Fishy Times

The view from our house at dusk

I've just returned from a week in Cornwall. We stayed 2 miles outside of Padstow, in a converted lifeboat house. We first stayed here a year ago and the house is absolutely stunning. This year, myself and only two others of the original party returned with 5 friends, and the response from everyone else upon reaching the house was overwhelming. I'd forgotten how great it is; there was much shrieking, "oh my god!"-ing, and general excitement.

One thing we didn't manage to do last year due to choppy seas was to go mackerel fishing. On our first day, we booked it in. Of course, when the time came it was raining, but undettered, we got our raincoats on and hiked into Padstow. After all, we survived the torrential downpours of Bestival; what's a bit of light rain?

The sea was pretty choppy and one of our party turned a slight shade of green. We stopped once to chance our luck, but as none of us caught anything we moved on. Suddenly, people were catching fish left right and centre. One of us even caught this hapless crab (above) - it just hung onto the weight and wouldn't let go. More the fool him.

Typically, since I was bouncing around with excitement about the trip, I was the only one to not catch any thing at all. Luckily my mates caught 28 mackerel between them, so we had a plentiful haul. After a pretty harrowing descaling and gutting session, the mackerel were ready to be cooked.

The mackerel were then stuffed with lemon, liberally oiled, seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked on a hot barbeque until the skins were crisp. Simply served with a salad, these were beautiful; the fruits of my mates' labours and delicious to boot. We even convinced my fish-disliking housemate, who caught the most, to give them a try. She liked it, and thus we crowned her Fish Queen of the week.

Unfortunately the crab fared less well. We stuck him in the freezer for half an hour before dropping him (yes, we also named him - Crab C. Nesbitt) into rapidly boiling water. He seemed fine when he went in, but when he was cooked we found he'd dropped his claws and when we prised the shell open only brown water poured out of it. Given that we had no internet access or 'phone signal and none of us had ever cooked crab before, I gather we must have cooked him wrong which is a real shame. It could also have been his 2 mile journey home in a plastic bag.

Nevertheless, the claws were delicious; the meat was sprinkled with black pepper, spread on two slices of heavily buttered toast... divided into squares for 8 people. Still, you can have too much of a good thing, right?