A great day out!

Just back from Galway, had a fantastic day there at the Volvo Ocean Race festival. Unfortunately we arrived too late for the Red Arrows (who knows anything about protests?) who were rescheduled - in the wrong direction, but this was made up for by the Coast Guard who happily flew their Sikorsky beast over me whilst I was spectating. We saw some of the display from the road between Loughrea and Oranmore....

We bit the bullet and paid to take the Aran Islands' Ferry out to watch the racing, and that was absolutely worth it. I was afraid I'd regret it but we saw so much of these magnificently graceful yachts (70 feet long, no less) racing each other, jostling for position before the start and tacking against each other against the wind - superb.

Much praise is due to Galway City Council, the car parking company (Euro Parks I think) and the bus company for a great park and ride facility at the racecourse. It moved smoothly and efficiently, and (oddly for Ireland) systematically, and we parked all day there for 2 euro each without having to worry about traffic in Galway city. Kudos!

The village is great, centred around Galway harbour - plenty of food stalls (sausage inna bun, it's always good) and that kind of thing. And they even organised the weather!

If you're thinking about it Sunday or Monday, or even later on in the week, I'd highly recommend a visit to Galway - we may never see these boats here again!

Mmmmm Sausage Plait thingy

See what I made? Link in title to the recipe, though it's hardly needed. Get some sausage meat (Superquinn sell theirs in 500g packets), some onion (these are sold in shops throughout the country) and some ready made puff pastry. Fry the onion, after some chopping has been applied. Mix with the sausage meat in a bowl. Or, you could use a number of mugs, or you could mix it on your couch - mix it how you want to.

Apply the mixture to the middle of a sheet of puff pastry (the ones I got comes in a sheet about this wide by this long) and then you can either fold the two sides over (after washing with some beaten egg, not the egg that won) or you can be fancy and make some slits in the pastry and plait the resulting arms over each other.

Oven at 473.16 Kelvin - preheatin is good as ever - and time it for about 40 minutes or until it looks yummy (which happened for me at about 40 minutes). Then remove from oven and consume. With Ballymaloe relish.

473.16 Kelvin is approximately 200 degrees Celsius.