Duck legs with a pomegranate sauce

We can be rude about the supermarkets but at 7.00pm on a Tuesday evening after work there aren't that many other options in Birkenhead to pick up some food to cook for the evening.  I went in without any great expectations and came out better than anticipated with a couple of duck legs and a pomegranate that was going cheap - so all for less than £3.00.

I had at the back of my mind that there were recipes for duck and pomegranate and a quick flick through a couple of books showed I was right although it transpired I could have picked up some walnuts as well. I pierced the skin of the duck legs and browned them in olive oil in a heavy pan over a medium heat for 15/20 minutes. I took them out whilst I cooked off a finely sliced onion and a squashed clove of garlic.

I squeezed out the juice from the pomegranate I had bought (wishing I had got two) and the juice from a lemon. This was added to the wilted onions together with a tablespoon of good honey, a seasoning of salt and pepper and a good splash of water. The duck legs were put back into the pan and I put the lid on and left it on a low heat for almost an hour.

By that time the duck was cooked but there a good layer of fat on the sauce. So I took out the legs and kept them warm on a plate. Taking the pan off the heat I used some paper kitchen towels to skim off the fat gently layering them down to soak it up before carefully lifting and discarding. Once the fat had gone the pan was put back on the heat to allow the sauce to reduce for a few minutes whilst I cleaned off some green salad from the garden. The rain from the last few days seems to force the soil into all corners of the green leaves so it needed a good soaking. Once it was clean and dry I poured the sauce over the duck legs and used the green salad to help soak up the juices. They were delicious.

The music we listen to when we are alone

The picture reminded me that I am meant to be finishing the book about mackerel. Galen still remembers the half promise I made three or fours years ago towards the end of a three Murphy's lunch that once the book was published I would buy a speedboat. Galen forgets that there are a whole range of speedboats and that whilst he has his eye on the thing that David Beckham took up the Thames to the Olympics last Friday evening I will be inclined towards something more prosaic.

So this seems like a good time to put something on the cooking of mackerel up here.

A SIMPLE WAY WITH MACKEREL

For two.

Catch three mackerel. You should be cooking them within an hour or so of them coming out of the sea.

Gut and fillet them.

Heat a glug of olive oil or a small pat of butter  in a frying pan until hot.

Add the mackerel fillets skin side down.  You could dust them with flour before putting them in.  Once in the pan season with salt and pepper.

Cook for a minute and flip them over. You may need to use the spatula to stop them from curling.

After another minute take them out and arrange on a plate. Add some chopped parsley and lemon juice.

Eat with your fingers.

You could slice the fillets into three and eat on pieces of toast. Or even have them whole in a fresh baguette.

Like this they would be good with either tarter sauce or possibly horseradish

Mary Arundel cooks them on the bone, dragged through seasoned flour and fried until crisp.

Home alone for the rest of the week and the Flaming Lips have a newish CD out so listening to their 10 minute deconstruction of Erykah Badu and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face which has its moments. Next up The Unthanks with Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band. Maybe I'm mellowing but I suspect that The Unthanks will get played more than the Flaming Lips - yup put it on now and the hairs are starting to rise on the back of the neck already. I will be a wet rag by the time we get to Fareweel Regality.

 

Falafel

Another Saturday morning trip to the International Store on Oxton Road to buy some lunch and a another new toy for the kitchen is found. Falafel were wanted for lunch and I knew that I had seen on one of the shelves tucked away at the back various brightly coloured packets that were clearly marked falafel and suggested the possibility of something interesting. So I went to investigate and I was right. There were three or four packets of one sort or other all promising tasty falafel by stirring and mixing with some water. Without having any great idea of what to go for I was sold by the the packet of Durra  as it came with its own little falafel maker all for the grand sum of £1.79.

Back at home the two packets of powder were mixed with cold water and left to stand for an hour. The time was used up chopping up tomatoes, cucumber and long thin cool green peppers and arranging them neatly on a plate. After an hour the falafel mixture looked too wet and and I was convinced that they would fall apart as soon as I started to fry them. But having started I was going to have to finish the job. So I heated a good covering of oil in a small frying pan. The small metal instrument was simplicity itself to use. It appeared to have been made out of a couple of old tin cans. At the bottom there was a small plate just over an inch wide which was connected to some sort of spring mechanism inside. Pull back the lever and smear and spoonful of the mixture into the wide bottom. Then hovering over the hot oil let go of the spring and give it a shake and a small disc of falafel mixture started to frizzle. They held their shape and did not turn to mush in the oil as I had feared. After a minute I turned them over to let the other side cook.

After 15 minutes there were twenty or so small rounds of falafel which we ate stuffed into pitta with yogurt the chopped tomatoes, cucumber and pepper and dashes of chilli sauce.

Old smoked Gubbeen sausage

Every year I come back from Cork I will have a handful of smoked sausages from Gubbeen. They will have been bought from their stall at Bantry Market on the last Friday of the holiday in a final flurry of enthusiasm and desperation to bring back with me as much of the food of West Cork that I can. Once home I usually quickly realise that it will take some weeks to get through all of the sausage and so some will end up in the freezer.

Last night I found two sausages going back to 2005 and 2006. One was a salami and the other salchichon. There was no getting away from it they needed eating up so I took them out to defrost overnight.

Galen and I ate them this evening.

In town today over lunch I bought from Lunya a glass jar 600 gr of smoked lentils Lentajas al natural extra. When I got home I finely chopped a small onion and started to cook it off in a good dollop of olive oil on a high heat. I added 4 chopped cloves of garlic and cooked that for a few minutes more whilst I peeled and chopped the sausage into dice of about half an inch. Outside of their plastic wrapper they smelt fine despite their years lurking at the back of the freezer. At the back of the house the sage has been going wild in our wet summer and I finely sliced 4 leaves to add to the onions and garlic together with a half teaspoon of paprika from the 1 kilo tin I bought years ago from Brindisi and is still going.

That all continued to cook as I drain the lentils. This took longer than anticipated as the lentils had settled at the bottom of the jar and had to be eased out the air burping and farting behind them. Once into a sieve I sluiced them with water and put them into the pan, the contents of which had started to gain some colour. All this was allowed to heat through, moistened with a slug of the Galician beer I was drinking.

There was a final seasoning with salt, pepper and parsley and it was then eaten out of bowls listening still to Giant Sand.

In Watermelon Sugar

About 100 years ago when I was 18 or 19 I read some books by Richard Brautigan. He was an American writer, an alcoholic, who shot himself in 1984 aged 49. You could tell from the writing that he was almost out of his time and he had an unhappy life. Despite the apparent simplicity of his books, the almost haiku precision of what he wrote,  it all became too complicated and he finished it. I have most of his books at home on the shelves although I am still trying to find the old copy I had of Trout Fishing in America. His writing helped shape a mythical image of America I carried around with me at the time. I have hardly looked at them since.

I was reminded of one of his books at the weekend when I saw a pile of pale green watermelons in a box outside of the International Store on Oxton Road. £3.50 each they were too good to resist. They were vast and one was almost too heavy to carry in the white plastic bag they put it in. The kids wanted to play with it in the kitchen, carrying it around and threatening drop it in a great pink mess of watermelon flesh and seeds on the stone floor.

We ate it that evening after a barbecue sliced into great chunks. The seeds were still small and we ate them seeds and all the juices slathering down our chins and in my case sweetening my beard. The taste brought back memories of camping holidays in the south of France and eating them outside the tent and then I was reminded of Richard Brautigan and his gentle elliptical books

"In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar."

Richard Brautigan 1973

Durrus Cheese

As I said when I started this the Sheep's Head Food Company was to be the name of the deli I was going to open in Oxton dedicated to the selling of good food drawn from the producers of West Cork. A large part of what it was going to sell was cheese and I thought that here would be a useful point to dwell on some of those cheeses  and what was inspiring about them.

Next month we will be in Ahakista and I will be going to the farmers markets and some of the farms where the cheese is made and on the ferry back to Holyhead I will hopefully have a boot-full of cheese stuffed into cool bags amongst the luggage to pass on from a stall I am going to set up in the garden. So this will be a small taster of what there will be. There will be a few more teasers to come and some hints at the music that will be burbling away in the background.

It was Durrus cheese that first alerted me to the possibilities of good food in West Cork. When the family first talked about holidays in Ireland I could only think of Spain, the endless intense sun, platefuls of tapas and a relationship with food that struck all the chords in me I could hope for. Ireland was fine but that was more for the Guinness and the endless plates of chips. But it was Ireland we went for and I was hesitant at first, unsure of what its attractions would be. A lot of these became apparent on our first visit to the Cottage one Easter, as the sun edged its way out and we found ourselves doing nothing more but sit on the wall leading down to the sea watching the view, clouds moving up Dunmannus Bay and the sea washing over the black rocks and the covering of kelp and seaweed, the weather coming in. There were platefuls of chips but for lunch in the Cottage we would have rolls from Cashman's in Durrus with freshly cooked ham and cheese. The cheeses were Carrigbyrne and Durrus.

The Carrigbyrne was delicious - a soft cheese with a pale white rind, not dissimilar to brie.

The Durrus was proper cheese in 400gr rounds wrapped in greaseproof paper, with a distinctive yellow label and a picture of a cow. It was the sort of cheese you would be pleased to pick up in a good French market. As it suggested on the label it looked as if it had come from the farm. Under its puckered pale orange rind still marked with the metal racks on which it had been sitting whilst it matured there was a creamy pale cheese, slightly pockmarked with an acidic bite in its taste. There was an intense pleasure to be had periodically taking a thick quarter of the cheese, cutting away its rind and eating it as the lunch slowly dissolved into the afternoon and someone had to make their way up to the pub for a couple more pints to see us through.

The surprise in it all was that the cheese was made only a few miles away.  Durrus village was down the road and suddenly there was this great connection between the food that I was eating and the landscape it had come from. Over the years since then we have skirted past the farmhouse where Jeffa Gill makes the cheese. It is up in the hills, up on the road past the  church almost to the top where spine of the peninsula starts to take shape and body on its long reach out into the Atlantic.

The milk for the cheese comes from two Friesian herds and the taste and texture is continually varied by the seasons, the amount of rain that has fallen and the quality of the green grass. It is as you realise that proper cheese relies so much on that connection, the rain and the grass that feeds the cows that the name of the book about amongst other things food in West cork Eating the Scenery starts to make sense.

These are pictures of the hills just up from the farmhouse in the townland of Coomkeen where the  on the ridge of peninsula. The view takes in the bulk of both Bantry and Dunmannus Bays. Somewhere along the way we also met a couple of cows. Pictures of the cheese will follow in August after it has been bought fresh from the market.

 If you need more information on the cheese go to

 http://www.durruscheese.com/

Compost, worms and what to do with a hard mango

Now that it has warmed up there is something sobering about the Saturday trip to the green compost bin at the end of the garden. A weeks worth of potato peel, carrot tops, banana skins, apple cores, used teabags and old coffee grounds will have built up in the pot in the kitchen and is starting to smell. The compost bin has been in the garden for at least 5 years but it is only over the last couple of summers that it seems to have got going. For the first few years whatever we put in there did not seem to go down until the bottom was emptied in spring and spread over the veg plot. But now it has been taken over by great clots of worms that seethe all year round.

Open the lid and there is a good whiff of rotting fruit and whatever flies have  gathered will buzz into the air. Peer in and last weeks pot full of kitchen waste will already have started to be dragged down into the thick brown gloop that I suppose is basically worm shit. The surface looks fairly innocuous but dig down a bit and every item of old veg is seized by clumps of worms of all sizes. The eye is first caught by the pink ones two or three inches long but then you notice others no thicker than a piece of snipped cotton all turning and  trying to get away from the light. And that is the sobering part. Bury my old body in the ground for a few months and it to will become a vast clump of worms like those in the compost bin, turned to worm shit and then back into the soil.

Some things take longer to break down than others. The odd bottle top that gets in there will be around for ever, labelling on an avocado skin, elastic bands, egg shells and the stones from the mangoes we had last summer.

I bought another box of honey mangoes this morning from the grocers, so that will be 4 more stones in the bin, and last night I picked up one those sad, hard green giants they sell in the supermrket. It had been reduced in price, twice, so they wanted to sell it, but there was still hardly any give as I gently pressed at the skin with my fingers. I got it anyway as I guessed there would still be sweetness there.

Back at home I slowly fried off two thick chicken breasts in a touch of olive oil, seasoned with salt, pepper and a good pinch of paprika.

I peeled the mango and then sliced off the yellow flesh from around the stone. This was then diced and put in a bowl into which I added half a finely sliced red onion, two crushed cloves of garlic, a very finely diced red chilli, olive oil, salt and pepper and the juice of one lime. Mixed all together and left to let the flavours meld for a while.

When the chicken was done I eat it with the mango salsa and a pile of basmati and wild rice.

All cooked whilst listening out for the good bits on the new Guided By Voices album.

How simple does a tomato sauce have to be

Put a packet of good spaghetti into a large pan of water which should be at a rolling boil.

Heat olive oil in a frying pan and add 4 thinly sliced cloves of garlic. Careful it does not burn. Take a good pound of very tasty cherry tomatoes from the grocers and cut them in half and put in the pan with the garlic. You don't really want them to cook more to heat through so lower the heat a bit. A minute or so before the pasta is ready squeeze in the juice of a lemon into the tomatoes and season with salt and pepper. Drain the pasta, tear some basil into the tomato sauce. Pour the pasta into a large white bowl and slide the sauce on to. Eat with parmesan cheese.

We listened to a fantastic song called Country Line by Cass McCombs. We saw him live earlier this year and this was the last song that he played. It was totally unexpected, one of those wide open songs that seem made for the mythical blue roads of America.

Giant Sand

This Friday night we will be going to a musical BBQ of sorts for which we have been asked to choose two songs to listen to along the theme of "Going back to the country". Now this is a good theme as it is inarguable that a large proportion of the music we listen to has its roots in some kind of americana and one way or other that stems from an understanding or history that comes from country (in the sense of country & western). But why did this happen and where did it start? Well one of the first bands that did it for me was Giant Sand. They started in the early '80's and a quick look on iTunes shows I have at least 10 CDs and although I have not counted at least that many records. All the old records have recently been re-released on CD with added bits to celebrate their 25 years with us and to date I have been very good in not hoovering them all up. Over those 25 years they have basically been one man, Howe Gelb, and the various friends and acquaintances he has sat down with to make a record. These have included M Ward, Calexico, Victoria Williams, Neko Case and numerous others.They started off as Giant Sandworm and the earlier records are noisier and more of a racket than the more recent ones. There are some who could listen to them and say that it all sounds the same and to an extent they do but that is part of the point. They are basically Howe's slightly sad lugubrious voice laid over some guitars and piano. Sometimes it is just a guitar or a piano and other times they are both together with drums or maybe some horns woven in a well. But over a record, a CD and 25 years that voice and the music builds up to a great picture, it is burnt midnight music out of the American south west that bears some listening. I saw them in concert a couple of times in Oxford in the venue down the bottom of the road from East Avenue. Both times they played Mountain of Love. The second time I saw them we drank Guinness and whiskey in the Bullingdon Arms before we went to the gig. We stood at the front of the stage and half way through the evening Howe ushered on stage an old country singer whose name I cannot remember - he was dressed in black with a great silver buckle on his belt and wearing a cowboy hat. We were slightly surprised but he fitted the evening well. They played Mountain of Love as an encore when I shouted it out. It was the only name of one of their songs I could remember and Howe gave me his bottle of Newcastle Brown to finish off. The next day I saw him sat on one of the wooden benches on Magdelen Bridge and to my eternal regret I did not stop to say hello. They have a new CD out now and I have suggested that we should be listening to a song from it on Friday.

Before then I am going to find me a recipe for some appropriate food and buy a few bottles of Mexican beer.

Lobster fishing in Dunmannus Bay

On Saturday Ward's were selling lobsters. They come in from Cornwall and are cooked before being put on display the colors bright red against the white ice and grey fish. I compare notes with Nigel over their cost. In Ahakista we buy them from Tommy Arundel on the pier. He is out in the bay in his boat Freedom most days of the week hauling in the pots, pulling out the lobsters and crabs, re-baiting and then laying the pots down again.

Last summer I spent an afternoon on his boat watching him work. It took 45 minutes from Kitchen Cove to get up past Donneen Pier and the great piece of orange cliff that had fallen into the sea. He has had the boat for 7 years, 4 years in the water. She was some twenty years old before be bought her in Scotland and she was taken down to West Cork. She spent a year on railway sleepers by the Pier whilst he repainted her blue, rebuilt the cabin and fitted a new engine.

As we headed up the bay we left behind a churn of white water and we were followed by two great black backed gulls who hung in the wind some twenty yards or so back from the stern. Porpoises had been following them the previous week. In Kitchen Cove the boat felt outsized within the circle of water we normally pottered around in a dingy or a canoe. But once out in the bay she was dwarfed by the enormity of the water and the scenery that rose up on either side. I could still feel her power - we were running alongside Kilcrohane after a five minutes, a trip that would normally take us half an hour in our boat Montbretia. Joe, Tommy's mate fell asleep in the corner of the cabin. Tommy laid out the pliers for nicking the tails of the female lobsters before they are put back and another small sheet of cut metal to measure the length to make sure they were not too small.

Eventually the boat slows down, Joe wakes up and he and Tommy put on their thick yellow waterproofs. Joe takes up a boat hook as Tommy manoeuvres the boat alongside a buoy just off the the cliffs. Joe heaves the buoy into the boat with the boat hook and the thick wet line is then run through the wheel of a winch that sits behind the cabin. The line is looped around the metal drum, and with a twist of the black lever it starts to haul in the blue line out of the water and it falls in a untidy pile on the deck. It was not so long ago that they did this by hand. The pots are heavy and cumbersome even to carry on the Pier and it must have been hard and difficult work pulling at the cold wet line and the dead weight of the pots in the water. 

The first few pots are nothing but by catch, sea urchins, which are thrown back into the sea and star fish which are dumped in a bucket, they are dirty orange and brown, crawling and suckering at whatever they touch. These are the great enemy of the lobster men - they have rasping teeth which chew at the pots and eventually break them. Crabs can be kept if of sufficient size and are heavy enough but spider crabs are put back as at the moment there is no market for them.

Some of the pots are filled with three or four black dog fish, wrapped around themselves their sandpaper skin would tear at the flesh if they caught you. The big ones are almost 4 feet long with great angry  mouths and tiny rows of teeth, there is something dark and malevolent about them.  Ireland may not have snakes but these grey creatures writhing and turning over the hand as Tommy pulls them out of the pots make a good substitute.

When they arrive the lobsters are surprisingly bright and active as they come out of the sea. In the water they “swim” by clapping their bodies together. Out of the water in the strange air they try to escape with great arches of their back and their claws splayed out snapping at the wind. Tommy and Joe wear thick blue rubber gloves but these would not offer much protection if claw was to clamp its way round one of their fingers. Tommy puts a crab's claw between a lobsters pincers and they crush it in two. There is a real indignation that they should have been removed so harshly from the safe confines of the sea and rocks where they have no enemy to the boat, all their power gone and useless in Tommy's fist.

Their colours are particularly vivid, on top not so much blue but a strange off black, mottled and alive in the sudden light and underneath they are pale with a look of burnt skin. They are such primitive creatures and it is hard to shake away the image of them as some kind of giant insect with their rows of small legs scurry against the unyielding surface of the air and the bottom of the boat. To calm them down and stop them from fighting they each have to be covered with a damp cloth. Most of these appear to be old pieces of Tommy’s clothing – torn jeans and jumpers.

There are about 25 pots on each run. As Tommy empties the pot he passes it to Joe who tips out the last the small crabs which are still hanging on. He then stuffs a couple a ripe herring into the netted pocket in the top. Tommy has to stop the winch every so often to mend one of the pots which the crabs have torn trying to get out. He quickly knits them back together with green twine. The pots are then stacked neatly to the rear of the boat. Once they are all in and the last marker buoy with its tangle of rope has been hauled from the surface Tommy turns the boat round and tells Joe where to lay them again dropping them back into the sea as the blue rope that holds them together unfurls. Gobs of seaweed and great fronds of kelp adhere to the pots – they are encrusted and bent out of shape held together with chicken wire and twine from where they have been torn by the sea urchins and star fish.

Once a line of pots is out again Joe takes the wheel to motor to where the next line is waiting to be hauled in.Tommy sits against the cabin of the boat next to the boxes of lobster. He takes them out in turn from under the damp cloth, gently cradling the lobsters between his thighs in their yellow sea trousers a plastic bag of elastic bands at his side. The blue rubber gloves are off and Tommy does this barehanded. One band goes on clamping the first claw shut as the other claw arches back and rubs against his hand but cannot quite turn round to get a purchase.  He never takes his eyes off them and tells me that part of the learning of this as a boy was getting distracted and having lobster grab hold of a finger.

Once the lobsters claws have been banded they calm down and don’t try to fight so hard and they can be laid together at the bottom of one of the fisherman’s tray at the bottom of the boat under another damp cloth.

The crabs seethe in their black tray. As they are thrown in they aggressively bite out at the nearest crab and they then scuttle and kick to get out of the tray. The odd lucky one is able to get out but is normally caught by its back legs and thrown back in. The luckier ones are able to make it to one of the sluice holes and are able to fall back into the sea.

Over the course of almost two hours a total of five lines of pots are pulled out of the sea. Not all of them are relaid and the last couple are stacked in a neat pile at the back of the boat. They have caught about 35 lobster. Some will be going to local restaurants and other will be going on to Spain and France. We had four of them for supper that evening. Not all of the lobsters that come out of the pots are destined for the table. If they are too small or egg bearing females they go back into the sea. Their tails are nicked with a pair of pliers and it is clear that some of them have been caught a few times before.

Throughout the year Tommy is out in Dunmannus Bay six days a week. Over the summer the boat leaves the pier at 7.00 in the morning. He is back for an hour or two over lunch and then out again. During the winter they drag for scallops until March, then it is lobster through the summer and from the last few weeks in August it is prawns from pots that are laid across Kitchen Cove. On the day I went out with him the sea and the weather was fairly benign and dry. We were close to the cliffs and so avoided the full heave of the swell that comes in off the Atlantic in the middle of the bay. We watch him as he goes out when the wind is blowing down off the hills and the rain is thick and heavy filling the air with moisture.

We normally have lobsters from him 2 or 3 times each summer. If we are not in the Cottage to collect them when arrives back at the Pier he will leave them in a bag in front of the kitchen door. He never forgets.

THE ONLY WAY TO COOK LOBSTER

Lobster pots

Lobster pots were made locally, possibly for centuries. The sally rods were drawn home from the marshy districts in which they grew freely. A timber frame with holes was placed on the kitchen floor and, while the twigs were still wet and pliable, they were weaved in a pattern until the “trough-shaped” mould for the lobster pots was completed.

The Story of Kilcrohane

Noel Streatfield describes how to her “unending satisfaction she and Rachel [Leigh-White] together hauled in the biggest lobster ever caught in the local bay”. That local bay must be Kitchen Cove. Few lobsters are caught there now. The episode is described in some detail in The Growing Summer when the lobster is caught at night. Boys fall into the water and spend the night on what I suspect is Owen Island.

Should you come across a lobster and it is alive and kicking and fresh from the sea when you come to cook then do not be misled by the many recipes there are for the cooking of it. There are numerous suggestions for sauces and the like but my belief is that you should keep it simple. So prepare to get your hands dirty.

First of all you will need to get over the fact that you will have to kill the thing. Don't worry too much about this, as it will die happy knowing the pleasure it will bring to you. To prepare it I would put it at the bottom of the fridge with some seaweed on top of it. This will feel like home and lull it into a false sense of security if not send it to sleep.

Take a large vat of seawater and bring it to the boil. When it is at a rolling boil carefully remove the lobster from the fridge (you don’t want to wake it) and place it gently as possible into the boiling water. It will die straight away and almost immediately will turn the traditional shade of red. Cook it for about 20 minutes; it will need roughly 20 minutes a pound.

Towards the end of cooking time take half a pat of butter and warm it gently in a saucepan together with 3 well crushed cloves of garlic, a good handful of chopped parsley and salt & pepper.

When the lobster is cooked remove it from the water. Place on a large board and find your biggest and sharpest knife. You will need to split the lobster. This means placing the tip of the knife at the back of its head where there is a cross and plunging in. The head should cut in half fairly easily but you may need a sharp pair of scissors for the back part.

Place the split lobster (or lobsters if hopefully you have more than one) on a large plate and pour over the melted butter.

Eat with lashings of the most expensive white wine you have drunk out of tumblers.

Silver dourade and alphonso mangoes

A trip down to Ward's on Saturday morning to see what looks good. There are three bright silver dourade in the corner of the ice counter tucked below the monkfish. There are three of us eating and they look about right for one each. I know that we have tomatoes and lemons at home so all I need to pick up from the grocers is a bag of Cyprus potatoes. However I can't help myself and buy another box of honey mangoes from Pakistan. They are only available for a few months over the summer and the boxes are stacked up on the counter of both The International Store and the grocers. I have started to collect the tops of the boxes, piling them up against one of the walls in the basement brightly coloured, they will look good for a party. There are four or five mangoes in each box, smaller than the hard, unforgiving monsters that fill the supermarket shelves, they are intensely sweet and slightly obscene as they slip around the mouth.

To cook the fish I peel and cut the potatoes into quarter inch slices and par-boiled them for 10 minutes. There was a red pepper in the fruit basket so I put that under the grill until it was blistered and black, put it to one side until it had cooled down and carefully peeled away the skin and scrapped away the seeds, keeping as much of the juices as I could.

To assemble I poured a healthy glug of olive oil into the bottom of a good sized oven tray and mixed in the potatoes with four squashed cloves of garlic. I put that into a hot oven for a few whilst I took the fish out of the fridge and wiped them down with a paper towel. I took the tray out of the oven and placed the fish on top of the potatoes and then scattered the red pepper and two quartered tomatoes around the fish. I doused with mored olive oil and then seasoned with thyme from the garden, a finely chopped dried red chilli,a good pinch of ground cumin, salt and pepper. That all went back into the oven for half an hour. Before putting it on the table I squeezed over the juice of half a lemon.

The potatoes were soft and had just start to roast up at the edges. The fish peeled off the bone and they fed the three of us very happily. Afterwards I sliced up three of the mangoes and we ate them with our fingers, the juices running down our chins.

For music I had been in the attic and dragged out some old records, Mary Coughlan singing I want to be seduced,  Galleon Drunk and The Band.      

Sunday Hopkinson Lamb

It does not have to be sunny to have a barbeque. Sunday was grey and miserable with a continual threat of rain but I had bought a great butterflied leg of lamb from The International Store the previous day and it had been marinating in the fridge overnight and to shove it under the grill would not do it justice. Cooking over the raw heat of white charcoal would be the only way to get the right combination of dark almost caramalised exterior and pink middle.

It is only over the last month or so that I have bought meat from the small butchers at the back of The International Store and I have not been disappointed yet. They have whole chickens with their heads still on and before it was taken off the bone the leg of lamb was of a size that I am not sure it would fit in the oven. Next time I will get it on the bone and it can be roasted stuffed with garlic, anchovies and rosemary on a bed of cannellini beans and tomato sauce.

The marinade was from Simon Hopkinson - an onion, garlic, ginger, orange and lemon juice, cumin and coriander, turmeric, cayenne pepper, paprika, soy sauce and sesame oil all wizzed together into a fine sauce in the food processor, poured of the lamb and left overnight in the fridge.

On Sunday afternoon as grey clouds loomed up from the horizon the barbeque was piled high with coals and lit. After half an hour the coals were white and I spread them out so an even hot heat glowered at the rack that I placed above them. I laid the lamb down and put on the lid and left it for 20 minutes by which time one side was nicely blackened and I turned it over for another 20 minutes. Cooks perks - so I took a couple of slices to make sure all was going okay. I took the lamb off the heat and let it rest for 10 minutes or so whilst the table was laid and the rest of the late lunch completed.

We ate it with a yogurt sauce and roasted new potatoes and a plate of salad from the garden.

The music should have been Frank Sinatra in his Vegas years.