It felt a bit like I was making a cake out of mayonnaise.

The recipe had been spotted on Saturday morning in the food section of The Guardian.  A ring cake made with olive oil, eggs, flour and ricotta.

It took some searching in the basement to find the ring mould I knew that I had. In fact that was the longest part of the process.

The flour was sifted with sugar and baking powder.

In another bowl I whisked together a tub of ricotta with olive oil. This looked unprepossessing. In fact it looked like a badly split sauce. But as I whisked in the eggs it came together just as a good mayonnaise should.

The wet was then stirred into the dry with the zest of two unwaxed lemons and then scraped into the oil mould and into the oven for 40 minutes.

The recipe suggested testing it was ready with a strand of spaghetti. I use a metal skewer.

It went well with yogurt.

We ate it listening to The National.

The rain has settled in now and looks as if it could be with us for the next few days.

But before it started seven mackerel were caught off Owen Island. Sadly they weren’t caught by me. But they were handed over so I could make a mackerel tartare.

The recipe had been cut out of The Financial Times magazine and sent to me years ago. Periodically I have come across and meant to have to hand the ingredients for making it but for whatever reason I have not got round to it.

I did so this year which is perhaps why we have caught so few mackerel the first week we were here.

The ingredients consisted of a cucumber, some cocktail gherkins and capers.

The mackerel were filleted down by the beach and the guts and bones fed to the birds. The recipe suggested the fillets should be skinned as well but having made a hash of skinning the one fillet I decided it would work just as well with the skin left on.

The fillets were put to one side whilst I cured some skinned and seeded cucumber in a mixture of salt and sugar.

The fillets were then chopped into small pieces and mixed with chopped gherkins and capers, the juice of one lemon, some olive oil and a good grounding on salt and pepper.

By the time this was done the cucumber was cured and I rinsed it and chopped it fine and stirred it into the mackerel mixture. It was all left to rest for an hour before being eaten.

It was fought over.

We were off the point from Owen Island not catching mackerel. There was a hard wind coming off the shore and grey clouds gathering round the back of Rosskerrig. Another boat slowed down near us and a voice shouted out “Any luck?”

I shook my head and shouted back “Not a thing.”

“We were here two hours yesterday and got a mackerel and three pollock.”

“You were lucky then we just got the one mackerel.”

“Where have they all gone?” he shouted back.

Just then there was a tug on my line and I felt the rush of a fish on hook.

“Here!” I shouted. “The bloody fish are here.”

There was one mackerel on my line and as the boat pulled of he shouted “The only mackerel in the bay!”