We have a glut of courgettes and I was planning to cook some for lunch, finely chopped in olive oil with garlic and then mixed with pasta, lemon juice and some chilli but then someone suggested gazpacho, so we had that instead.

The 50p corner at the veg shop had a couple of kilo bags of soft tomatoes. I bought those and a couple of peppers and half a cucumber and I was done. I had everything else I needed at home.

Of course one of the beauties of making gazpacho is that there is no cooking involved.

I have a memory of Keith Floyd making some on the beach in Torremolinos in his series about food in Spain. For years I thought that he had made it by putting all the ingredients into a black plastic bin and then using a small outboard motor to liquidize it. Whilst that is an attractive though I have managed to track the clip down on YouTube and there were no outboard motors involved.

I made mine in a Magimix, pulsing tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, onions and garlic and rubbing it all through a sieve with the back of a spoon. I seasoned it with olive oil, sherry vinegar, salt, pepper, a shake of Tabasco and a small handful of mint leaves.

I put the bowl in the frezzer for half an hour before we sat down to eat. 

We ate it outside scattering croutons into the soup.

It has not been as hot today but there is a closeness and stickiness in the air.

We have been listening to Miracle Legion.

Tonight we will have the first of the potatoes from the garden. We will have to make the most of them. There aren’t very many!

Thursday night and one of the few evenings of the year when it is possible to have all the doors and windows in the house open and the night has been let into the house. Somehow I know that by the time we get to the weekend the clouds will be over and there will be a chill back in the early evening. In the meantime we are making the best of it.

We ate pizza making the dough last night.

Over the last few months the bread flour has become a mixture of white and wholegrain flour. We have, it appears, managed to get to the right combination of the two which basically means having just enough wholegrain to give some sourness to the bread. 

I spent twenty minutes or so on it last night. Mixing the flour with some sugar and salt and then pouring in milk and water from a jug into which i had stirred a couple of sachets of dried yeast. I always start these things with a wooden spoon thinking that will be enough to do the job. It never is. And so I have to get my hands in there stirring up the flour and water and then kneading it.

I measure kneading by whatever music is playing, get it started and then carry on until the next song is finished.

Having made the dough it went into the fridge for the night until early this evening.

There were three toppings for the pizza:-

– a mixture of tomatoes, garlic and oregano on top of some sliced onions with pieces of spanish had and salami in between and topped with mozzarella

– all of the above but without the meat

– onions cooked for twenty minutes or so with garlic, slathered over the rolled dough and topped with anchovies and chopped black olives.

Most of it went and somewhere along the line we listened to Virginia Astley.

In the meantime it is dark outside and there are people sat there under the night sky talking.

It was only later on Sunday afternoon that I remembered there had been more work with the whisk when I opened up the oven to find four meringues on a tray, they were perhaps a little brown.

It must have been late on Saturday evening that I decided to make them. There were the eggs whites left over from making the mayonnaise and meringues always seem a lot easier to make after a few glasses of wine. So the whites were whisked up into soft peaks with a drop of white wine vinegar. I then must have put then put them into a low oven which I turned off when I went to bed.

The shops were still open when I found them so I shot out to buy cream, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries and we had Eton Mess for pudding Sunday evening.

Tonight we had an easy supper. Water on to boil. In the meantime I chopped up a red onion, tomatoes, garlic, dill and coriander. When the water was boiling I tipped in a bag of pasta. Olive oil went into a pan to heat up. When hot the onion and tomato mixture was tipped in. I added a couple of packets of cooked prawns and heated them through until the tomatoes were just starting to give of their juices. By this time the pasta was ready and drained off. The prawn mixture was tipped in with a third of a chopped block of feta and a load of salt and pepper.

Listening to Let It Bleed.

We have an old friend coming for supper this evening which seems like a good excuse for making a pudding.

When we in Ireland at Easter I picked up a book called The Pleasure of the Table which is a collection of recipes by Theodora FitzGibbon who wrote a food column for The Irish Times for twenty years. She was a cook of the old school and the book is full of recipes for things like Rabbit Pie, or Devilled Kidneys or Stuffed Lamb’s Hearts.

The puddings and cakes are the best bit and so I turned to it for inspiration for this evening.

I decided on Blueberry Syllabub; mostly because of the picture showing the deep pink cream in clear glass bowls.

Fortunately they had blueberries at the Veg shop and it was easy enough to make; just a matter of cooking the berries slowly in a pan with some sugar and lemon juice until the berries split and their juices ran. The berries were then sieved and the sweet dark juice was stirred into a bowl of whipped cream.

I had some help making it and had to slap down the small fingers wanting to run themselves round the bowl.

There are five glass dishes of it in the fridge downstairs.

We had burgers for lunch and I then made some fish stock. The next time i get a head that size I will try roasting it!