Yesterday I had nearly 1400 (1398 to be exact) hits on my site.
This is something like a thousand more than ever before, but its OK,I havn’t lost the run of myself, and I don’t think I have become flavour of the month.
The great majority of these hits were from two places, one in Canada and one in the USA.
They were hoovering up all my recipes, god knows why, maybe it was entirely innocent and it was some mother giving a dower chest of recipes to her daughter.
Its all OK with me but Jeez they could have taken a few minutes off their scooping to say thank you Martin for the recipes.
There is still time to say thanks folks.

I have been enormously impressed by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chicken Run programmes on Channel 4 over the last week and most thoroughly support him.
Now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology and the brilliance of daughter Caitriona, you can join him from my site.
Just double click on the logo on the column on the left, under the other links.
Come on Ireland, lets give these chickens a decent life!

I got Words we Use, by Diarmaid O Muirithe out of the library which is smashing book for all putative etymologists.
In it he says that not long ago he heard a Donegal chef shout from his kitchen that the lettuce had gone silly.
Apparently in this sense silly is a totally correct word for limp and flabby.
I still wish I had heard it.
The notion of lettuce being silly in the cold room really appeals to me.

Ho Hum Harry
If I was a maid
I’d never marry
But since I’m not
I’m no way sorry

This was an apparently meaningless rhyme that my wife Sile’s mother used to mouth as she set about some repetitive house work.
Such is the mindless rhythm of the words that I have heard Sile herself copy her mother exactly and chant it as a sort of semi-exasperated mantra when starting a routine chore.
I must confess that up to a few years ago, having heard it hundreds of times, I assumed it to be a meaningless jumble of words.
Then one day it stopped me in my tracks.
It does make perfect sense.
It is actually a peon of praise to the joys of female sexuality.
All you have to do is realise that the word maid, up to comparatively recently, meant not domestic help but a virgin.
Substituting the word virgin for maid suddenly changes the whole meaning of the words (and ruins the scansion.)
Then it becomes the song of a married woman extolling the joys which come with the loss of maidenhood.
It is just as well that my mother-in-law never understood what she was saying,
…or then again maybe she did.

Mackerel is a delicious and a sustainable fish and very reasonably priced but not as popular as it should be.
For the years I ran the restaurant I tried to persuade people to eat it by putting it in the menu but it was decidedly a non-runner.
This I firmly believe is that it is a bony fish and people are afraid of the bones. There are various ways to get rid of the bones, my wife has an ingenious method of pressing on its back to remove them, but I have found the only fool proof way to get rid of all the bones is to cut them out, not at all difficult with a sharp knife.
Buy the mackerel filleted by the fishmonger, this gets rid of some, but by no means all, of the bones.
Now if you lay a fillet on a board you will see that the principal bones run in a straight line down the middle.
Using your sharp knife cut at each side of the line of bones effectively removing a narrow band of flesh with the bones in.
Throw this away, or use with the head to make a fish stock.
Now check the edges of the fish with your fingertips and cut out or pull out any remaining bones there. Do this thoroughly as mackerel bones are very unpopular.
This divides each fillet into two boneless goujons, each fish into four.
Now you can cook the fish in different ways.

Baked Goujons of Mackerel
(for 4)

4 Large Filleted Mackerel
Juice of 1 Lemon
4 Tablespoons of Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper
4 oz. (110g) Fine Breadcrumbs

Caper Mayonnaise:
6 tablespoons mayonnaise (Home made if possible)
4 teaspoons roughly chopped Capers
Mix these together to make the sauce, you may add some of the vinegar from the capers to sharpen the sauce.

Put two tablespoons of the oil on a baking tray and turn the goujons on this, coating them with oil and laying them together skin side down.
Pour the lemon juice over these and sprinkle over some salt and a liberal grinding of black pepper.
Cover these with a layer of the breadcrumbs and then sprinkle over the remaining oil.
Pre-heat the oven to 200C, 400F, Gas 6 and cook the goujons until opaque all through, this should take about five minutes.
Serve these immediately with the caper mayonnaise.

Goujons of Mackerel with Garlic Mayonnaise

(for 4)

4 Filleted Mackerel
1 Beaten egg
175g (6 oz.) Fresh Breadcrumbs

2 Egg yolks
2 crushed or finely chopped cloves Garlic
300 ml (10 oz.) Olive Oil (not extra virgin)
Salt Pepper and a teaspoon of vinegar.

Garlic Mayonnaise

Mix the garlic with the egg yolks and dribble in the oil beating all the time to make the sauce.
Season this with salt and pepper and a teaspoon of vinegar.

Make the goujons as described above.

Dip these in egg and then in the breadcrumbs.
(If you have some fresh herbs in the garden mix some chopped herbs with the crumbs)
Fry these in batches in olive oil until brown on all sides and cooked through.

Serve with the sauce on the side.

January 6th. Thèzan-lès-Béziers ; the village.

March 2nd. In the church in Thèzan-lès-Béziers ; my very own St Roch.

May 26th. St Jorioz ; the Croque en Bouche and I, at Isabel and Paul’s wedding.

June 3rd. Foirnis ; through Máire and Pádraic’s window.

June 18th. Griffith Place ; the triffid

August 10th. Vieussan ; the circus came to town.

August 18th. The terrace, Thèzan-lès-Béziers ; the first sight of the Pyrénées.

August 26th. Capestang ; les Copains d’Abord.

November 3rd. Tramore beach ; walking the dog.

December 15th. Christmas, Griffith Place ; Hazelnut, Mincemeat and Apple Pithiviers.

Since we so rarely see snow I confess I went a bit over the top taking pictures.

When my daughter Dee did her first year in English in UCC she was recommended as a text book in linguistics to read The English Language by David Crystal. This is a wonderfully readable book about the origins, usage and rules of the English language. When she finished her year she presented me with the book as she recognised that it would one I would read with pleasure.
She was right. I enjoyed it very much, but then I am a self confessed word nerd.
This Christmas she and daughter Eileen gave me another book by the same author, By Hook or By Crook which is a wonderful, anecdotal book about the authors travels around England and Wales and his telling the stories of the words he encounters there,(and yes he does mention Waterford’s claim to origin of the title of his book)

I enjoyed the book so much I decided to write and tell Mr Crystal how much it had pleased me , and, (because I thought he might be interested) to let him read my theory of Sir Clifford Chatterley’s lover which I have blogged here.
To my delight I received a most pleasant and interested reply from him within an hour.
Thank you David Crystal.
I discovered that, like myself, he writes a blog, mainly devoted to words, their usage and origins here.

He has just got himself another constant reader.

January 3rd 2008

January 4th 2008

I am just enjoying one of my christmas books; By Hook or By Crook, by David Crystal.
The author is an authority on linguistics and the book is part of a BBC project he was involved in, attempting to record local, regional accents which are on the decline.
This is of course right up my street and an excellent choice for a well known words nerd like me (Thank you to Eileen and D.)

But being not only a nerd but an egocentric one it led me directly to think about my own accent.
My background is Cork, middle class,third level education. I have lived in Dublin for many years, in Kent in England for two years in my twenties and in the south east of Ireland since then.
All of these things are reflected in my accent , and much more besides.
One of the principal problems/benefits I have is that I have an accent whict seems to suffer from osmosis, by this I mean it sucks up, and is changed by passing accents.
As a student I had a girl-friend in Selby in Yorkshire and I went to stay with her and her family for a few days one Christmas.
On the way back, on the Liverpool boat I fell into conversation with an elderly Irish woman. Having chatted for some time about the weather she said to me
” Well there is no resaon to ask where you are from”
I grinned, my Cork background was obviously evident, her next remark then astounded me;”You’re from Yorkshire aren’t you”
My few days in Yorkshire had obviously completely conquered my native accent.

Many years later, when I had my own restaurant, I had an assistant chef with a sharp ear.
She informed me, after some time working with me, that she could tell who I was talking to on the phone, or at least from where they came, from my (unconsious I swear) adjustments to accents as I talked to them on the phone.
She was so uncannily accurate with her guesses that I have to accept the truth of the accusation.
That is the problem with the osmosis effect.
People tend to think that I am trying to be terribly posh when I talk to people with English public school educations when I end up sounding slightly posher than the Queen or, even worse this , when talking to people with strong Cork accents I end up sounding just like Jimmy Crowley.
The benefits are that I find it comparatively easy to sound fluent in a foreign language. My French sounds way better than it is, A lot of my time is spent in France nodding as I fail miserably to understand a long reply to a question I asked in French with a sufficiently good accent to fool the respondent into think I spoke the language with great fluency.

We are friends with an Italian family of restaurateurs here in Waterford and one night, many years ago they brought their , entirely monolingual Mother, on holiday from Italy, in to dinner.
Wanting to say something pleasant I asked one of the family for a sentence on the lines of “Did you enjoy your meal” in Italian which I could say to Mamma.
I said my piece and was rewarded with a long stream of Italian which was entirely byond me.
I did my noding gravely bit.
A few days later I met one of the family in Waterford who told me, with some delight, that Mamma was delighted with her meal, apparently she had said
“But you would expect that with an Italian Chef ”