Last night we ate piece of monkfish marinaded in yogurt with turmeric, ginger, garlic, cumin and lime juice. It was fried off quickly in hot oil and eaten with rice and cool tomato salad.

It has been an autumnal day. There was a wind last night and this morning looking out of the bedroom window the front of the house was awash with brown and orange leaves.

It was dry so over the afternoon I raked up the leaves and shovelled them with my hands into a black bin. When the bin was full I took it to a corner of the garden behind the greenhouse and emptied it out. I did that five times. Stamping on the leaves in the bin to compact them down so I could get more in. I finished with a pile of leaves as tall as me.

They took some burning and I must have annoyed all possible neighbours with the smoke the fire made. There was one raspberry left by the birds.

To set them alight I buried a small cardboard box filled with newspaper at the base of the pile and set a corner of paper alight. The cardboard and paper burned quickly enough but there was too much dampness in the leaves for them to catch properly. Instead a deep heat generated in the middle of the pile of leaves and as it got more intense the smoke billowed out across all the neighbouring gardens. Any flame only lasted a minute or so before burning itself out.

Every so often I raked the pile of leaves over covering up where the heat seemed most intense.

It was a good fire and after an hour most of the pile had gone.

For supper we ate the remains of the chicken I had cooked on Friday night with a vegetarian alternative made with aubergine.

In the meantime I cooked an ox’s heart for my sandwiches.

There has been a request for the recipe for the chicken cooked with strong coffee, brandy and honey.

It came from a book called Adventures in Greek Cooking: The Olive and the Caper by Susanna Hoffman and was called Chicken Kapama and was very easy.

Take one chicken and cut it into pieces. Heat olive oil in a pan with a lid and brown the chicken. If necessary do this in patches. Season the chicken with salt and pepper as you go.

Once the chicken is browned remove to a dish and cook a finely chopped onion in the oil that is left in the pan. After a few minutes add a good squirt of tomato paste and then as that starts to catch pour a third of a bottle of red wine. Bring to the boil and cook for a minute or two.

Then add the rest of the ingredients as follows; three chopped tomatoes, 3 tablespoons of brandy, a third of a cup of strong coffee, three tablespoons of honey, a cinnamon stick, three cloves and a bay leaf.

Return the chicken to the pan with its juices and cook at a simmer with the lid on for about forty-five minutes.

It was only me eating so I had a couple of the chicken pieces with some of the pasta I had bought from Matta’s. We will finish the rest for lunch tomorrow.

We went to see Northern Soul this afternoon so this evening we are listening to a 18 track CD compilation which the sleeve-notes tell me would costs a grand in 45s.

We will be eating fillets of monkfish that have been marinading in spiced yogurt and a tomato salad. The recipes for these come from Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana which has just won cookbook of the year in the Observer Food Magazine. Lips are smacking.

It is so unseasonably warm on the moment we are not really feeling the benefit of leaving the central heating turned off.

Kristen has gone to university and so feeling the pinch we have kept the heating off for as long as possible. There were one or two mornings last week when we wavered but now we appear to be back to balmy evenings. If you are going to be making these sacrifices you want to be able to walk round the house with icicles hanging off the end of the nose and thick scratchy wooly jumpers piled over the shoulders. But there is none of that here. I have just been outside to pick a few bay leaves and there was a warm glow to the breeze even though it was 8.00 in the evening and dark.

In the meantime I have been cooking Greek this evening.

Earlier in the year I was given a book of Greek cooking. it has been by my bed and I have leafed through it before going to sleep but it was only this morning that a recipe caugt my eye and I thought ‘That will do for the evening’.

My eye was caught by the combination of honey, strong coffee and brandy. It is cooking now on the oven and filling the kitchen with an unseasonably warm thick rich inviting smell no doubt helped along with an infusion of cloves, cinnamon and bay leaves.

To eat with I have a choice of small pastas that I picked up at Mattas on Bold Street. i was very pleased with the one that looks like spaghetti hoops. I may need to put that to one side until Kristen is home again.

It would be fanciful to suggest that I can remember the first time I tasted a piece of Gubbeen cheese. It would have been one of the first times we went to Ahakista and no doubt we would have either been sat around the old dark oak dining table inside or we were outside eating around the green plastic table which would have been set up just beyond the yellow door.

I was still unsure of the place but starting to realise that the way into it would be through the food and more particularly the cheeses made from the milk that came from the cows that ate in the green grass in fields all within thirty miles or so of the Cottage.

I may not be able to remember that first time but there is no forgetting the smell. It was a pungent swipe at the nose that hit you as soon as you pulled away the greaseproof wrap of paper from around the small wheel of cheese. The smell stuck to your fingers. A ripe rich whiff of the farmyard and wet damp fields.

We have eaten a lot of Gubbeen cheese since that first time. One of my favourite ways of eating it is after a meal. The cheese is set up on a wooden plate with a sharp knife and the people around the table take their turn cutting away a slice and paring the rind and then eating it perhaps with some pickle or maybe with some coked down quince. With some good wine and friends it is easy to eat up.

We normally bring a bag of cheese back with us after the summer but this year we brought less than usual. There is just the one small round left in the fridge downstairs. Once that is gone we will have to wait until next year before we can have some more.

I am writing this by way of a note to say that Giana Ferguson has now written a book setting out some of the history as to how she came to make the cheese. You can buy it on Amazon. I have resisted the temptation for one evening but I suspect for not much longer.