Saturday night in and I persuaded the daughter that we should have pasta with seafood.

I am not sure she realised when she said ‘Yes okay’ that I was going to be cooking her fideas out of the Morito cookbook.

It had been a few weeks since I had been down to Wards and I felt the need to invest in some seafood. So I bought two good handfuls of clams, a similar amount of mussels and six prawns. I also bought some salt cod for later in the week.

I used the prawn shells and heads to make stock. Frying them in olive oil and then adding onion and carrots, white wine, bay leaves and water.

It was then just a question of cooking down down some finely chopped onions and leeks, with a few cherry tomatoes, lemon zest, bay leaves, red chilli and fennel seeds until caramalised. That was removed from the pan and the fidea (small pieces of angel hair pasta) were fried in more oil until just starting to brown when the vegetable mix was stirred back in and and the stock added. Clams, mussels and prawns were dotted artfully and it went into the oven for twenty minutes.

We ate it with Turkish bread from the grocers listening to some of the most sublime music recorded by a man wearing an enviable pair of yellow trousers.

One of the kids announced today that her favourite saturday lunch is pitta bread stuffed with chicken tikka so that is what she had.

The rest of us went more refined and had either lamb steaks that had been fried in a hot pan with plenty of cumin or falafel.

I cheated with the falafel using a mixture that comes from The International Store. They are ridiculously easy to make. Just had water to the mix, stir and then leave for an hour.

You do of course need a aleb falafel (or falafel mould) to shape the small patties before frying them in not too hot oil.

I had my lamb on warmed Turkish flatbread on a bed a salad, tomato, onion and red pepper and slathered with Greek yogurt and hot chilli sauce.

I will make proper falafel next time.

It was just the son and me at home this evening so we ate spiced chicken in wraps with rice and salad.

For the chicken I took a couple of skinned breasts and four skinned and boned thighs, chopped them into chunks and started to fry them in hot olive oil.

As they sizzled I sliced a red onion and a red pepper and stirred them into the chicken. Spices were added; a good shake of cayenne pepper, smoked paprika and ground cumin, plenty of salt and pepper and a couple of spoonfuls of white balsamic vinegar. It was all stirred again, the heat turned down and left to cook.

As it did that I cooked the rice. Sainsbury’s do a packet of basmati and wild rice which go great with this sort of thing. Some of the kids don’t like it, complaining about the black bits, but the son doesn’t mind.

Once the rice was done it was just a question of extracting the son from his room to eat and assemblage; warming a wrap and then layers of salad, chicken and rice, and for those who wanted it cooling Greek yogurt and hot chilli sauce, and folding it up right so nothing leaks out.

They went down okay. Whilst eating we listened to an album  I must have bought 14 years ago by some people called Broadway Project. It sounded very good – all broken up sounds and disembodied voices and flutes.

You would have thought that having reached a certain age I would be able to resist the little handwritten labels that can be found at the top right hand corner of the records they sell in Probe.

But there I was today leafing through the racks to waste a few minutes over lunch before going back to the office and my eye was caught by the words “massively recommended”.

Shit. I may never see this piece of vinyl again and who knows what I might have missed. I have been in there enough times and bought something just because it was what they had playing. If this was so good I better have it. Now.

Not only was it recommended but it was also “Brilliant trip-pop…think Broadcast,, Stereolab, United States of America, Strawberry Alarm Clock”. All of which sounded like very good advice on a wet and grey Wednesday afternoon. So I made my investment and have not been disappointed.

I was told last night that I was wasted as a lawyer and should go out and open up the record shop I would have been running if I had not gone ahead and passed my Law Society Finals.

I am not sure about a record shop as such but a small place selling good food with a record player in the corner playing a random selection from what I have got on the shelves sounds quite good. Of course I would have to be the one selecting the music.

Whilst thinking on that I have been making plans to make pies with some of the battered, rusty and encrusted pie tins that have sat for the last thirty years or so upstairs at Homebaked. I have washed a couple of them out and I think they will be okay to use. They have the dark black patina that comes from having spent years going in and out of high heat and the metal is thin with use. But line them with pastry and fill them with some cooked beef they should come out good.