We’re still in lockdown, so the restaurants are closed, but at least all the schools reopen tomorrow. No hope for eating out until mid May though. Restaurants cope in different ways, take aways mostly, some go further than that, like Rick Stein. His places offer some carefully prepared boxes, containing ingredients for a starter, main and a dessert for two, plus simple instructions how to put it together. Florek ordered us one of these boxes and it arrived yesterday, beautifully packed.

For starters there were Cornish mussels, that somebody even cleaned before vacuum packing them, for the main an Indonesian curry, pavlova to finish with. A very pleasant bottle of French vermentino, 60 ml of which was to be used to prepare the mussels, I used more and then we drained it in the evening, all this pleasure for £55 plus DPD delivery.

Mussels were lovely, different to the creamy, garlicky ones I make, those were flavoured with confit onions and no cream was recommended. Nice, but I’m sticking with mariniere next time.

The curry was lovely too. Fish lovely and fresh, especially the seabass.

The bean salad for me could be skipped, especially as the side dressing was made with shrimp paste, a vile ingredient that does not agree with my palate since that awful nasi goreng I made once. Florek tried a little for the science, I smelled it and gave it a tiny taste before downing a glass of wine quickly. Yuk.

2 nice big meringues were provided, all I had to do was to whip the cream and fold it together with some passion fruit. And that was that.

Good stuff altogether, we might be trying a different menu some time soon.