The Eagles have long been a guilty pleasure of sorts that has never extended beyond a couple of songs from Desperado and the knowledge they were mates with Warren Zevon so can’t have been all bad.

When the news came through last week that Glenn Frey had died I had in the back of my mind that somewhere I had a recipe that he had set out for the perfect Texas Chilli. It was in a Christmas present from years back called The Rock’n’roll Cookbook. With the benefit of hindsight I suspect they regret the page given over to Gary Glitter and his recipe for Spaghetti Glitterarti.

It took a while to find the book but it was eventually located on a top shelf. When I found the recipe for Texas Chilli it transpired that it was Don Henley’s as opposed to Glenn Frey’s, which I suspect goes a long way towards summing up The Eagles.

Before eating  the chilli we went for a walk along the beach off The Gunshot at Leasowe.

There were boxes of tomatoes stacked up on my left as I walked into the grocers this morning. Kazim made me taste one, they were so good, he said. It wasn’t long since I had cleaned my teeth and it tasted sharp against the mouthwash of mint. £3.99 a box, he said. So I bought one.

We had some of them for lunch sliced and stuffed in warm pitta with onions and chicken, cucumber, yogurt and hot chilli sauce.

I will cook the rest of them down tomorrow and use them to bolster an Eagle themed chilli sauce.

This evening I cooked a handful of them as part of a seafood pasta. Mussels, squid, prawns and scallops cooked with their own juices with a couple of razor clams thrown in for those who enjoy chewing on salty rubber bands. There was olive oil as well together with garlic, chilli and white wine and all held together with a bag of tagliatelle.

Now listening to Ray Charles doing his modern sounds in country music. Is there a cooler record anywhere?

Going through my old restaurant bills last night I realised I was missing a tranche of bills from when we went to Australia five years ago, then I remembered they had gone into a separate folder. I dug them out, smoothed out the creases and stuck them in.

The highlight was the bill for the meal we had at a Vietnamese restaurant on Thomas Street, Sydney called Xic Lo.  I can’t read what it says on the bill but I remembered I ate Spring Rolls, including the vegetarian rolls that had been ordered by someone else, and quail glazed in a sweet sauce.

Touring Google I was pleased to see it is still going and that the quail are still on the menu.

We are heading back to Sydney in two months time so we should be going back. I hope that the bill still comes scribbled out.

One of my many bad habits is to make sure, once the bill has been paid in a restaurant, that the bill ends up in my pocket. From there it will find its way into my wallet and eventually end up in a tin that has stood on the window ledge in our bedroom for the last ten years.

I started on the habit without realising what I was doing and then one day I found myself with twenty or creased bills in my pocket. It seemed a shame to throw them away so I kept them. One of the first of these bills was from a restaurant called Las Huertas which we found down a side street in Santiago de Compestella. I have it front of me now and see that I ate octopus followed by Bacalao Huertas which I guess must have been the house salt cod. I am sure it was very good.

The tin has been filling up so this evening I took out the bills to put them in some order and stick them down in a book.

So far I have got to 2011. What is most marked is how they have lost character over the years. It is rare now to get a bill written out in such neat hand-writing as the one we got from Las Huertas. Now they all printed out and time and date stamped.