It is funny but I often talk about wanting to open a restaurant of some sort and then someone asks me what sort of food it would sell and I am stumped for an answer.

But if pushed I would have say Spanish.

There re a couple of reasons for this. The first is the TV series on Spanish Food that Keith Floyd did about 25 years ago now. I watched every episode and videoed them as well. The video has since been transcribed to a DVD so I can if needs be slip away for a quick fix.

Inevitably there was a book of the TV series and I duly acquired that as well.

Keith Floyd was always fairly free and easy in the kitchen but he seemed more so in Spain and that seemed to bring out the best in the cooking. Good ingredients cooked without fuss with a glass of wine always at hand to help with the chopping and the frying.

In one episode he made a bucket of gazpacho on the beach in Torremolinos with a hand mixer that looked more like an outboard motor.

The second reason for me coming up with Spanish food is that at about the same time the Floyd series was on television good friends moved to Madrid so inevitably some holidays were spent over there. This was when I developed a mild addiction to Paxcharan – but it was also the food.

The first time we went was for Christmas and we did our shopping for the big day in a small local market. Although we were staying in a nondescript suburb of Madrid the market was heaving with good food. We bought a small turkey a      nd also some hake – Merluza – I can still remember where the stall was in the market although I can’t now remember how we cooked it.

I know we had difficulties with the turkey – chiefly because we spent two hours cooking it under a grill before we realised something was wrong. The two hour delay in the cooking was critical as it gave another two hours for the unrestricted consumption of all the beer and wine that had been purchased to go with the meal.

We probably had better meals out in the city – lambs kidneys in sherry, prawns with chilli and garlic, rabbit with garlic, partridge and a plate of perfectly formed and cooked red mullet.

So by way of small tribute to the hake I bought in that market in Madrid 25 years ago I thought I would cook hake last night.

Two thick steaks were duly acquired from Wards Fish.

To cook them I started with a thick cider flavoured tomato sauce. An onion was chopped and cooked until soft in olive oil before being joined by some garlic. I then stirred in a couple of chopped tomatoes and a half bottle of strong cider. This cooked until it was thick and sludgy.

Just before we ate I dipped the hake steaks in some flour which had been well seasoned with salt and pepper. I fried them for a couple of minutes in hot olive oil before laying them in the pan with the sauce. They cooked in there for another five minutes before we ate them with fried potatoes and salad.

We listened to Animals That Swim.

It may have been that on Friday morning’s Today programme they were trying to lighten the mood and provide some distraction from the Trump nightmare that was about to enfold across the water.

So they started on a feature on the great courgette shortage.

Of course this is only a crisis if you want to eat a courgette in January. For myself I have my fill over the six weeks or so in the summer when they are in glut in the garden. Even then the best thing about them are the flowers.

But even so it transpires that snow has fallen in Spain as a consequence of which courgettes are in short supply. The talk moved swiftly on from the lack of courgettes to possible substitutes.

It transpires that a possible substitute is a cardoon. At this point ears pricked up as I was fairly sure there was a cardoon in the garden.

I went out to inspect it this afternoon and even took a couple of cuttings for cooking purposes. Back in the kitchen the cuttings looked a bit woody for cooking so I concentrated instead on the haul from the freezer in the basement.

On my occasional furtle through the freezer I have been made aware that there are a couple of rabbits in there.

I decided to put one of them to good use this evening.

It defrosted last night and I half expected there to be a high smells in the basement this morning. As it was the only smell was that which comes from too long in the freezer. It was almost enough to draw the cats.

The rabbit came wrapped in half a dozen plastic bags and I half think it was an unexpected gift from a couple of years ago.

It was duly cut up and put to good use admidst

some cooked down onion and garlic and half a bottle of white wine with herbs.

The eldest daughter is off to Copenhagen next most month and has managed to snaffle a seat at Noma where she will be eating some of the best food in the world.

I mentioned this to somebody the other day and was told that I should watch an episode from Rick Stein’s last series in which he spent a weekend in Copenhagen. So I settled down to watch it Friday night.

The bit about Noma was an anti-climax as someone had got something wrong with the booking and there was no filming inside. All we got were a couple of shots of an impressive looking converted warehouse with the Noma sign outside.

But there was plenty of other Noma like food a lot of which was assembled on plates with tweezers and patience. For all the impressive cuisine the best looking food that I saw was on open sandwich served in what looked like a fairly prosaic cafe – rye bread piled with pickled herring, sour cream, salad, apples and interesting tasting green herbs.

But as I watched the programme my mind kept turning back to the opening credits showing the various places Rick had visited over the course of the series and a shot of what  looked like the cathedral in Cadiz. Halfway through I could take it no more and I turned off the programme on Copenhagen to try and find if he had devoted an hour long programme to the good food that can be had in Cadiz.

It turned out he had and I was hooked for the next hour.

If I have a favourite city in the world then it is probably Cadiz. I have been there three times and on each occasion totally beguiled by the place.

The first and second time I was there we stayed by three or four days and the last time (5 years ago) we were there just for the day.

Cadiz is a big city that stretches across the coast facing up to the Atlantic. The old city is almost totally surrounded by the sea and is at the end of a long spit of land that sticks out into the ocean. The port area is relatively modern and most days there will be a cruise liner hogging the horizon but it doesn’t take much to step back into the old city.

It is mostly made of narrow streets, the roads just about wide enough for a car, through which it easy to wander trying to get lost until inevitably the street opens out to a square where there is normally a bar to be found selling cold beer, sherry and tapas.

The streets are narrow to give some protection from the sun in the high days of summer when the heat beats down so it is impossible to do anything. On either side there are tall houses with big heavy doors and oversized knockers. Occasionally a door will be open and walking past you slow down to look into the cool shadowed interior. A lot of the houses have a small central courtyard open to the sky with a pool or fountain in the middle.

All the buildings appear to be made out of faded yellow sandstone. The permanent sea air weathers the stone and it can feel as if the whole city is slow crumbling back into the sea that always there around a corner as you walk.

But as Rick Stein shows it it is the food that makes the place.There is a fish market in the centre of the old city. Walk through it on a morning and the white slabs of cold stone are loaded down with obscene amounts of fresh sea food. It is difficult to believe that the sea can keep giving of its bounty so that Cadiz can continue to have its fill.

Of course with a market like that seafood that can be had in every cafe, bar and restaurant is pretty special.

The last time were there was a Sunday. The bars and the tables and chairs spilled out in to the street all with people drinking and eating and talking.

We sat inside and ate great platefuls of fries fish; dogfish flavoured with vinegar, small whole squid and best of all tortillitas de camarones – small whole prawns cooked in batter with a few green herbs.

Later in the afternoon the tables and chairs were put away. They would be out again in the evening.

Watching Rick Stein walk the streets of Cadiz the hairs on the back of my neck bristled and I could think of no other place I would rather go back to.

One of the great pleasures of going to West Cork every summer is the cheese. Durrus and Gubbeen are always readily available but Milleens is a bit more elusive. Tt has to be furtled for on the shelves of Super Valu in Bantry and Schull and on the tables that are set up in the regular markets.

But it is one of my favourites especially after it has been left for a while in the back of the fridge and is then found again. If I make it for my sandwiches for lunch there is deep smell of the earth and matured green grass that sticks to my fingers through the morning.

So it with some sadness that I read that Veronica Steele had died. She started making Milleens back in 1978 and in many ways can be regarded as the god-mother to all the great cheese that can now be had in Cork.

This is what Jane Grigson had to say about her in 1984 in an article that appeared in The Observer Food Magazine.

VISIT TO A CHEESEMAKER

Thinking that Ireland was short of cheese, I brought one over from T’yn Grug for the Allens at Ballymaloe. They were politely grateful, but I need not have bothered. Their Sunday evening table was covered with Irish cheeses. Later in Dublin, in the cheese shop of the Powerscourt Townhouse market, the first thing I saw as I walked in was a row of them – cheese from Milleens; soft goats’ cheeses from Wendy and Brian Macdonald in Wicklow and so on.

We went to visit Veronica and Norman Steele on the north side of the Beara Peninsula at Milleens. Rhododendrons and thick greenery at first, pines and glimpses of water. At Dareen gardens, a coast road turns off right down past the cottage where the fish producing O’Connors live. A creek runs in at that point, a path goes down to their boat and in the distance their shellfish rafts rest on the sea; we thought of dinner to come at Kenmare, with their mussels, their oysters and, above all, their sea urchins.

On to Milleens. A flaming car in the middle of the road watched by the sad owner and his parents. No one in sight, village two miles away. Gradually people emerge from nowhere, ambling along, chatting, drawn to the smoke and flames. At last, we get by.

We struggle up the right stony muddied lane and we find two philosophers in Wellington boots, teacher and pupil, both young, turned herdsman and cheesemaker and not regretting it. Straight off the lane, you step up into the orderly, sweet – smelling cheese room, the dairy. Then into the living – room where cheeses were set out on a long table, with a long bench and a view over the sea, over the great inlet like some Galician ria that jags in to the town of Kenmare on this rough shredded fringe of Ireland.

The Steeles began in 1978 with one cow, three gallons of milk a day. Now they have twelve friesians, two kerries and fifty gallons of milk a day. They make two kinds of cheese, Beara which is a cooked curd cheese, a big yellowish cheese, and the flatter Milleens. They export all over the place, to Germany, America and England. With one helper, they have a business they can manage, a life they like – but they could sell ten times as much.

They are keen to spread the idea of Irish cheese. With the chairman, Patrick Berridge, they are amongst the most active members of the Irish Cheese Producers’ Association, which is now thirty strong. Veronica Steele has no craft secrets, but passes everything on that she can.