IF my lunch guest was curious about the unaccustomed sounds, she didn't let on Just the plumbers," I said, to explain the knocking and chopping and murmur of male voices coming from the kitchen. Then came the tap on the door and it was lights, action and a surprise birthday lunch cooked especially for her, in my primitive kitchen, by the Portable Food Company.
With the proliferation and variety of eating houses springing up everywhere, one might be forgiven for suspecting there must be few people nowadays who eat seated at their own board. But plenty of people are combining the two - finding it will not break the bank occasionally to bring in outside caterers and eat a meal in the comfort of home, cooked by someone else.
Eamonn Slater, together with his business partner Bryon Yore, set up the Dublin-based Portable Food Company nearly a year ago. The form is that you ring up and discuss your requirements.
"People want all sorts of different things," says Eamonn, an electronics boffin turned chef who spent three months studying with Darina Allen at Ballymaloe, "hot or cold, sit-down or fork. We always ask people how much they want to spend. Then we can suggest an appropriate menu."
For us, they cooked roast pepper staffed with fennel, spicy potato cake and a spinach thing with mushrooms. And it was formidable. Everything was prepared in my own, tiny kitchen and what a luxury it was for the two us to sit there like Lady Mucks and be served.
The best bit, apart from the eating of the food, was the washing-up: there wasn't any. All done by the Portable Food Company.
But what's it like to work in someone else's kitchen and, more to the point, what's the best sort of kitchen for a strolling chef? "Well," says Eamonn, "we've worked in all sorts. Good knives are essential so I always bring my own set. Then, we like to be left alone to work so a separate kitchen is best."
The Portable Food Company does everything, from wakes and weddings to buffets and book launches. Canapes come at £5.50 a head, hot buffet supper for 20, £7.50 a head and a slap-up meal for four, excluding wine, about £24 a head.
Welcare Foods is also into home catering and has recently started a new line in more upmarket, one-person meals. "We deliver right out into Co Meath and north Kildare," says managing director Matt Farrell. "We do 50 deliveries a day and try to deliver on the same day because we do, a lot of work with house-bound people and our driver is sometimes the only person they talk to all week. They rely on us." Welcare Foods meals are nutritionally balanced and come frozen, so a whole week's meals can be delivered at the one time.
"Our meals are best cooked from frozen," says Farrell,"and we offer people a trial run with a table-top steamer that switches itself off automatically. With the new Apetito line, we're branching out and providing meals for students and business people living on their own."
Welcare Foods can provide a full meal of roast and vegetables for one - without the purchaser having to go to the expense of buying a joint or a chicken. Irish stew with mashed potatoes: £2.70; roast beef in Burgundy sauce: £3.30; lentil and vegetable casserole: £2.65. Delivery is free.
When Food For Thought, a women's co-op restaurant in Dun Laoghaire, started up, people gave them three years. That was 13 years ago and it's now difficult to get a seat there during lunch hour. Nearly all their home-cooked food is eaten in the 37-seat restaurant but a small proportion finds its way into people's homes. "We get some of our local customers collecting from us," says founder member Eleanor Thornton. "They may be going away on holiday and want to be sure there's food in the house for an elderly relative or a teenager left on their own. Those meals have to be collected. Provided we have two or three weeks' warning, we'll baked extra of whatever we're doing and, freeze it for them. Most people want what they've liked in the restaurant."
A pasta meal with meat costs £4.60, with reductions for orders of 12 or more.
The Gallic Kitchen in Dublin's Frances Street started off as a sandwich stall in Mother Redcap's, Market. Now, its business is mainly outside catering. "We did an order is small enough to go in a funeral yesterday and have another one today," said owner Sarah Webb who used to work at White's. People ring in their orders a day in advance. "Day of" orders (a favourite phrase of Sarah's) are difficult but, like any other miracle, not impossible.
"We do some deliveries but if the car, we ask customers to collect themselves. We also supply instructions on how to cook or reheat the food as well as how to cut certain dishes." For numbers over 100, Sarah's service will include a waitress for £35. Finger food for a reception costs £5 a head while a dinner party will cost £20-25 a head.
All chefs worth their salt have their litany of near disasters and Sarah has hers, like the time she had to cater for a marquee wedding on hired ovens which not only had the doors hanging off but had to be propped up on boxes. And speaking of which, what does Eamonn Slater think of that great barometer of bourgeois respectability, the inside of the average oven? Thankfully, he is tact itself: "You can get the mangiest of ovens in the nicest of kitchens. Sometimes you open an oven and there's the remains of last week's roast still in it. But if I found mice droppings in an oven - and I have - I wouldn't say, excuse me, I've just found, you know - I'd simply clear it up and get on with the job."
THE real horror story, though, concerns the woman who "bought in" a fish en croute dish for a dinner party and passed it off as her own. She cut into it only to discover she had been given an apple strudel by mistake. Nothing daunted, she expressed mild annoyance: "Silly me, I must have taken the wrong thing out of the freezer. Excuse me while I defrost one of my curries." She withdrew for a few minutes then returned to see to her guests.
Some time and much drink later, she returned to the kitchen and took out of the oven the complete curry meal deposited there by a kind friend who had collected it from the local Indian takeaway.
There's style.