I have been wanting to cook with chocolate for a while and today I finally got round to it.

The recipe came from Claudia Rodin’s book of Spanish cookerey. On previous weekends I had flicked through books of Mexican food but had not been able to find quite what I was looking for. Yesterday morning I was looking for something else and came across the brief description that involved chicken with prawns and chocolate. The most satisfying part was taking the pestle and mortar and pulverising up a paste of almonds, garlic, sherry and chocolate to stir into the chicken stew that had been made. The highlight of the chicken stew was the hint to grate the tomatoes. This meant cutting a tomato in half and rubbing it up hard against a cheese-grater until all there is left in the hand is is a fist-full of skin.

Yesterday I bought three good bags of rotted manure from Rightway. In the afternoon I tipped them over the freshly dug soil on the veg patch and turned it in. It will be another month or so before I start any planting out but the soil is getting ready.

Today I spent an half hour trawling the internet for seeds to buy. I have made a change already this year by planting out some garlic. I am going to be giving onions a go as well. I have always been put off planting onions when I read something about there being little point growing something in the garden when it is cheap and easily obtainable from the shops. But I was given some home grown onions last year and they were very good.

I do try and plant things that are difficult to get in the shops but then, as with the cavolo nero, I find that I am the only one that eats it and we have a glut of the stuff in the garden. I did find something new to do with the cavolo nero last weekend. This involved cooking a good handful of the green leafs in boiling water until soft, draining them and squeezing out the moisture, like you do with spinach, chopping it and then frying it off in olive oil with some garlic and pine-nuts. I then spooned it over yogurt and very good it was although the kids didn’t touch it.

I have also gone for a couple of different types of tomato, some golden beetroot and more padron peppers. Hopefully this year I will manage to grow more than the one lonely pepper.

And this afternoon I made some coleslaw. I found a recipe for salad cream in Simon Hopkinson’s book of vegetable cookery. This meant an energetic twenty minutes beating two eggs with sugar and vinegar over a pan of simmering water until it came together. Once this had cooled I stirred in cream and tarragon and put it to one side in the fridge.

I then chopped the vegetables; white cabbage, carrots and celery. I have got a mandoline which should make this easy but I never seem to get it right and either take off the top of one of my fingers or am left with a mess of unevenly shaped vegetables. My fingers survived this afternoon but the veg was misshapen. I ignored this and stirred in the salad cream.

I am not a big fan of coleslaw so I am not sure when I will be eating it.

They were fighting over handing out the leaflets in Birkenhead this morning. I avoided them on the way down to the market  where I went to Wards Fish to buy haddock for this evening and prawns for  tomorrows lunch.

On the way back up the hill and outside Asda a woman came walking towards me waving a handful of leaflets. I tried to smile nicely and walk on and I almost made it by when she said ‘It’s to save the NHS.’ I had anticipated that she was wanting to talk to me about God l so rather sheepishly I stepped back and took one from her.

Having been caught out I was off my guard and before I knew it an elderly man was in front of me pushing two more pieces of paper into my hands.

‘These are about some worth saving’ he reassured me as I walked on.

Yesterday we went for a walk through a wood in North Wales. It was muddy underfoot and the children weren’t happy. But there were bunches of snowdrops out and when the sun came out the first hints of Spring.

After a few days heavy rain the water around the pier loses its usual green lit clarity and turns a murky, brackish brown, discoloured by the thick peat run off from the hills brought down by the swollen streams. Mackerel in the bay retreat from the flush of fresh water and can be hard to catch for a few days. The weather will also bring an increase in seaweed, washed in soggy piles on the beach, slowly, the damp, cold entrails, rot into slush.

Gobs of rain coming down hard on a Sunday afternoon.  The fire is lit but the log basket is empty and soon I will have to go outside into the wet to fetch more wood  for the fire. The rain is coming down so hard it seems to flatten the water, smoothing out the wave crests. The stream next to The Butter House has swollen and its torrent flushes the pier with fresh water.

The water for The Cottage comes from a well the pump for which is kept under lock and key at the bottom the orchard. Sucked from deep in the ground there is a smell to the water, peaty and rain washed, it perfumes your body after a shower.

Sat in The Cottage at high tide looking out over the bay. Grey cloud has fallen so the other side is almost lost in the haze. The water is so high it seems to lap at the bottom of the garden, grey and unyielding above the line of the green lawn. As the tide starts to go down the rocks in the bay break the surface and at first could almost be mistaken for a small whale sitting quietly just under the surface.

An inventory of what can be found under a large flat rock at low tide. Go down among the seaweed and rocks at a low tide. Wear thick boots  and once you are amongst the seaweed draped lifeless over the rocks start to carefully lift stones to see what might be there. Sometimes it maybe necessary to turn over a few before uncovering some of the life that moves in and out of the tidal reach.

Pipe fish – black, like small eels, three four inches long, hardly there, looking a stray smooth twig amongst the seaweed.  The first sign of life comes as you pick it up, carefully between a finger and thumb, the body arches and twists in surprise. It has a puggish snout and back in a white bucket of water you can see its fluttering gills and fins.

Broad-clawed Porcelain crabs – almost indistinguishable against the sand, about half an inch across with one claw almost as big again covered with a soft brown down.

Shore crabs – scuttling from seaweed to rock so you have to chase by lifting another rock and then another until at last it as trapped and cannot squeeze away anymore. But then there is the delicate operation of picking it up with your fingers kept away  from the flailing claws. Best to do it getting the shell at its widest point. If you catch a couple of pounds of them then you have enough to make into a soup.

A walk around the north side down from Finn McColl’s Seat along the road that runs the against coast and then turning back  along the old Horseshoe Road back to the top of the mountain. We had a wet picnic huddled by Glanroon Pier, watching the swell pull and twirl the kelp around the rocks, getting munched on by midges. A couple exploring the back roads of the peninsula had driven their car too far down the track that leads to the pier. They were stuck in the wet mud and slick stones, smoke burning from the rubber as they tried to force the way back up the hill. The path was too narrow for us to pass and they could not open the doors to get out. I stood watching in the wet knowing that I was going to have to offer to push but not being sure if I could make a difference. But there were some other walkers and one of them offered to help as well. So we bent to it, the tyres squealed through the mud and after three good pushes we were able to help the blue car back up the hill. Having finished I looked down and there was a spray of brown thick mud up my trousers, coat and touching my hat. The driver offered us a lift but we were on the walk and it was raining which would help to clean off the mud.

On the way we fell into a short conversation with an old man, black boots tied with odd laces, and a clean white shirt. He lived in one of the yellow houses that cling to edge of the hills over that side. Talking of pubs and Murphy’s and comparing the prices of Kilcrohane potatoes. He had his pint on a Saturday night in Paddy Arundel’s and we agreed ‘The smaller the pub the better the pint.’