Lunch today was four lamb cutlets from Edge’s the butchers in New Ferry on the way back from picking younger daughter up from Cheshire oaks.

After the red wine of last night I needed something spicy and meaty to eat. I made a rub by crushing a teaspoon of cumin seeds with rock salt and pepper corns. This was massaged into the nuggets of meat whilst I cleaned off the bits of squid from the griddle. As I did this the kitchen was again filled with the smell of scorched squid.

A bit of oil then went on the griddle and I cooked the lamb so there were black ridges on both sides and it was still pink in the middle. The salt cumin and pepper had just the right kick.

The afternoon was spent in the garden. Things are starting to grow in the greenhouse despite the recent cold and there was time to lie flat out face up to the sun and doze for a few minutes.

As those who have been there will know one of the very good things about The Good Things Cafe is the selection of good cook books they have on the shelves which you can browse on your way to the loo and buy at the end of your meal. Plan things carefully and you can buy the book that contains the recipe that gave rise to the meal you have just had. Something I was able to do some years ago with ducks legs and noodles which now appears in Carmel Somer’s own book but which roughly derived from a recipe for a ragout of duck legs in a book called The Cooking of South-West France by Paula Wolfert. It is now a Friday night favourite if I am cooking for myself and spot some duck legs in the chiller in Sainsbury’s.

One of the favourite books I have bought from there is called Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons. The sub-title will tell those who know me why I like it Enchanting Dishes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa. 

Last week on Sunday whilst we were having our Easter lunch I spotted a couple of new Diane Henry books, there was one on preserving food and another called Food from Plenty. Having had a good lunch and a few glasses of wine I leaved through it and spotted a few recipes I thought I would enjoy cooking so I bought it.

We ate from it last night, griddled squid with chickpeas, peppers and chermoula. It was delicious.

Most of the ‘cooking’ for the meal came out of either a tin or a jar. I went to Lunya over lunch and bought a selection; roast red peppers stuffed with prawns, mushrooms and partridge, octopus , smoked mackerel and two jars of plump and bulbous el Navarrico chickpeas.

So for the starters it was mostly a question of opening a tin and depositing the contents neatly on a plate. The only cooking I did was to fry in olive oil some finely diced potato which I mixed in with the octopus. I also sliced a salami from The Gubbeen Smokehouse.

We had picked up a kilo of cleaned squid from Ward’s earlier in the day. This was chopped into large chunks and lightly scored. I then put the chickpeas in a bowl and mixed in olive oil, ground cumin, hot paprika, a chopped red chilli and finely chopped parsley and coriander. The recipe called the roasting of red peppers but I had picked up a jar of el Navarrico whole piquillo peppers preserved in their own juices from Lunya so I just threw that into the mix.

The squid were cooked on a very hot grill for 30 seconds or so until the pieces were charred at the edges and started to curl. As they cooked they were added to the chickpeas in the bowl. Just before serving I stirred in some lime juices. We ate it with smoke billowing round the house from the griddle.

For pudding we had a selection of Irish cheeses (Smoked Gubbeen, Milleen and Durrus) with a bowl of pears that had been baked with honey. Another recipe suggested from the Diane Henry book.

We listened to a lot of John Grant.

All in all a vary good Friday night meal.

On Monday we drove to Schull and parked by the old broken down church and graveyard on the Colla Road. On the wall around the graveyard Cork County Council had put up a sign warning against the dangers of illicit digging of graves. The sign made it clear that the Council would accept no liability for any injuries caused by grave digging activities and that for the avoidance of doubt this included those engaged in voluntary grave digging.

Helpfully guidance was given as to how one should go about having a grave dug and who one needed to contact for the digging of a lawful grave where there would be no danger to life and limb.

Inside the church rubbish had blown in with the wind, and trees and ivy grew through the rusted metail railing that made up some of the old graves.

We moved on from the pier down the road and the sea and the stretch of water that separated the mainland from Long Island. As we turned the corner to start walking along the coast heading west the wind was behind us cold and blustery. The water was choppy and grey and the white houses that clustered on Long Island looked alone and somewhere away from the world.

At Colla Pier there were a few boats which had a collapsed look about them beaten up by winter and the weather waiting for the heat of the sun. They were streaked with brown and the colour was bleached out of them. We followed the walk round cutting back through the hills. In their shadow some of the force of the wind was diminished but as we got to the top of the hill overlooking the church and Schull harbour it came at us in full force blowing the air out of our lungs. The harbour was empty of boats. At one point I looked back and through the shadow of the hills there was a glimpse of The Sheep’s Head grey in the distance.

We walked quickly down the hill and bundled into the car to be off for lunch. Hackett’s was open and we sat down at the large table opposite the bar and set about ordering our food as pints were poured and bottles of Coke put on the table. I have been to Hackett’s a few times over the years and somewhere I have a t-shirt to prove it. I don’t think I have ever seen the same person behind the bar but whoever it is they seem to own the place and there will be a conversation about the night before and how late it was before the doors were finally closed.

There was a sign behind the bar spelling out the opening and closing a times over the Easter break “We are open when the door can opened otherwise we are shut.” The barman wore a very fine Captain Haddock t-shirt and I was tempted to ask him where he had got it from.

The food was a good if not better than ever. I had a BLT sandwich made with thick slabs of Gubbeen bacon and a great pile of salad. The others had bowls of soup and toasties and in the case of one another bowl of soup as he was still hungry. Two of the children did not want there salad so I ended up polishing off three great portions.

Having finished lunch we spilled out onto the Main Street and walked up and down. Two thick slices of steak and a bag of potatos were bought for supper and almost an hour was spent choosing books in the bookshop.

At this time of year Tommy catches prawns. They are langoustines, Dublin Bay Prawns but Tommy just calls them prawns. He catches them in pots similar to a lobster pot but lighter and with a smaller hole. He keeps his catch in the water until he has enough to put in the back of his van for the drive to Inniswiddy where they are quickly shipped off to France.

Over the last few weeks he has lost some his catch to the fresh water coming down into the bay from the hills. The rest are packed into small individual containers so the don’t kill each other. The containers are about the size of a large cigar tin just under an inch square and five perhaps six inches long. Just big enough for a prawn. They are slipped in tail first claws uppermost and then stacked in small crates all held together with rubber bands.

The crates are a mix of colours and sizes. On the day I watched him come in it was a low tide. He put his boat Freedom at the head of the pier and Joe climbed the ladder and opened up the back of the van. Tommy stayed in the boat and had to stand on a crate so as to be be able to pass up the boxes of prawns to Joe.

‘Hardest work of the day,’ he said.

Once all the crates were loaded onto the pier Tommy climbed up the steel ladder and started to sort them in the back of his van.

‘They’ll die if they’re out of water too long,’ he said. There was a man watching and he suggested that Tommy could fill the back of his van with water. ‘Feckin’ hell,’ he said.’ I could try that but I don’t know it would hold all the way down to France.’

‘Will you be getting some more?’ I asked him.

‘Well I’ll be in on Monday or Tuesday about 5.00 and there should be a bag I can pass over.’

Then he was off backing his silver van down the pier to get his prawns to Inniswiddy so they could be shipped off to France still alive and good.

He wasn’t out on Monday but on Tuesday morning we could see his boat out in the middle of the Bay. He came in as I was walking up to the pub for a lunchtime pint and I wandered down to talk with him. We started on the weather.

‘Feckin’ hell its cold,’ he said. Although the sun was out the wind still whipped in from the East scouring the water and leaving it a pale bright blue.

‘It is getting better next week but you’ll be gone by then but it should be right for the summer. The weather it’s not been so bad this year and the fishing has been good but feck on a day like this it is cold on the hands out there. Here these are for you’ He reached into the front of his van and handed me a white plastic bag full of prawns. He took E10.00 for them and I carried them back to The Cottage. They were still alive and fresh from the sea a bright pink against the white of the bag.

Having put them in the fridge I carried on with my walk to the pub and picked up a pint to drink as I cooked them.

To do that I half filled the large steel pan with sea water and put it on to boil. Once it was at a rolling boil I took the prawns out of the fridge and tipped them into the pan. They were cooked in the time it took me to have another two sips at my pint.

Once they were done I drained them and arranged them neatly on a large plate.

We had them cold for lunch pulling apart the hard shells to prise out the nuggets of firm white meat within.

Later that afternoon the sun came out and it was almost not cold enough for me to write some of this outside looking over the bay.