( For more recipes, take a look at my Flickr "food" set. The previous recipe on this site was Rice with bacon and mushrooms, which was a fried rice based dish. )

Having got to New Years Eve, we realised that our local Chinese takeaway was inexplicably closed. (They'd better not be planning to stay closed on 3rd February as well...) But anyway, we decided to rustle up our own chow mein style dish, and added some green chilli for extra zing!

PART I - Preparation

You'll need to have the following ingredients to hand:

• Noodles (I used these Chilli Noodles)
• Smoked sea salt
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Crushed black pepper
• Chopped garlic
• Chopped ginger
• Chopped green chilli
• Medium onion
• Sugar snap peas
• 1 x Cup of vegetable stock
• Soy sauce
• Five spice powder
• 2 x Chicken breasts

Chop the onion, and finely chop the garlic, ginger and chilli. Slice the sugar snap peas into bite-size pieces. Cube the chicken and season it with soy sauce, salt, pepper and a little five spice. Boil a kettle. The supposedly "straight to wok" noodles still need a quick soak!

I used a large saute pan throughout.

PART II - Cooking

Fry the chopped onion in a little extra virgin olive oil and add the chopped mixture of garlic, ginger and chilli. You might want to season with salt and pepper.

Add the cubed and seasoned chicken. Once the chicken is cooked through, add the vegetable stock. I let it simmer for a while.

Soak the noodles in boiling water. At the same time, add the chopped sugar snap peas to the pan. Cover and simmer.

Once you're happy with the sugar snap peas, drain the noodles, add them to the pan and mix well. Sprinkle in a little more soy sauce.

The noodles just need heating through. A couple of minutes should do the trick.

Serve onto heated plates. Don't know if it's just me, but this kind of stuff seems to go cold quickly.

PART III - Eating

What exactly is chow mein anyway? There seem to be about as many recipes as there are Internet users. (Well maybe not that many - but quite a lot.) I think this may not be very authentic, but who cares! The combination of garlic, ginger and chilli is a fine elixir that can be used to transform almost anything into a tasty meal. I'd summarise this as being a medium hot, spicy chicken and noodle dish. Enjoy with an ice cold beer!

For more recipes, take a look at my Flickr "food" set.

One day I will sit down (or stand up, more likely) and really take the time and trouble to learn how to make a decent risotto. For now, I settled on a quick and easy rice based dish, which probably has more in common with fried rice - but contained enough mushroom and bacon to make it into an adequate supper.

PART I - Preparation

You'll need to have the following ingredients to hand:

• Basmati Rice
• Sea salt
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Crushed black pepper
• Chopped garlic
• Thyme
• Tomato puree
• Medallions of smoked back bacon
• Mushrooms
• Small onion

PART II - Cooking

So far as timing is concerned, I don't multitask, and the following worked out fine for me...

Prepare the ingredients so far as you can. Chop the garlic, slice the onion, wash and slice the mushrooms, and cut the bacon into short strips. Keep everything else within arms reach.

I follow the Delia Smith approach to rice, which takes about ten minutes, plus you let it stand for a few minutes afterwards. In this instance, I seasoned the rice with salt, coriander and cumin. Set the rice off and immediately move to your other pan.

Fry the garlic and onions in a little extra virgin olive oil, and while they soften, fry the tomato puree for a minute or two. Mix, and then add the bacon and mushrooms. Season with salt, pepper and a little thyme.

With any degree of luck, your rice should be ready at about the same time as the bacon/mushroom and so tip it in and fry it all together for a couple of minutes.

Plate, and enjoy with ice cold beer. In this case, I'd picked up a 650ml bottle of Singha Thai beer, which was pretty good - definitely happy to have some again.

PART III - Eating

As I mentioned above, ultimately I want to learn to make risotto, but like many people I've been put off by the thought of standing over it and slowly adding the stock, etc. Until that time, this rice based recipe is not too bad. However, an occasional wild mushroom risotto would go down really rather nicely, so I'll have to take the plunge and see how it goes.

The above recipe is not particularly sophisticated, but it was tasty and you can't go wrong with the preparation. My biggest mistake was to eat it while watching Airplane 2, but short of employing a triple starred Michelin chef in our kitchen, I don't think anything would have helped make Airplane 2 more digestible.

Enjoy!

It was November, dark since 4pm and the roads were quiet. The supermarket was far behind us now and we were turning the corner into our street. The night was cold and clear, the moon full, and the radio played. From the back seat, Lucy explained her conceptions of goblins (who do not have to be scary, apparently) in a dialogue of thoughts which had come to fruition over her three and a half years of life experience. And yet, amidst this family normalcy, a seed of doubt was sown.

Rather than something missing or out of place, it was the sight of something that shouldn't be. Out of the darkness, an eerie light burned in the front bedroom window, casting diagonal rays upwards across the white, horizontal blinds. It could have been a reflection, a trick of the light, but none of us aired our doubts as we pulled into the driveway.

Investigations would have been superfluous. We knew immediately. A metal bedside lamp, turned off when we left the house that morning, was now lighting the window, and not for the first time.

Sceptical on the first few occasions, I was happy to dismiss it. If a light was off, and then found to be on, there could be no great mystery. It had obviously been turned on by someone. If that seemed impossible, it was our memory that was at fault; not the lamp. After a couple more occurrences, this scepticism became increasingly hard to sustain. A proper investigation was clearly needed.

We were dealing with king-size bed, matching bedside cabinets, and lamps on either side. We swapped the lamps and waited. It was pretty clear that the problem would also switch sides of the bed. But it didn't. And, we were now coming home to that reality, after a routine wander around Morrisons.

In some strange way, now that we had eliminated all natural explanations, it was a relief to acknowledge that what we were dealing with here must be some sort of benign poltergeist activity. Friendly spirits letting us know that, from somewhere, they are with us. It's actually quite reassuring to acknowledge this simple truth - and so let's just leave it at that. Case closed.

But why does any of this matter?

I recall a conversation with a work colleague, relating to a friend of a friend who was seeing a mysterious ghostly figure in their home. This happened repeatedly and over an extended period. All of her friends and neighbours were naturally supportive, fascinated by the story. Local history was investigated and a suitably ancient tragedy unearthed. A priest was called and the house blessed. This is not the only such story I've heard. Lots of people seem to have a similar tale within their circle of acquaintances.

What strikes me as notable by it's absence from all these stories however, is the appearance of a less romantically inclined friend, imploring the protagonist to get an urgent GP referral and a CAT scan. If I ever tell you that I am experiencing vivid hallucinations, please feel free to drag me down to our local GP surgery; I can assure you that I will not be offended by your concern. I'm obviously not a brain surgeon, and perhaps daylight hallucinations might have some benign causes, but it hardly seems like a symptom you should ignore. It can't escape notice that some potential causes may be rather more sinister, such as pressure on your brain from a lesion, blood clot, or tumour.

So despite anything I might have said up to this point, feel rest assured that the saga of our mysterious lamps is not over.

I'll be trying different electrical outlets and plugging the lamp in around the other side of the room. I'll try a surge protector. If that still fails to provide a solution, I'd suspect some other environmental factor. Is there a transformer in the wall? What do our neighbours have in the adjacent room? Are metal coated touch-lamps affected by moisture, humidity, draughts from the window directly above, or residues of Dermalogica intensive night-time moisturiser? How hard can it be to find a qualified electrician with a Fluke tester. Better to pay a professional than to put our earth leakage circuit breakers to the test with bare hands and some dodgy circuitry.

I dislike the term "sceptic" as it seems to imply the existence of an opposing viewpoint that might have some credibility, but for the purpose of this story, I am a sceptic - and proud to be so! Whatever our lighting problem turns out to be, ghosts will not be at the top of my prime suspects list...

For more recipes, take a look at my Flickr "food" set.

This is a very simple spaghetti dish, but very simply excellent! It's Spaghetti, tossed in extra virgin olive oil, with garlic, basil, crushed black pepper and sea salt. The finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano provides the finishing touch. Next time I think I'll try it with Linguine, but whatever the pasta, I'll definitely be returning to this recipe.

PART I - Preparation

You'll need to have the following ingredients to hand:

• Pasta
• Sea salt (I used a garlic infused sea salt)
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Crushed black pepper
• Chopped garlic
• Basil (I used dried, and it was fine)
• Parmigiano-Reggiano

PART II - Cooking

Bring a pot of salted water to the boil and cook the pasta to taste.

A few minutes before the pasta is ready, heat the olive oil in a non-stick pan. Grind in some black pepper, and add sea salt, the garlic and basil.

Drain the pasta and rinse under cold water. This appears to be a controversial practice, and personally I've never bothered with a rinse. However, a couple of the recipes I was basing this on suggested it, and it did seem to work nicely in this instance.

Add the spaghetti into the oil and toss until it's coated and heated through. I found I was wanting to add some extra black pepper at this point.

Sprinkle some sea salt over the pasta and use a rasp to finely grate some Parmesan on top. Mix again, and then plate.

Before serving, grate on some more Parmesan over the pasta, a final twist of black pepper, and as the French would say, "there you have it"...

PART III - Eating

I like pasta, but for some reason I'd never stuck to such a simple recipe. I've always tried some sort of tomato based sauce. After an episode of No Agenda where Adam sang the praises of Linguine and white truffle, I found myself surfing for recipes and looking at some different options that focused more on the pasta. Definitely something I'll have to try more of, although unfortunately, white truffle might be a bit out of my price range for a lunchtime snack!