My route home sees me passing a decent butcher, an Asian store, the stalls of Moore Street where the ladies are happy to unload discount veg to me. At one point I went to a stall for two tomoatoes and came away with 10 tomatoes, 8 peppers and it being the time of year 3 bags of monkey nuts all for a euro more than I had expected to spend. The scam did reveal itself to me after as I arrived home realising the wiley old dear had loaded me up with green peppers - the outcast of the pepper clan and deservedly so. The same route serves my big Saturday morning shop as well as my need for getting together a weeknight dinner quickly when I have nothing in the house. I don’t consider myself a creature of habit the one exception being pork chops on a Monday night. The one bit of challenge in getting dinner together is how to put something next to the chop that involves a minimum of effort and time.

My saviour is the chick pea. Not alone can you cook your entire dinner in one pan, warming the chick peas through in the juices of the chop, you feel someway healthy knowing that chickpeas have good street cred amongst the nutritionists of the world. Now of course they will frown upon me frying the chop but bear with me while I explain. Good and all as grilling is, it takes time and time is not something I have when I want to get writing posts, somehow convinced that the people of the blogverse care what I had for dinner. Also there is an exercise element to the preparation of the chop as I brandish the nearest utensil with a flat surface and whack the chop into flattened submission ensuring you have a quickly cooked through piece of meat. Now I enjoy cooking for myself as much as a number and I will go to the trouble of setting aside the chop to leave its natural juices run back into the centre and rendered fat drain away but I will admit to using the porky olive oil remains to cook the chickpeas or a sauce. Said sauce only comes about on the odd occasion I have the correct ingredients in the house - wholegrain mustard to combine with the oily remains, cider to deglaze the pan and a dollop of cream to bring it all together - we’re talking minutes and a tasty dinner. I am rarely found wanting a lemon and so too a good squeeze of the acerbic juice to combine the aftermath of cooking your chop is an even faster home made ’sauce’.

Tonight I ventured to new terrain with good results - a fine bunch of flat leaf parsley commondeered in the Asian store I reached for a tin of butter beans instead of chickpeas and found myself mashing them with lemon juice, black pepper and roughly chopped parsley.  I am tied to dishes of my upbringing so the compliment I give the combination was that they had a welcome potato consistency, leaving me with a suitably contented belly this evening.