Well we are almost ready for the evening.

There was a brief cock up first thing when I pulled into the car park of The Community Centre in New Ferry and was able to remind myself that The Farmer’s market is the second Saturday of the month and not the first. I parked there anyway and got the leg of lamb and chicken from Edge & Sons. The chicken is for tomorrow’s lunch and has spent the day steeped in a sweet tea flavoured brine.

I have stuffed the lamb with rosemary and garlic and provided it doesn’t pour down with rain over the next hour or so I am going to roast it in the barbeque. The recipe comes from a book of Tuscan cooking called Beaneaters & bread soup which I picked up a couple of years ago in the Oxfam bookshop in Oxford.

It is full of robust artery bursting cooking; things like sweet & sour wild boar and ribbon pasta with a duck sauce. They suggest that ten minutes or so before the lamb is taken away from the heat it is smeared with halves of ripe tomato.

Before the lamb we will be eating aubergines with garlic, olive oil and feta and some sour dough smoked bread from the grocers.

In the grocers this morning I chatted again to Kazim. He was asking about the law and if I enjoyed it. ‘Do something else’ he said. ‘ Do something you enjoy.’

We’ll have roast potatoes with red peppers with the lamb and after that plums.

There has been a glut of plums this year and the branches of the tree are hanging down heavy with the,. I have cooked them in red wine and sugar flavoured with cinnamon and a few bruised pepper corns. I then cooked the wine down to a syrup.

We should be full at the end of all that.

Of course one of the problems with bacon is that you need a sharp knife to slice it and one of the problems with a sharp knife is that it will jump in the hand and try and take a slice off the end of a finger. So the bacon slicing was interrupted as I ran upstairs to put the finger under a cold tap to wash the blood away and then cover it with a thick plaster.

Apart from that mishap the bacon is going down well and is about to be put between two pieces of toast. At which point I will hit the old Brown Sauce debate. If the bacon is so good why should you be covering it in Brown Sauce and smothering away the taste? (And by the way it can never NEVER be Tomato Ketchup. Ketchup with bacon is almost as bad as Ketchup with eggs.) I think the answer lies in not using too much. The Brown Sauce should not overpower but should lurk about discretely in the background adding some sweetening notes.

Well that was a bit of a thrill. Walking into the kitchen and there is a smell of bacon. Smell of bacon I have made. It has been in the fridge downstairs for the last five days and now it looks like bacon, smells like bacon and even tastes like it. If there is going to be a criticism then it maybe a bit salty. I will give it try with the bacon eating kids over the weekend and see what they think.

In the meantime it is Friday evening and I felt like a one pot meal. There was a free range chicken going cheap in the supermarket so I picked that up with the intention of doing something vaguely Spanish with it after the excellent meal we had at Lunya last night.

I took a couple of lardons from the newly made bacon and started to heat them oil. As they sizzled I chopped up the chicken and threw that in. Chopped onions, garlic and three whole green chillies were thrown in and stirred about with a good spoonful of paprika. I then peeled a couple of potatoes, quartered them and pushed them down amongst the chicken. It was then a question of adding some wine, a tin of tomatoes and letting it cook for an hour.

It is all about done and I am going to eat it now.

Thank you Peter for the Cava.

Listening now to David Byrne & St Vincent. A good birthday treat for myself.

A couple of days ago I was reminded that I have a copy of The Coast of West Cork by Peter Somerville-Large. The book describes a bike ride that he took along the coast from Clonakilty, up and then back down the Mizen and then up and back down Sheep’s Head past through Bantry and finishing somewhere on  Beara. It includes a good description of the weather that can be found on Sheep’s Head.

Next morning I departed from Kilcrohane in bright sunshine. As I cycled over the pass to Bantry, and in Edith Somerville’s words, “the glory had departed from the weather and an ugly wall of cloud was rising out of the west to meet the sun. The hills had darkened and lost colour, and the white bog cotton shivered in a cold wind that smelt of rain.” The ceaseless battle between clouds and sun, the strokes of light on mountains and sea followed by swollen black clouds with their bellyful of rain, must have a conditioning effect on environment.

I cycled up the Goat’s Path, climbing the side of Mount Sefin to the summit, crowned unexpectedly with a gleaming white marble copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta. Then there was Bantry Bay once more, “the noblest Bay in the world and capable of containing all the navies of Europe.” It was almost invisible in the rain which stung my face as the bike rattled downhill. The downpour became heavier, hard and relentless. With one hand holding my umbrella over my head, the other grasping the handle of the bike, I cycled on into town.

Sound very familiar!

 The Royal Navy in Bantry Bay at the time of the first Great War (1914-18). Part of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet assembled in Bantry Bay in preparation for the Battle of Jutland in 1916, which was the main set-piece naval engagement in the First World War.