More sausages

They don't half like their sausages, my humans. Last night the weather was good so they ate in the garden. Martin barbecued some beautiful organic pork sausages from a small producer in Fife and served them with salad and fresh bread, and lots of mustard. The sausages were lightly flavoured with coriander and had a lovely firm texture and natural skins that crisped up nicely while cooking; they must have been made from happy pigs. Here's a photograph of the bangers sizzling away over the hot coals.

One of my readers has asked why I don't cover lunch as well as dinner in my blog. Well, there are only 24 hours in the day, and a cat of my advanced age needs to sleep for about 23, and I have grooming and eating to fit in to my day as well as blogging. The other reason is that my humans are usually out of the house when they eat lunch, so I don't always get a good look or a taste, although I sometimes see Martin preparing packed lunches in advance. Yesterday it was cottage cheese, pasta salad and a couple of tomatoes. (Of course cottage cheese wouldn't be interesting enough for Martin, so he sprinkled some spices over the top; chilli, black pepper and cummin, I think.) Today he has some cold new potatoes, some of those crab-stick things, coleslaw and black olives. Annie is going for lunch at one of my favourite fish restaurants, Two Fat Ladies, and if she tells me about it, I will report back here.

A Monday-night Curry

Last night Martin threw me a prawn while he was making dinner. If he was trying to make up for the disappointment of the sea bass incident, it didn't work. The morsel came from a packet of frozen prawns from Thailand, and it had very little flavour and a faintly unpleasant, chemical whiff about it. Sensibly, he cooked the prawns in a curry - not a full-on, from-scratch curry but a Monday night cheat made with a couple of tbs. of Patak's vindaloo curry paste, an onion and half a tin of tomatoes. Alongside it was a a dish of chopped courgettes stir-fried lightly with turmeric, chilli powder and amchoor (a souring agent made from powdered, dried green mangoes, available in Asian grocery shops), and just a drop of water to stop the spices burning. There was also the last of the bhurta aubergine preparation from last week. He served the dishes with brown rice, pickles, pitta bread and a few slices of onion and cucumber.

I put my paw in the curry when Martin wasn't looking, and the prawns were just about acceptable in the hot sauce. (Some people are surprised that cats like spicy food, but many of us do. It's sour stuff that we can't stand.) These oriental prawns are cheap and convenient, but they don't have much flavour and the aquaculture industry in the third world, together with the subsequent transportation, is terribly bad for the environment. I think Martin should avoid them in future.

The selfish, rotten scoundrel!

I'd been so looking forward to the sea bass fillets Martin bought at the farmers' market. So imagine my disappointment when the selfish, rotten scoundrel cooked them for himself and Annie without giving me so much as the skin! All I got was my usual bowl of coley and Science Diet, as seen in this photograph.

Martin cooked the bass in a very hot non-stick frying pan with just a spot of olive oil, giving it a couple of minutes on each side. He scored the lovely silver skin with a sharp knife so the fillets wouldn't curl up, and served the fish with jersey royals, and organic carrots cooked with butter and thyme.

As if that wasn't bad enough, he took a few left-over Dublin-bay prawns, peeled their tails and made a quick fish stock out of the heads and shells, added some cream and the reserved tail flesh, and served the lot over green tagliatelle as a starter. I didn't get any of that either!

They also had salad, freshly-made bread, and almond slices for dessert. You'd think with all that they could have given me just a little of the fresh fish. Well I won't forget this incident, I can tell you. Next time I catch a spider, I'm going to eat the whole thing myself without offering them so much as a leg!

A beach picnic

I've noticed that when the sun shines, humans like going outside and taking their food with them. At our house, Martin will fire up the barbecue whenever there's a break in the clouds, although Annie isn't quite as enthusiastic. At the weekend, they often go out walking with sandwiches and fruit packed into bags that they carry on their backs. Today was sunny so they went to Heads of Ayr, which is the seaside, and walked for miles on the beach. (When they got back they smelled of seaweed.)

I've never been to the seaside, but I can't see the appeal of eating bread on a windy, sandy beach when you could have your head stuck in a nice bowl of fish on the floor of your own kitchen. Having said that, I quite fancy the idea of a beach; I imagine there would be quite a few birds to chase, and perhaps some small creatures to fish out of rock pools.

Martin made sandwiches early in the morning, using ciabatta rolls. He made some with slices of chorizo and a tomato relish he bought at the farmer's market yesterday. Then he used emmental cheese, sliced red onions and something called Bombay Sandwich Spread to make some more. The spread is a vividly green, tangy paste made by a company called Natco and available at some branches of Tesco. It's not to my taste, but Annie and Martin love it. You can make it yourself by putting a big bunch of coriander leaves and a small bunch of mint, half an onion, a small handful of roasted peanuts, a tsp. of roasted ground cumin, a tbsp. of yoghurt and as many green chillies as you fancy into a blender. Add salt to taste and blitz until smooth, adding lemon juice or water to get a thick paste. If it's home-made, it will last a couple of days in the fridge. The commercial stuff will keep for weeks.

Spread it on bread when you're making sandwiches with cheese, chicken, salad vegetables or whatever you fancy. Or stir some into yoghurt to make a quick raita. I've seen Martin mix it in to tuna, which is a criminal waste of decent fish if you ask me.

Talking of fish, it can't be long until I get my sea bass fillets for dinner. I can't wait!

What a disappointment!

I was so excited about my sea bass fillets last night, so you can imagine my disappointment when Annie gave me my dinner bowl and I saw nothing but familiar flakes of frozen, microwaved coley, complete with unappetising grey bits. I looked at her and mewed in a questioning tone, suggesting politely that she'd made a mistake, but no, the sea bass stayed in the fridge. So presumably I'll get it tonight. Hurrah!

Their own dinner looked and smelled great. They started with asparagus, which I'm not fond of because it makes my pee smell funny, but it's still the season down in Worcestershire so they're eating it often at the moment. Then came a paellera filled with the fideos and sweet, fresh langoustines, or cigallas as they're known in Spanish. I sneaked a lick of the pan when they'd finished and the stock was delicious. If I remember rightly, Martin made it about a month ago from the heads and skeletons of a couple of black-headed bream and stuck it in the freezer. They also had a salad made with one of the kohl rabbi things, sliced into shavings with a potato peeler. I think they liked it, but I can't see them putting it on the shopping list on a weekly basis.

Cold Rabbi

It's Saturday, but my humans were up and out of the house quite early this morning. After a quick cooked breakfast - a fried egg sandwich and a fruit smoothy for them, fish and biscuits for me - they left for the farmers' market and the gym. (The gym is a place they go for very short holidays. I know they're going on holiday because they take bags of clothes with them and when they get home these clothes go in the wash. But because these holidays are only about two hours long, they don't need to put us in the cattery.)

As for the farmers' market, I've no idea what that may be, but it must be very strange indeed judging by the stuff they buy there. This week they got something called kohl rabbi. (I thought they said cold rabbi at first but apparently it's a cabbage-like vegetable, and of course kohl is a German word for cabbage.) There is a picture of one above.

Martin bought four of them because they looked so lovely, but now he doesn't know what to do with them. You can eat them raw in salads, apparently, but as a cat I wouldn't be doing that. Indeed as a cat, I wouldn't be eating them at all, but I'm more enthusiastic about the other food they bought at the market. They got two beautiful fillets of sea bass, which I expect are for my dinner as a change from frozen coley, and some langoustine tails, which may also be for me and my sister. They got some bacon, too, and eggs, and some cake.

Anyway, for their dinner tonight they're going to have fideos, which is Spanish pasta cooked like paella. You start by making a sofrito. (That's onions, garlic and tomatoes softened in olive oil. I'm picking up quite a bit of Spanish now my humans are into everything Hispanic, though I'm naturally beter at Catalan, being a cat. Or gat, to use the Catalan word.) Then you put uncooked, broken spaghetti or some other thin pasta into the paella pan with the simmering sofrito, toss it around to absorb the flavours and the oil a bit, then pour on fish stock, bring it to the boil then reduce the fire and let it bubble away until almost all of the liquid has been absorbed. You can add prawns, shellfish, pieces of monkfish, even vegetables, if you must. In Spain they often put squid ink in it so it turns black, but tonight Martin will probably add some saffron. Sounds delicious, but I'm looking forward to the sea bass fillets personally. I think I'm getting the best deal.

What an eventful day!

It was all go at our house yesterday. Annie had the day off from college and she took Chutney to the vet. (That's Chutney my sister, not the stuff they eat with cheese. There's a picture of her here.) When I'm on my own in the house I quite like it for about five minutes, as I sit on the stairs imagining what it would be like if it was all mine; then I get lonely and worry that they won't come back. But Annie returned, and she brought a cat in a box that looked a lot like my sister, but it couldn't have been because it smelled all wrong, like hospitals. So I hissed at it and scratched its face, and then ignored it. When I saw it again and had a good sniff, it turned out it was my sister after all! So I apologised and groomed her for a while.

As if that wasn't excitement enough for one day, a man came round to fix the central heating system. I followed him around the house while he fiddled with each of the radiators, and tried to tell him about my earlier adventure and how I'd failed to recognise Chutney when she came home from the vet, but he didn't seem very interested. Perhaps he just didn't understand. All in all I needed a good long sleep in the afternoon, and when I woke up it was tea-time. Fish and biscuits, my favourite!

As for the humans' dinner; it seemed to be mostly wine. They did eat some sausages and a kind of pasta-and-wheat pilaf thing, but I would estimate that two-thirds of the calories they consumed came out of the bottle. Or bottles, plural. They say they are being very good these days because they don't drink for five days of the week, but they make up for it on Friday and Saturday, let me tell you. (To be honest, we quite like it when they drink too much wine because they lie down calmly on the sofas and don't bother us.)

Him again...

Dinner was later than we'd have wanted again tonight. Annie was at the beautician so we had to wait for Martin to get home. He's not quite up to speed on our medicine, so he always starts by spending ten minutes peering at the labels on the bottles of tablets and consulting the calendar. Then he has a bit of a fight with my sister Chutney, as she doesn't like taking her laxative. Perhaps I should explain; Chutney and I are seventeen, which is quite old for cats, and we have a number of life-threatening conditions. Thanks to modern veterinary medicine, we can stay healthy and happy, but we each have to take several kinds of tablets - it's quite a complicated regime. We get our medicine before we eat; I don't know why but I think it might be the law. Anyway, by the time Martin had dosed us and put our bowls down on the floor, I'd all but shouted myself hoarse. Still, I enjoy my cod and Science Diet all the more when I've worked up an appetite with a good scream, and tonight I savoured every last flake of fish. (There was a bit stuck in my whiskers, but I found it later and had it for supper.)

As for their own dinner, Martin made one of his regular vegetable dishes, which he calls bhurta. It's originally Punjabi, but he's been making it so long that he suspects he's strayed away from the authentic recipe he found in the early eighties (long before I was born!). To make it he stabs a big aubergine a few times with a knife before roasting it under a grill (if you don't make little holes in the skin, it will explode). When the skin is black and the flesh is soft, he lets it cool down and peels it, chopping up the pulp. He then fries seeds - mustard, fenugreek, fennel, cumin and nigella - in a little bit of oil. You can buy this mixture of seeds already prepared in Indian shops; it's called panch phoreen. When the seeds pop he adds dried red chilies and the aubergine pulp. When it's sizzled a bit he adds tomatoes, usually chopped tinned ones, in about the same quantity as the aubergine pulp. This mixture is allowed to bubble away for a few minutes, then Martin adds a good handful of frozen peas or broad beans. It's ready when the peas or beans are cooked through. My humans love hot, sour, fresh tastes, so they sprinkle chopped coriander and fresh green chilies, and sometimes lemon juice, over the top. If that's what they eat in the Punjab, I'm glad I'm not a Punjabi cat.

But that's me being subjective, sorry. Martin served it alongside the dudhi curry he'd made last night, some salad, yoghurt and ready-made chapattis heated in the toaster. (He'd normally make his own, but tonight he couldn't be bothered.)

So there was nothing about their dinner tonight that I'd have thanked you for, though I noticed Martin made himself a packed lunch for tomorrow with some sardines. Now that's a bit more like it.

Late dinner

My sister and I ate dinner quite late tonight because Annie - who normally gets home first - is working this evening and we had to wait for Martin. By the time he arrived, gave us our medication and served our food, I was starving, and screaming at the top of my voice. (I always shout immediately before being fed; I've done it since I was a kitten. At the back of my mind I fear that if I didn't make a noise, I wouldn't get any food.)

I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about my cold cod and biscuits tonight, but it looked better than what Martin ate. As he didn't have Annie to cook for, he just boiled some noodles and tossed them with beansprouts, shredded carrot, a couple of chillies, spring onions and some szechuan chilli oil. I ask you - where was the meat? He'd finished in ten minutes. Then he made a loaf of bread (that's something I do quite like sometimes, but more to suck on than to eat) with one-third granary flour, one-third white, and some shredded sundried tomatoes. While he was listening to The Archers he made a dudhi curry for tomorrow evening. (Dudhi is a marrow-like vegetable he found in Tesco. Martin says they've gone all multi-cultural since the asylum seekers moved in to Springburn.) In addition to the dudhi itself, it contained peanuts, coconut, chillies, mustard seeds, cummin and ginger.

After dinner I sat half way up the stairs while Mart messed about on the computer. When he goes downstairs to watch the telly, I should get a chance to curl up on the sofa.

Inauthentic Merguez

Last night Martin cooked some merguez sausages that he'd bought from Clive Ramsay's nice-but-expensive delicatessen in Bridge of Allen, together with a few slices of haloumi cheese, the final stub of an organic black pudding from the farmers' market, some jersey royal new potatoes and some English asparagus wrapped in very thin smoked ham from Germany. They ate some green salad too (nein danke! As a cat, I can't say I'm fond of vinegar in salad dressing, though I don't mind the oil). It sounds a lot, but there wasn't much of any single thing. Martin said that these merguez, which were made of pork, had nothing in common with the halal lamb ones he buys from Baraka, a shop run by an Algerian man on Great Western Road in Glasgow. Annie pointed out that though they might not have been authentic, they were delicious; dense, meaty and heavy on the garlic.

Me, I had my usual coley fillet and a bit of Science Diet. I managed to push my sister out of the way and get a mouthful of her Felix cat food, and washed it all down with some nice tap water.

Welcome to my blog

My name is Dingo. I'm an elderly tomcat from Glasgow in Scotland, and this is my first attempt at blogging, so I'd ask you not to be too critical.

My blog is going to be all about food. My human companions, Annie and Martin, get awfully excited about their dinner. As a cat with an enquiring mind, I thought I might record what they eat each evening for posterity. I may occasionally comment on their lunch and breakfast too, and perhaps on their alcohol consumption.

I could of course record my own meals, but I fear you might get bored quite quickly as I almost always have white fish and Science Diet. Sometimes I have scrambled egg when my mouth is sore (I am a very old cat). By contrast, my humans eat all manner of exotic dishes, some of which look delicious. (They also eat stuff I wouldn't thank you for, like oranges, but then, I am a cat, after all.)