still working behind the counter insulting the customers on Mathew Street.