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. 

When I bought the piece of beef that need slow cooking I already had in mind the pot I was going to cook it in and what I was going to do to it. Only the week before I had reminded myself that at the back of a cupboard in the kitchen we have a small brown clay pot with a lid. It was just the right size to take the piece of beef.

The piece was taken from the shin and was about an inch thick and fve inches wide with a piece of bone with some pale creamy marrow going through it.

I layered the bottom of the pot with chopped onion and garlic and over that overlapped four sliced tomatoes. I seasoned it with oregano from the garden and plenty of salt and pepper. I laid the pice of beef on top and seasoned it some more with olive oil, red wine and more salt and pepper. It all fitted very snugly in the pot.

The idea was that as the onions and tomatoes cooked down the beef would sink into the pot and take on some of the lubrication given off.

Three hours later it more or less worked as planned. The onions and tomatoes had cooked down to a mush and the beef fell apart to the touch. I spooned out the beef and some of the tomatoes and put the rest through a sieve.

I ate it with fried potatoes and a good bottle of red wine.

If I cooked it again I would fry off the beef first but apart from that it was very good.