Home alone

Over the past few days, I've had coley and Science Diet for dinner every night. Chutney has gone for the option of Felix and Science Diet, and most nights I've managed to muscle in to her bowl for a bit of variety. So nothing out of the ordinary, then - although it's been less routine for our humans. On Wednesday Martin stuffed some round courgettes with minced mutton. He fried the chopped flesh from the inside of the vegetables with the meat and added garlic, pine nuts, cinnamon, cummin and fresh mint before stuffing it all into the cavity of each courgette, which had been parboiled for about three minutes beforehand. They went in a hot oven for twenty minutes with a bit of cheese on top. They looked delicious and created a distinctly Middle Eastern aroma of rich meat and sweet spices. Unfortunately he only made enough for him and Annie; there was nothing left over for us.

On Thursday, Martin went to London to some swanky party in the gardens of Chelsea Hospital, where, he tells me, he drank Pimms and ate barbecued sausages. The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves. Annie ate the last of the prawn curry with some pitta bread, and complained that there wasn't very much of it. (She could have had something else as well, but that would have involved cooking, so she just went hungry.)

Then on Friday evening Martin returned, somewhat dishevelled, and from limited provisions put together another of his simple regular dishes, a Hungarian pasta dish called Turoscsusza (no, they don't call it that in our house. They just say "that Hungarian pasta dish".) To make this you boil some pasta until it's al dente - it's meant to be small, irregularly shaped flat squares like broken lasagne, but you can use anything, and farfalle are good. While it's cooking, put the oven on to 190C or thereabouts, chop some bacon, preferable unsmoked streaky, and fry it in its own fat. Mix the cooked, drained pasta with the bacon, and add enough cottage cheese and sour cream to produce a nicely coagulated mass. Put the lot in a gratin dish and bake until it browns a little on top. In Hungary it's often enriched with eggs, but that makes it a lot heavier. Of course you can add something like chopped flat-leaf parsley, black pepper or paprika if you want to enliven it a bit, but go easy on the salt as the bacon will be salty. It's very good, in my opinion, and it's interesting how different it tastes from any Italian pasta dishes I know.

Martin told me about the first time he came across this dish, in Budapest. He and Annie were eating at a beautiful old restaurant called Kispipa, which is apparently a favourite of Tony Curtis, who at that time was helping to fund the restoration of Budapest's main synagogue, in the same street. (You'll be thinking that this is a lot of detailed information for a cat to recall, but Martin repeats all his stories so often that it sinks in, even if you only have a little brain like me.) The dining room was lined with dark wood panelling and mirrors, a pianist played a concert grand on a small stage, and smart waiters clicked their heels as they took orders. It felt like a location for a Cold War spy movie. Martin ate venison and tarragon soup which came to the table in a huge terrine, followed by roast goose. (This was largely down to luck as the menu was in Hungarian and he, Annie and the waiter shared only a few dozen words of German, some of which were "I live in Railway Station Street".) Naturally Martin wasn't particularly hungry after soup and goose, but he wanted to try something else because the food was brilliant, so he scanned the menu and chose the cheapest thing there for dessert, reasoning that if it was cheap, it would be small. For about thirty pence, he got an enormous dish of Turoscsusza. He made a dent in the vast expanse of pasta, cheese and bacon because it was delicious, and because he didn't want to offend the staff at this lovely restaurant by leaving too much of it, but he then found it rather difficult to get up and walk back to the hotel. He's been making it at home ever since, but has not to this date served it after roast goose.