I have a new favourite food. Black pudding croquettes. A walnut sized piece of black pudding wrapped around some cheese and rolled in breadcrumbs and then deep fried.

As they arrive at the table they are almost too hot too handle and then when you bite into them…..the black pudding is as hot as just cooled magma and has a good earthy taste and then there is a scalding burst of cheese.

We ate them yesterday evening in Roja Pinchos on Berry Street, Liverpool. Our second time there in a week. We were with children last night so didn’t have the opportunity to start the evening off with a couple of pints.

Pinchos are a kind of finger food from Northern Spain. They are smaller than a tapas and each one is really no more than a mouthful or two and they are very good.

We sat ourselves down near the bar. This was a good thing in some ways as all the cold food is stacked there so there was no need to get up to help yourself to more, in fact we could pick the food off the plates and onto our table without having to lift ourselves off our seats. This did mean that we ate more than we ought to and it did start to add up.

There is no menu. The cold food is on the bar and you can use your eyes to see what it is or ask one of the men in a red t-shirt if you are not sure. Each piece of food is pierced with a large cocktail stick. The sticks come in two sizes; small costs £1.50 and large £3.00. So you can see the danger of being sat within easy reaching distances of the good food on the bar.

The hot food was a list of good sounding food reeled off by one of the men in a red t-shirt. This was the first night they had been doing the black pudding croquettes.

So we had:-

– from the cold bar – ham wrapped around a stick held together with a small red pepper stuffed with cheese, tortilla, figs wrapped in ham, chicken salad, smoked salmon with potato salad, roasted red pepper stuffed with potato mayonnaise on a piece of bread and goats cheese encrusted either with pistachio or black seed.

– for the hot food we had – creamed mushrooms on toast with a perfectly formed fried quails egg, pork loin deep fried with cheese, mackerel and sea bass on toast and prawns and of course potatas bravas.

We ate the lot drinking the house white and pints of Estrella trying to lose count of the sticks as they gathered in a pile on the table.

We will be back to eat more of the black pudding croquettes hopefully sneaking the same  seats up near the bar.

When a member of the family has been away for a few weeks and then is home for a brief weekend before Easter there is a temptation to be accepting of whatever it is that she wants for her tea on the first evening back.

She wanted pizza. And almost immediately there was a debate as to whether there was enough time to make some dough from getting back from work, giving it time to prove and then to make a good thick tomato sauce for the topping.

In the event there was time for all of these things. The dough was made before I got home and the various toppings were cooked, chopped and laid out, ready to be cooked in a vey hot oven.

The pizzas were very good and I might have written more about them but have found myself befuddled over the last half hour over an argument with the youngest member of the family as to the difference between an objective and subjective viewpoint.

I suspect she was right.

So slightly to my surprise early Wednesday morning I found myself walking round a property and eyeing up its potential as a palace for the sale of good Irish cheese.

Afterwards someone sent me message ‘Any Scope? or too big/expensive?’ and I was bound to reply “All three!”

It was very big. Three floors; basement, ground and first, stretching back from the street. In the basement there was a strengthen piece of glass covering on the floor with a do not dive in sign. This was a well and turns out the place had once been an ink factory and the water had been used for the ink. The building was late Victorian and there was something of a warehouse about the place.

The ground floor still had the old wooden floor. It was rough and scuffed with use but looked intact and good enough to scrub up. The ceiling was held up with heavy grey ironwork and there were high windows going down one side of the room and at the back.

The first floor had a vaulted ceiling with the same heavy ironwork. It had the same windows and although they were covered up it felt light and airy. It didn’t take too much imagination to clear away the factory fittings and to put down a bar at one end and then a series of tables and chairs and groups of people sat round eating and drinking.

But then there was an awkward dark mezzanine floor, a tatty small kitchen and an internal office that had been created out of plaster board and plastic.

The place itself was expensive and there would be a heavy cost in doing anything with it. And then when all the ‘it’ had been done would there be enough people to come and make it work. There are only a limited number Irish cheeses it is possible to sell in a week.

We shall see.