Shingara, paayesh and baba ganoush

My parents were visiting over the weekend. We only have one bedroom, so M and I slept on futons in the living room, under a beautiful silk throw M's dad gave us as a wedding gift.

We visited my mother's friend in Essex. In the 1960s, they were both studying at rival medical colleges in Calcutta - my mum at Nilratan Sircar Medical College and her friend at National Medical College. We ate deliciously authentic Bengali food - shingara (samosa), paayesh (spiced rice pudding), lal saag (red leaves curry), okra posto (okra and white poppy seeds). Her older brother and his wife were visiting from Calcutta. The three of them had just returned from New York, where the son of my mum's friend works as a business director for a major museum in Manhattan. He and I were childhood friends. We were both only children and we bonded over a mutual love of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Now he lives directly opposite the United Nations on the east side of Manhattan, over-looking the East River.

My mum's friend is in her 60s, is a retired paediatrician and travels the world several times a year - Poland, Slovenia, Alaska, the Galapagos islands, Japan, the Amazon. Sometimes alone, or with her family, sometimes on an organised tour group with Saga. Her home is filled with books - from paediatrics textbooks and Chinese language books, to histories of Calcutta and novels in Bengali. Her greenhouse houses a contemplative Buddha from Homebase and her garden is ablaze with colour. A truly remarkable woman. We had so much fun.

On Sunday, we relaxed at home with my parents. We watched a mindless but fun British Bollywood movie set in and around Brick Lane, chatted and flicked through food magazines together. Then we met M's sister at Tara, the Kurdish restaurant on Green Lanes. Surrounded by Kurdish rugs and hookahs, we tucked into kebabs, lamb chops, humous, flat bread, baba ganoush, grilled sea bass and bright red Kurdish tea served from a chipped teapot with a rather dapper, extravagantly moustachioed soldier hand-painted on the side.

M's in France again tonight and tomorrow night, so I'm home alone, eating defrosted leftovers (chickpea, spinach and pomegranate stew), doing laundry, flicking through Grazia and Time, and dipping in and out of American Bengali writer Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies short stories. Enjoying time in on my own, but missing my husband more than I care to admit.

Feeling fruity

It's been a good week for fruit. Lemons, limes, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, Alfonso mangoes, papaya. I'm feeling very virtuous. I never used to be a fruit person (fruity maybe) but my husband loves fruit and always has varieties of it in the house. So I'm growing to enjoy fruit too.

Yippee, it's Friday - and my parents are coming tonight!

Simple as it gets

1 x medium size diced red onion
2 x cloves of garlic, diced
1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
200g young spinach
1 x 400g tin chickpeas
1 heaped teaspoon whole cumin
Splash of Tabasco
Squeeze of 2 lemons
Salt to taste

1. Saute the onion in a heavy based saucepan.
2. When translucent, add cumin and garlic and stir until the aroma is released.
3. Add chickpeas, tomatoes and water to cover.
4. Bring to the boil then simmer on a low heat for 20 minutes.
5. Season to taste then add lemon juice and Tabasco.
6. Stir in spinach until it wilts.

Serves 2 with hot flat Turkish bread.

This is as simple as it gets for me. Both my husband and I have been having some crazy days at work. This dish takes 30 minutes at most to prepare and cook, and is perfect after a long and intense day.

Inflatables, charcuterie and cleaning

Friday / Lamb kebabs with pomegranate jus for me and lamb kebabs with pistachio and cheese for M at a bustling Antepliler on Green Lanes / Two episodes of Sex And The City - Season 4 - my favourite season / Slobbed out on the sofa, unable to move after an intense work week.

Saturday / Breakfast of Monsoon Malabar coffee, mega-sized croissants and "shredded wheat" baklava dripping with honey / Into town for pop art superstar Jeff Koon's Hulk Elvis exhibition at the Gasgosian in Kings Cross / Large-scale, photo-realistic oil and canvas depictions of the Incredible Hulk, inflatable monkeys, geisha girls, The Liberty Bell, landscapes, illustrated steam engines and horse-drawn carriages painted by Koons' army of assistants in New York's Chelsea / The landscapes looked like they had been originally photographed then imported into Photoshop where various filters were applied and then printed and painstakingly copied onto canvas with good old-fashioned paint / Audacious, vivacious, vivid, pulsating with energy / M had dragged me to this one because I've always disliked Koons' posturing and kitsch art, but I admit this show had me salivating as if I was being sucked into a maelstrom of Opal Fruits.

Through the muggy heat to Liverpool Street and the Martin Parr exhibition at Rocket in the awesome Tea Building / So much bleaker and starker than Koons' work but no less intense and all-consuming / I was rivetted by Parr's photos along Scotland's A8 road, with every image stuck in a 70s timewarp - jowls galore in an old man's club, a hunched-shouldered waitress looking out the window in a tea room, a lone swimmer in an open-air swimming pool on a grey and rainy day, an elderly man splayed on the damp pavement outside a pub / Parking Spaces featured 41 photos from 41 countries, including the Czech Republic, the UAE, India, the USA and Syria, of parked cars and parking spaces / What captivated was the life unfurling between the spaces, in the background / So simple, so everyday, so mundane, so absorbing / Rocket represents Parr in the UK and we had a good chat with the owner / Came away with two books - a limited edition signed copy of Parking Spaces and a book on Istanbul.

Through the humidity / My blouse sticking to my back / To Spruth and Magers and Cindy Sherman's A Play Of Selves from 1975 / Sherman is famous for her photographic self-portraits exploring female identity and these 72 photographic assemblages told the story in three acts of a woman overwhelmed by her own alter-egos in her pursuit of love and self-acceptance / I love Sherman's older, more natural work and find her recent stuff overly stylistic and stiff / As such, this show was wonderful.

To the Old School exhibition at the grand old Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi on Old Bond Street celebrating a re-engagement with Old Master modes of representation / Mixing and matching Old Masters and the modern / Works by the likes of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Younger and Carlo Dolci hung alongside modern day painters inspired by them such as my favourites Jeff Wall, Michaël Borremans and Karen Kilimnik / The gallery itself is sumptuous and traditional, with a wonderfully musty and congested library, heavy doors, woodpanelled walls and ever-so-slightly faded jewel-coloured wallpaper.

Lunched on cheese and dill pickles (M) and egg and anchovy (me) rye bread open sandwiches at the Nordic Bakery on Golden Square / Saw Zadie Smith's husband Nick Laird rummaging through his rucksack with a friend on Golden Square / Light and fluffy Portuguese custard tarts and coffees in Soho's Fernandez & Wells on Beak Street / Soho eerily quiet and the sky darkening with clouds / DVDs from the Virgin Megastore on Piccadilly - Death Wish, Melinda Melinda, Spider, A History Of Violence, The Cooler.

To the new 3-storey Whole Foods Market in Kensington / A long queue to get in but we were inside within 5 minutes / Busy but not uncomfortably so / Wonderfully air-conditioned / Abundance of beautifully displayed stock from organic peas in their pods to eco-friendly cleaning products / Attentive service / We could easily have bought everything we ended up buying in various shops around Soho or on Green Lanes, but the experience of buying it all under one roof was fun / We bought an Argentinian Malbec and French Medoc from their comprehensive wine section; manchego cheese, fig-wrapped soft goats cheese, gorgonzola piccante and quince jelly from their Neal's Yard Dairy concession; lomo curado or dry-cured pork loin from the bulging charcuterie counter; sun-blushed tomatoes, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, almonds marcona, dried spaghetti and orecchiette, rye bread and kalamata olive bread; oh, and a book on yoga!

To home, where we ate a selection of our Whole Foods goodies, watching the charismatic Charles Bronson in the rivetting vigilante thriller Death Wish, followed by Woody Allen's entertaining Melinda Melinda on DVD - both set in and taking us back to NYC.

Sunday / Browsing the internet / Cleaning the house / Doing laundry / Shopping locally for meat, vegetables and fruit for this week's meals / Sorting through unwanted clothes and clutter - eight dustbin bags of stuff! / Chatting to my parents on the phone and planning their trip to London next week / Reading novels, magazines, the newspaper / Eating sun-blush tomatoes and goats cheese on rye from yesterday's Whole Foods Market trip / Cooking a Mexican dinner of homemade guacamole, beef strips, roasted red peppers and a tomato and cucumber salad, all wrapped in tortillas / With refreshing bottles of Corona / Followed by green tea and mixed berries / Watching the always brilliant and disturbing Taxi Driver on DVD / Doing a little facial micro-dermabrasion and slapping on the best face pack I've ever used at home / Getting an early night - good night!

Busy doing nothing

Work is so busy and stressful these days, I have little energy to do much after work except collapse at home. I start counting the days down to the weekend on a Wednesday, for it is at the weekend that I am able to rouse myself enough to go out and about.

Another reason for not going out on a weeknight much more is that I am finally enjoying a good home life - in a house that's all mine and M's - our space, our things, all of it. When I used to flatshare and was either single or dating, I was always eager to go out after work, more often than not because all I had of my own was a cramped little room.

These days, I love chilling at home by myself or with M. I look forward to a night of doing nothing after a day of being frantic and breathless. It leaves me little to blog about as a result.

This week so far has been a typical week: sipping wine by candlelight, flipping through magazines, being engrossed in novels, surfing the blogosphere and, of course, cooking and eating comfort food such as peas and fried eggs on bacon. Blissful.

Weekend snapshot

A gloriously sunny weekend / Fighting the crowds along a jam-packed South Bank / Chowing down on Portuguese hog ciabatta sandwiches stuffed with hog meat, rocket salad and apple sauce / Looking up at the now drying out lawn Flytower / Watching the fantastically bathetic, melodramatic, comical and powerfully performed The Rose Tattoo at the National, surrounded by OAPs because it was a matinee performance / Lazing around in the long grass in Hyde Park - reading books, newspapers, people watching and sleeping / Wandering around the over-priced, lacklustre Photo London exhibition full of bland, derivative photos trying to ape the likes of the mighty Hiroshi Sugimoto, Martin Parr and William Eggleston, who also featured / Zoe Strauss (above left) stood out with her photos focussing in on the details of the urban American landscape / As did Saul Leiter's American street photography from the 1940s and 1950s / As did Sunil Gupta's photos of gays and lesbians in contemporary urban India / A better, more imaginative exhibition was the Tate Britain's How We Are: Photographing Britain / Fergus Heron's photos of pretty, faux cottage and mock tudor leafy suburban developments stood out for me / As did Susan Lipper's photos of bed and breakfasts / As did Paul Graham's documentation of Little Chefs, petrol stations and underpasses along the A1 road / As did Paul Reas' images of people shopping in retail parks, DIY centres and supermarkets (above right).

Spring cleaning

Since we've been back from NYC, where we ate all our meals out, all we've wanted to eat back home is clean, fresh and light home cooking / Clear homemade chicken broth with udon noodles / Freshly podded broad beans and peas with crumbled feta cheese and mint vinaigrette / Clear chicken broth with vegetable wontons / Light chickpea curry with spinach, tomatoes and apricots / Ricotta and spinach tortellini with homemade tomato and garlic sauce / Chicken pieces marinated with Thai seasonings such as limes, fish sauce, palm sugar and fresh coriander served with a shredded green papaya salad.