Happy Birthday, Ben

After a bland week where work dominated and food became a rushed bowl of pasta or something grabbed on the run, a weekend blow out. It was the best sort of Saturday lunch: good friends round the table and a string of courses. Starting with Champagne and oysters outside Southwark Cathedral at Borough and finishing with Birthday cake washed down with Moscato d'Asti.

In between came simply grilled English courgettes and homemade grissini, then fluffy ravioli filled with poached garlic and piled up with sage, ceps and winter chanterelles. A huge piece of tuna was seared briefly in a fiercely hot pan. A salt and pepper crust hiding raw, ruby flesh, sliced thick, like roast beef, at the table - a salad of baby fennel, preserved lemon and spanked pomegranate on the side.

Bottles of Campanian Fiano and Kiwi Pinot came and went and the cheese board was soon nothing more crumbs and a hard rind of pecorino.

7 friends, 6 courses and 11 bottles of wine to celebrate 30 years of Ben. Happy Birthday, mate.

A Holy Trinity

Pork, mustard and wine. In this case, it is Toulouse sausages, dijon stirred through some puy lentils with plenty of parsley and garlic and a fresh, peppery bottle of Syrah from the Northern Rhone. Jamet's Cotes du Rhone 2005 from declassified Cote Rotie, since you ask. A leftover bottle from the wedding.

But it could just as easily have been a glazed ham, some Colmans English (from powder) and a glass of a Macon Villages. Pork, mustard and wine. A restorative meal that can comfort and invigorate at the same time. A launch into the weekend.

Take Away

A Saturday night tv dinner. Steve McQueen as Lt Bullit on the screen and food from the wonderful Gujarati/East African restaurant Kastoori on the plate. The Thankis have been cooking their fabulous slightly hybrid food in Tooting for longer than I have been alive, ever since one Idi Amin kicked them out of Uganda.

Ordering is easy. Whenever we eat in at the restaurant, it's thali time. When we take out, it's as easy as asking for Vegetable Curry of the Day and Beans Curry of the Day. In a world of infinite choices, it is refreshing not to have to make a decision. There is also something exciting about eating whatever Chef is enthused about cooking that that day. Yesterday it was plump baby aubergines that had caught his eye. They burst open to meld creamy flesh with the spicy tomato sauce they had been cooked in. Delicious. The 'beans' were firm, nutty lentils that had retained the shape of each pulse, the bite of which gave a wonderful textural counterpoint to the slop of the aubergine. Fabulous, real food. Thank you, Mr Thanki.

Almost doesn't count

Just occasionally you eat a dish in a restaurant that is so good that it ruins everything. It used to be something you cooked at home, or would order elsewhere, but not any more. You've seen how good it can be and you know nothing else will suffice. Trying to recreate is an exercise in futility and disappointment.

So it was last night. We had perfectly fine ribeye steak, cooked just as rare as I like it but good as it was it just didn't match up to the what I ate at Hawksmoor back in June. Up until that meal, I was always a bit ambivalent about steak but now I am the worst sort of convert; evangelical, puritanical and obsessive. Now I love steak - as long as it is the Ginger Pig's 28 day Longhorn beef with Heston-inspired thrice cooked chips and textbook bearnaise.

Last night's was almost as good but, now, almost doesn't count.

A Fragrant Lamb Stew

Sunday afternoons are perfect for playing Mah Jong and drinking wine. For the record, the wine should be red and not too complicated. Fruit and spice are helpful, serious tannins are not. I missed some important tiles a few weeks back whilst I decided whether the tannins on an '02 claret would outlast the fruit. Cheap old vine Spanish Garnacha is about perfect.

Unfortunately, just as it takes two to tango, it takes four to go in search of Dragonflies and Windy Chows, and our regular partners are currently devouring tagines in Fez. So I decided to copy them. If nothing else, it would be an excuse to bump and grind some spices. The closest to r and b that I get. The result was a lamb stew fragrant with cumin and coriander, warmed by a slick of harissa and sweetened with some dried apricots which dissolved into a rich gravy. Black olives providing a darker bass note. Bland, fluffy couscous was all that was needed on the side.

And the leftovers cheered me up at my desk today. Spices and stewed meat seemed right for a clear, sunny day with a bite of winter in the wind. Autumnal food.

A Brill Supper

Fish and chips for a Friday night. Well, sort of. A big, shiny brill baked with thyme, lemon and butter and some roasted wedges of spud alongside. The kind of fish and chips that takes very little effort when you lack either a deep fat fryer or the concentration to be trusted with hot oil on the hob.

The brill from Mr Moxon's was a superb fish, almost as good as a turbot. Which, as Jane Grigson writes in her seminal Fish Book, is the curse of the brill; always being compared to one of the sea's most aristocratic meals. But such a comparison is really unfair. We should forget the T-fish and let brill be as brilliant as it can be. Last night's was soft, meaty and flavourful with big, juicy flakes of flesh and herby buttery juices. A bubbles of a bottle of Bruno Paillard's Rose Champagne made a happy partner as we watched Bruno's countrymen throw away the World Cup on the telly.

Monday's Pulse

A Monday night dhal: sloopy mung beans cooked with sticky onions and some lazy shakes from the spice rack. A few potatoes from the bottom of the veg box add texture to the melted pulses while a dried chilli gives a flash of red to the bland yellow-beige. Wonderfully inauthentic but fabulously forgiving, it sustains and comforts, mopped up with a coarse homemade chapati.
Flawed but perfect.

A Stilton by any other name

A new find mooching about Borough Market yesterday, a blue cheese that looked like Stilton, smelled like Stilton and tasted like bloody good Stilton. Even the name sounded suspicously like Stilton. But it wasn't Stilton, it was Stichelton. Confused? I was.

A little research was required.

Like Stilton, Stichelton is a mature blue veined cow's milk cheese from Nottinghamshire, and is the brainchild of Joe Schneider and Randolph Hodgson. Now Mr H is the man behind Neal's Yard Dairy and a man who knows his curds from his whey - so it should be no suprise this is a fine cheese. But why the funny name? Why isn't this just another good old fashioned English Stilton?

The answer is GOFE Stilton has to be made from pasteurised milk. All well and good but a state of affairs that left a big unanswered question. How good would unpasteurised Stilton be? Here's where Joe and Randolph come in - because that is exactly what Stichelton is, an unpasteurised Stilton.

And, boy, it is good. Deceptively creamy and mild up front, the guts and tang creeping up on you as you eat it. A delicious, wonderfully balanced blue. Even the name isn't the awful piece of marketing I originally feared, but an old English name for the village of Stilton.

Tasted blind, I have every faith that I would not be able to tell the difference between it and Cropwell Bishop's finest, but who cares? It tasted superb, especially washed down with a bottle of Reinhold Haart's Piesporter Domherr Riesling Spatelese 2005.

A fine end to a Saturday, even if I was too tired to stay up and see the Hammers on Match of the Day.