You must be codding.

Last week we had friends over for a meal, one of them is vegetarian but does eat fish so I decided I would do baked cod with a cream prawn sauce. We normally drive over to Ballina some 60k away to buy our fish from one of the very few wet fish shops still in existence, but still being in the Christmas period we guessed that there would be little in the way of fresh fish available so opted to buy frozen fish from our local supermarket, after all most people buy their fish this way so it must be of reasonable quality. How wrong can I be?

We bought one of the best known 'Irish' brands, 'Donegal Catch'. Unfortunately with frozen stuff you can't see what you are buying but I had a good prod at the bag and decided that I had better play safe and buy two bags to get four evenly sized pieces of cod. So the day arrived and four even peices were selected, we picked out the largest peices which would have been fine if they had not shrunk to almost half their size. Fortunately I had made plenty of prawn sauce with  lots of prawns in it, this compensated a little for the lack of cod. We cooked the cod exactly as instructed on the packet and very surprised to find a good half pint of fluid in the baking dish. We also have doubts as to whether this cod was the correct size, the flakes could barely be called flakes, quite possibly this fish was from undersized fish.
 The following day I had a good look at the packaging,

it stated that there was an 'ice glaze' of 5%, 95% cod fillets.  We then decided just for our own research to bake another piece of fish, weighing it before and after. The before weight was 77grams, the after, 48grams, a weight loss of 38%. This just does not happen when we buy fresh fish. It was not even cheap, it worked out at 15.78 per kg of fish. We buy fresh cod for 17euro a kg, and don't end up needing a magnifying glass to see the fish. We have emailed the company, needless to say we have received no reply. I guess they are well used to getting complaints. I am basing that assumption on another occasion  when I sent a query to a food company about the origin of their Organic bacon, the packaging gave the impression that it was an Irish product, in fact the pork that the bacon was cured from was Danish, but the company replied to my enquiry, by phone, not five minutes after I had sent the email. That's what I call good customer service. Needless to say, we will never be buying frozen fish again, and certainly not 'Donegal Catch'.
Spring is trying to appear, well ahead of time. We have had our first Muscovy duck egg, the willows have their pussy buds bursting, I even have an Anemone in bloom,

and I spotted the first primrose out in the bank of one of the lanes nearby. The broad beans, planted in the new tunnel are up a good three inches and tomorrow our first cauliflower plants will be planted into the tunnel, these plants were planted as seeds early November, they all germinated well and have spent the last two months in the cold frame, they are now three inches high, definitely time to be planted out. The buds on the peach trees are now swelling and there are also tip buds on the fig tree which we relocated to the new tunnel. Our new tunnel seems to becoming the fruit tree tunnel, with a peach fig and kiwi planted in it, this weekend this will be added to with an apricot tree, kindly donated to us by a friend who feels it's too big for her small tunnel . I hope it does as well as our peach tree . 

 

Mrs. Duck get the bread crust, unwilling to share,

Dilly Duck and hen look on,

Mrs.Duck finding it a little hard then dips it in the pond so soften it, how clever is that.