Flowers, but where's the fish?

The waiter wandered over. 'Está bueno, is it good?'

It's fine, we assured him. A starter dish of brandada de bacalao, which Janine and I were sharing. Fortunately the brandada came packaged in two small parcels of filo pastry, easy to share without mess, nestling cosily on a bed of mushroom sauce. Boletus sauce actually, because this was a smart restaurant, and there were flower petals sprinkled over the top of the little parcels.

This is not our usual kind of food and I had no idea what a brandada was, but swift online research revealed that we were eating salt cod mashed with olive oil, garlic and probably a few other things. It's a favourite dish across the north of Spain and open to interpretation. We were celebrating the anniversary of our arrival on La Gomera as permanent residents, a huge event in our lives, so it seemed right to indulge in something special.

'I can hardly taste the fish, though,' Janine commented after the waiter had floated away.

'No, it's…. mild. Subtle.'

I dipped my fork into the mushroom sauce, just on its own. Mild. Subtle. I thought I could detect cinnamon, perhaps. Or was it cumin?

Subtlety in flavour is, of course, an indication of an expert chef who doesn't try to hammer your palate with taste explosions. Well, some of them do that. This one didn't.

After finishing my filo pastry parcel I wiped out the remaining sauce from the dish with a piece of bread roll, which had marginally more flavour than the mushroom sauce. Here was a demonstration, perhaps, that I can no longer consider myself young. It's said that as the years march on we tend to prefer stronger flavours.

Anyway, prising open a little packet of filo pastry had been fun, like opening a mystery present. For the main dish we ordered a dish of stuffed peppers - those tasty, tangy little red peppers called pimiento de piquillo, in this case filled with spinach and prawns and baked with a gratin of cheese. I was fairly sure this was going to be a commercial frozen product, because they always are. Which busy cook would want to waste time stuffing delicate little peppers when you can buy something perfectly serviceable from the local frozen food shop? But no, I was wrong, these peppers were clearly home-stuffed with home-made stuffing.

'Está bueno?' The waiter again, hovering.

'It's good,' I told him. 'But I can't taste the prawns.' Ah, no, the waiter explained, this was intentional. The chef puts the prawns, spinach and other ingredients into a bowl and mashes them together. He demonstrated a fierce pummelling with one fist mashing the other. 'The flavours mix together.'

Okay.

In our later assessment over coffee we decided that we were simple folk with a preference for simple foods. Our favourite supper at home is fried eggs on a plate of julienne potatoes, with plain, ordinary, unstuffed red peppers and lightly cooked peas. The go-to restaurant meal (apart from pizza) is a lovely white fish called cherne, grilled to perfection but fancied up with nothing more than the typical Canary dressing called mojo. With chips and a little salad.

Peasants.

But by this measure, so is one of the UK's most celebrated celebrity chefs, Rick Stein, who launched an extensive portfolio of successful restaurants and has starred in numerous cookery series in travelogue style on BBC television. We have some of his DVDs and I love watching him trying to be enthusiastic about an artistic arrangement of tiny morsels at the centre of an otherwise empty plate. He can't do it. But see him tackling a simple dish of plain, hearty food and you see a happy man.

-------------- NOTES --------------

The restaurant menu referred to the light and crispy brandada packet as a bric, spelt without a k but pronounced almost like the English word, an interesting example of language transfer designed to confuse the foreigner.

Cherne is a very popular fish in the Canaries but its English name, Atlantic wreckfish, doesn't add much to its appeal. It's chunky but with a mild flavour and very few bones when filleted, often none at all.

The mojo sauce served with cherne (and almost anything else, if you want) comes in two flavours, as I've mentioned in previous stories. Both are based on olive oil and garlic, along with coriander for the green one or red pepper and chilli for the spicier red. The green mojo verde is recommended for the fish and the red mojo picante for the accompanying chips or boiled potatoes, but really it's up to you.

Where the Jumblies live

Far and few, far and few

Are the lands where the Jumblies live…

Edward Lear

'One day,' I remarked to the taxi driver, 'they'll solve this problem.' I try to engage taxi drivers, they're often chatty and enlightening, unless they're weary of foreigners trying to engage them. Some just grunt.

This one was somewhere in mid-range. He laughed scornfully and thumped his steering wheel. 'Nunca!' Never.

'They're talking about it this very week,' I insisted. 'The island council, the town council, the presidents of the other islands…'

'They're always talking about it. They've been talking about it for twenty years. Nothing ever happens.'

Sadly, this was undeniable. We were sitting in a long queue of cars, nudging slowly forwards as holidaymakers strolled past us on the pavements, licking ice creams. This is the normal experience for Gomerans disembarking from a ferry at Los Cristianos in Tenerife. Two lanes of traffic leaving the port converge with other roads at a small roundabout, where we all get shoehorned into a narrow street lined with parked cars, bars, restaurants, sex shops, bike hire centres and emergency treatment clinics for overwrought taxi drivers.

Actually the taxistas handle it better than I do, because they have no choice if they want to continue being a taxi driver. Various solutions have been suggested over the years, most of them showcased yet again in a current spate of high-level angst. The most radical idea is to ditch Los Cristianos altogether, cede it to the sunseekers and their all-day English breakfasts, trips around the bay and cocktails at sunset while we serious travellers sail into a brand new ferry port further along the coast.

There isn't one yet, of course, but there is a proposed location near a small coastal development called Fonsalía, supported by detailed plans of a multi-purpose ferry, leisure and fishing port. Looks nice in the artist's impression. Big, though. Ambitious.

So what did our taxi driver think about that?

In a word: 'Loco!' Crazy. It would add more than 20 kilometres to a trip to the airport or the capital, Santa Cruz, which is already an hour's drive away. And building a new port would take many, many years.

'But,' added the driver darkly, 'you can understand why some people would like the idea.' He did that Spanish gesture of rubbing finger and thumb together: banknotes! Well, yes, a major building project would offer many desirable deals and contracts, as critics with a suspicious nature have pointed out. I don't know and frankly 'Yo no me meto' as they say here, I'm not getting into that. More concerning is that it would open another busy sea route through an important marine protected area along the western coast of Tenerife.

All of which illustrates one of the penalties we Gomerans pay for our doble insularidad, double insularity. The first insularity is common to all the Canary Islands. We are ultraperiférico, ultrapheripheral - a delightful word which is also a technical term within the European community for regions that are an integral part of a particular nation but located far from the rest of it.

The double insularity is that to reach Gomera you not only have to cross two thousand kilometres of ocean from the rest of Europe to land in Tenerife, you then face another crossing by ocean or air before arriving knackered at your destination. It has cost you extra time and money, two factors that are also tiresome if you're a crate of Seville oranges or a new car.

It's not all bad. For one thing, some of the extra costs are subsidised (see Notes, below). And our doble insularidad means that visitors who come to La Gomera haven't just booked a last-minute holiday in any old place as long as it's sunny, they've made a positive choice to visit this very special island.

-------------- NOTES --------------

Far and few are the Spanish Jumblies, found only in two island clusters, but the Mediterranean Balearic Islands are far closer to home than the Canaries.

The Spanish state subsidises personal and business travel between the islands through the medium of the Canary Islands' autonomous government, registered residents paying just a quarter of the normal ferry fare. Also welcome are the lower rates of VAT applied in the Canaries, except that this creates complications for traders. Sometimes it's enough to put them off altogether:

'This item cannot be sent to the address you have specified. Please choose a different address.'

How daft can you get? I'd rather they just said honestly, 'Nah, sorry mate, not worth the hassle.'