January 2006 Archives

You can read about and vote for your favourite macaroon around the world at Glutton Rabbit's brilliant round-up of Hay Hay It's Donna Day #2 - Macaroons. It's all illustrated with nice pictures (making my macaroons look even more cow-pat-like in comparison to all the others!) and it is interesting to see how different people interpreted the idea of macaroon-making.

My favorites have to be Baking Soda's Almond Espresso Macaroons from Bake My Day and I'm loving the idea of Bron's Wasabi and Black Sesame Macaroons on Green Eggs and Spam. The Dark Chocolate and Orange Macaroons by Haalo from Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once are also very tempting. And I love the picture (that pink background rocks!) of Barbara's Lime Macaroons from Winos and Foodies.

Hmmm...who to vote for? The winner gets a set of Japanese cookie cutters and he or she will also get to host the next Hay Hay It's Donna Day event. Anyone feel like voting for my cow-pats?!

While the internet has undoubtedly simplified the matter of finding holiday accommodation, it's never at hand (unless, of course, you've got your portable internet device nearby) when you're on the road, looking for a decent bite to eat and somewhere to stay at short notice. Situations like these that make you thankful for having a guide book into the glove-box of your car and Georgina Campbell's guides to Ireland are useful tomes for such eventualities.

Ms Campbell's latest publication, The Best of The Best is described by her publishers as being "for the more discerning traveller and diner". Like the Bridgestone Guides, the selections in Campbell's guides are based on merit alone rather than the establishments actually paying for inclusion.

With useful maps aplenty to assist your navigation, Campbell informs readers of the finest restaurants, accommodation, pubs and cafés throughout the country. It is more comprehensive and less idiosyncratic than the Bridgestone Guides but there are still enough mouth-watering accounts of dinners and breakfasts enjoyed to keep even the most rampant foodie happy.

With places to stay and eat in every price range, you can easily avoid greasy garage shops and unwelcoming B&Bs while traveling around Ireland by keeping The Best of The Best and the Bridgestone Guides in your glove-box. You know it's worth it.

Georgina Campbell's Ireland: The Best of The Best is published by Epicure Press.

Last weekend - the macaroon-making one - I was down home cooking dinner for my mother's birthday. As we farm beef cattle, roasts are a regular part of life at home so, as the kitchen was in my hands on Saturday, I decided that it was a good opportunity to make something completely different. On Friday night I dug out the cookbooks that haven't yet made it to Dublin - they're the ones that got co-opted by the Little Sister - and started leafing through them, looking for inspiration. One of the Avoca books had an interesting-sounding Beef and Guinness Stew so I bookmarked the recipe for consultation the following day.

I only glanced at the recipe before I went into the local town of Charleville but I did remember to get a kilo of stewing steak, half a dozen muddy carrots, a few heads of broccoli and some puff pastry, as the Boyfriend had suggested turning what was supposed to be a simple casserole into a slightly more elaborate pie. I figured that we would have Guinness somewhere in the house after Christmas so I didn't worry about getting that only to discover, when I started searching at home, that I had used all the Guinness when cooking the Spiced Beef on Christmas Eve.

Never being one to let the absence of a major ingredient stop me from trying out a recipe, I decided to substitute a bottle of red wine for the missing Guinness and ended up with a Beef and Red Wine Pie. I used a whole bottle of wine to ensure that there was plenty of rich gravy. Deeply succulent and cold-weather friendly, this was a good sturdy dinner for a grey, raw January Saturday and went down well with the entire family - apart from my teenaged Little Sister who mostly doesn't eat the kind of "horrible food" that I cook. As there were both broccoli and carrots in the pie, we just served it with boiled potatoes to soak up all the lovely juices although some crusty French bread wouldn't go amiss either.

Of course, you don't need to bother turning this into a pie as it makes an exceptionally good casserole by itself. On the other hand, if you want to cook the meat in advance - always something which improves the flavour - remove the casserole from the fridge and let it come to room temperature before you add the pastry topping and pop it in the oven. Although, I must admit, that I ran out of time (not the first time this has happened) so the pastry got landed on the hot filling and put in the oven straight away. Not strictly orthodox but it works if you're stuck or disorganised like me!

It's been a while since Maman Poulet - sorry Suzy! - tagged me for the Weird Meme. For this meme I have to write five weird things about me. Well, one person's weird is another person's absolutely normal so I'm not sure how weird (or sane) these are going to appear to anyone else. I just know that they're things to do with cooking and food that people have pointed out as being somewhat strange.

1. I like to wash dishes by hand rather than use a dishwasher. While in New Zealand we had a lovely dishwasher that, even after the Boyfriend bought powder for it, was used only once for it's proscribed purpose. The rest of the time I found it handy - much to the amusement of the Boyfriend's family - as a storage place for plastic bags. Well, there's no point in leaving it empty, now, is there?

2. When leaving NZ I packed all my spices (especially my packets of Aji's cinnamon and chilli) into an envelope that I bribed the Boyfriend to post to me in Ireland. Sorry customs...

3. I love second-hand crockery and bakeware. One of my prized possessions is a large blue-flowered oval china plate that I picked up in a charity shop years ago and, while in NZ, I amassed a large quantity of "pre-loved" (such a great phrase) plates, pans and cooking equipment that would have, otherwise, been very expensive. Of course, pre-loved sometimes also means pre-battered and some of my removable-base tins had bases that were a little too easy to remove which led to a few leaking incidents.

4. A considerable amount of my luggage home to Ireland was taken up by cookbooks, including Zarbo Zest, and cooking utensils, including my beloved nut-cracker, dough scraper, pastry blender, zester... I was gutted to have to abandon my small cast-iron frying pan though. For some reason the Boyfriend didn't think that it was such a good idea to carry a cast-iron frying pan in my hand-luggage.

5. I often keep a bar of dark, dark chocolate in my cupboard for weeks, eating it after dinner, a square at a time. That's until the Boyfriend finds it. We now have to buy cheaper chocolate for him to eat in volume while I savour the more expensive sort over a long...slow...time...

Who to tag now? I rather liked Suzy asking for five weird cooking/food things about me so I'd like to turn the foodie spotlight on to:

eatstuff.net
Gluten-free Girl
my little kitchen
pearl of the orient
She Who Eats

Rules of the game: The first player of this game starts with the topic "five weird habits of yourself", and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don't forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says "you are tagged" (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.

Having missed the first Winos and Foodies Hay Hay, It's Donna Day - and you all know about my love of Donna Hay! - I had every intention of making a real effort for the second episode in what looks like becoming a long-running series of worldwide bake-ins. Glutton Rabbit at Pearl of the Orient chose Macaroons for Hay Hay, It's Donna Day #2 but I'm not a huge macaroon fan. Besides, I was down home and the Little Sister took one look at the recipe that I'd printed off from Pearl of the Orient and went "ugh! There's coconut in it." I have memories of making coconut macaroons when I was a child and they were never a great success - unlike anything involving chocolate. Then I remembered a recipe for Chocolate Almond Macaroons that I had come across in Taste: Baking with Flavour by Dean Brettschneider and Lauraine Jacobs. Although the book is back in New Zealand, there's still the internet and the Cuisine website came up trumps with just the recipe that I had noted in the cookbook.

As it was my mother's birthday on Saturday, the kitchen was rather busy. I had decided to cook Beef and Red Wine Pie for dinner so that had to go on first, Little Sister was across the table putting the finishing touches to her Squidgy Chocolate Cake (one of Delia's classics) and trying to barricade Mum from the room, the Other Sister was in and out getting my father to bend the door of her car back into place (it's not easy owning a '95 Fiesta in Cork these days), the Boyfriend was reporting on the goings on while the Little Brother teased the dogs and kicked a football around the kitchen. As a result, these macaroons got too little attention and I never got a chance to make the chocolate ganache filling. Between Pie and Cake they were completely overshadowed and I didn't even get to remove them from the baking tray until Sunday. Thrown into a lunchbox they made the trip from near Charleville to Dublin that afternoon. There, without any distractions (or the filling), I discovered that these macaroons were curiously moreish. They're not much to look at - resembling nothing so much as regularly shaped, although lighter brown, cow pats - but the combination of crisp crust and soft, slightly nutty, interior is a winner. The Boyfriend discovered this at the same time, only in a more intense way, and I now have discovered that he's eaten about three to every one I eat.

Although not the flop that I initially thought, I do think that these macaroons could be made better by adding some grated chocolate and a handful of flaked almonds when folding the dry ingredients into the egg whites. And maybe some orange zest - I even brought my zester home with me at the weekend to try out this theory! Alas, juggling everything else meant that these only got made with half my attention. Still, thanks to Glutton Rabbit for giving me the idea to dig out that recipe although I don't know if there was much use of "creativity and cooking skills" in this angle of the world. Still, not everything always works out, especially in the cooking department! I wonder how everybody else got on?

Although already the author of two well-received memoirs - Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour - as well as a couple of not so popular detective novels, it has taken American chef Anthony Bourdain a little while to embark on his own cookbook and he throws himself into the undertaking with commendable vigour.

An already hyperactive writing style doesn't get lost anywhere along the way as he pushes, prods and sometimes seems to want to deliberately antagonise readers. Bourdain is the executive chef at New York City restaurant Les Halles, and he has decreed that this book is a "field manual to strategy and tactics". To that end, he's determined to treat the reader as if he or she were a rookie in his kitchen. He doesn't mince his words as he coerces and advises, issuing warnings and occasionally yelling (in print).

Bourdain takes the solid, mainly carnivorous (don't miss the blood and guts chapter), French principles behind Les Halles and reworks them for a private kitchen to good effect. Behind all the bluster, there's a chef with a talent for imparting his knowledge of food to those who wish to learn. While it won't be very useful to vegetarians (fans of Ysanne Spevack's Fresh and Wild Cookbook avoid!), the Les Halles Cookbook is an undoubted education.

Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain is published by Bloomsbury.

In the wake of leaving New Zealand and my living-out-of-a-bag-ness in Ireland during November and December, it's only now that I've gotten round to checking out Chris Bell's Five minutes with Peter Gordon at NZBC. That's the New Zealand Blogging Corporation, rather than the New Zealand Black Caps, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation or even the New Zealand Building Code. After I blogged about Peter Gordon's sublime Tomato and Chilli Jam, Chris contacted to tell me with this link to his Gordon interview. I found it interesting to read what Gordon had to say - in relation to his Marks and Spencer ready-made-meals - about cafés in Britain:

"Better a few good ready-mades a week than baked beans and fish and chips every night. The food culture, and home-life culture, here in the UK is so different to NZ. In NZ you can pop out to a local café and have fairly good inexpensive food - in the UK that's a lot harder."

I think that could also apply, in many ways, to Irish cafés, the majority of which simply are not interested in cooking food from scratch. I get sick of the soup of the day coming straight out of a packet, the ubiquitous and badly filled panini, the Irish "side-salad" (tasteless tomato, iceberg lettuce, watery cucumber all served taste bud-numbingly cold) and the ever-present pile of plastic-bagged muffins on the counter. And it's not cheap food either.

Cafés weren't always great in New Zealand (I still must get round to posting a name and shame category!) but most of them they sure as hell beat Irish ones. Many places that I frequented used free-range eggs and that went hand-in-hand with a closer attention to and interest in the food that they served. Initially I was amazed to discover that NZ cafés frequently made their own soups, muffins, tray-bakes and cookies on the premises. Then you start to wonder why this can't be done in Ireland too. Is it the high cost of staff? Extortionate rental for café premises? Or just the fact that Irish people are willing to accept low standards?

Derry woman and Sunday Telegraph food writer Diana Henry has again come up trumps with her latest book, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow. Her first cookbook, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, focused on the tastes and enchantments of the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa. With praise from Claudia Roden and its appearance twice on the Glenfiddich award shortlist, it became an instant classic.

Like Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, there is a focus on travelling in Roast Figs, Sugar Snow. Henry has traversed the chilly areas of the Northern Hemisphere and collected recipes from Maine, Norway, Tuscany and Denmark, grouping them by theme under idiosyncratic chapter headings. Tales From the Hunt covers game and wild mushrooms, Earthly Pleasures focuses on pumpkin, squash, beans and lentils while Sugar Snow is devoted to maple syrup.

Henry's introductions to each chapter are evocative and personal, being as much a travel guide as information on the ingredients. Like her previous book, there are seasonal quotes scattered throughout from Laurie Lee, Marianne Moore and Robert Frost as well as the piece that inspired her - Laura Ingalls Wilder's vivid description of a sugar snow in Vermont from Little House in the Big Woods. These literary diversions make Roast Figs, Sugar Snow a book that is worth reading as well as cooking from. But don't underestimate Henry's recipes. There's the detail of Sugar-On-Snow for those Ingalls Wilder fanatics, Beef Pie with Wild Mushrooms and Claret ("you can make men fall in love with you with this pie"), the substantial-sounding Steamed Apple and Marmalade Pudding and Uncle Desmond's Sloe Gin.

Vividly luminous photographs by Jason Lowe compliment Henry's sensuous writing and make Roast Figs, Sugar Snow a book to curl up with on a dark night in front of a roaring fire. Just don't try doing it when you're hungry.

Roast Figs, Sugar Snow by Diana Henry is published by Mitchell Beazley.

For anybody with more than a passing interest in food and/or blogs, check out the 2005 Food Blog Awards at the Accidental Hedonist's own blog. As Kate points out, the list of nominees is one of the best ways of discovering blogs that you might not have come across otherwise, such as the five-times nominated The Travellers Lunchbox and Gluten-free Girl. There's also tried-and-true names such as the inimitable Chocolate & Zucchini, 101 Cookbooks and the new, improved Too Many Chefs. Voting is open now and continues until 18 January so, if you'd like to have your say or even if you're just interested in discovering new food blogs, click over to Accidental Hedonist.

Before we took off for our year in New Zealand, the Boyfriend was really getting involved in bread-making. There was an ongoing, sporadically successful, sourdough project but where he really hit his stride was in making bagels. A birthday present of Bread by Ursula Ferrigno and Eric Treuillé (never let it be said that I didn't encourage him!) inspired him to try their recipe. Do you know how they get the holes into their bagels? You take a small ball of dough, stick your finger through the centre of it and then work your finger in a circle to stretch and widen the hole. It's rather like doing the hula hoop, but with your finger instead of your waist! We were in fits laughing that first morning that he tried the recipe as our fingers hula hooped their way through eight bagels.

You don't get many bagels from 500g of flour but they're so good that you really don't mind. While often erratically shaped (hula hooping may not be the most precise way of producing them), the Boyfriend's bagels are nicely browned with an appropriately dense and chewy interior. We used to sprinkle sesame and poppy seeds on top but, given the Boyfriend's pumpkin seed fixation (the reason that I started adding them to my Brown Bread recipe) we've started brushing the bagels with egg and sticking pumpkin seeds on top. These are not something to make when you're in a hurry but, if you've got a currently unemployed boyfriend, you could do a lot worse than encourage him to take a look at Ursula and Eric's recipe for bagels over on Swiss food blog Rosa's Yummy Yums. They're perfect toasted with a dab of cream cheese or, if you want to go for a fancier bagel, try some of the fillings mentioned on Dublin's Itsabagel website. Personally, I would strongly recommend The Mountaineer.

I was home down the country last weekend and, when I was investigating the fridge, I discovered a chunk of almond paste. It had originally been made by my Little (in age, not so in height) Sister to cover the Christmas Cake and the leftovers got abandoned in the fridge. I couldn't pass it by - I must admit I love almond paste. When I was a child, I'd take a piece of Christmas Cake just for the almond icing and try to trade the cake part off against someone else's icing. Many's the Christmas Cake, much to my mother's annoyance, that was denuded of its tasty almond coating ever before the royal icing came near it!

I remember standing by my mother as she did her Christmas baking, perched on a chair so that I could reach the worktop, all wrapped up in an apron that was much too big for me. Maybe that's when I realised that, if you make the sweet things, then no one can give out to you (too much) for eating it! So the Christmas Cake became my job and I often made a little too much almond paste so that I could have a stash of it in the fridge for myself...or, perhaps, try out other recipes that involved almond paste.

One such recipe culled from a Woman's Realm or Women's Weekly of many years ago was from an article on festive dishes from other countries and was for a Dutch Christmas ring, known as Kerstkrans. It was not a difficult recipe - almond paste, encased in puff pastry, glazed with apricot jam and decorated with cherries - but it was a delicious treat, especially hot out of the oven.

Although the leftover almond paste wasn't really enough for a Kerstkrans, I decided not to waste it. Mum had puff pastry in the freezer and, while laying out the sausage of almond paste on the rolled out pastry, I decided to add some orange zest to lift the flavour of the almonds. I imported my trusty citrus zester, purchased from Judith Cullen at her cookery evening in Christchurch, from New Zealand and - despite not doing much cooking recently - have used it every time I've been down home. The fact that it's so easy to zest oranges, lemons and limes, makes you add the peel to many dishes, Cranberry Sauce, for instance. Here, I intensified the orange flavour by glazing the Kerstkrans (although it was more of a January Crescent than a Christmas Ring!) with Bonne Maman's Bitter Orange Marmalade.

While not the best looking Kerstkrans that I've ever made - or the most faithful to the original recipe! - this was a perfect with a cup of coffee in the afternoon. Light flaky pastry encased nutty almond paste, which was complimented by the intense flavour of the orange zest while the marmalade made the slices suitably sticky.

But it was the name given to it by the Little Sister which really topped things off. "Oh, you've made Baby Jesus in His Blanket", she said when she saw the Kerstkrans laid out on the table. It turned out that she'd been looking through my old stack of Home & Freezer Digests ("the only women's magazine that specialises in the needs of the freezer owner" - I used to buy them when I was in my teens) where she came across a picture of Stollen, the traditional German bread-like cake which is also filled with almond paste. In the description, it said that the shape of the cake was meant to represent the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes. Therefore, in the Little Sister's world, my Kerstkrans became Baby Jesus in His Blanket. Not the worst name! So, without further ado, let me present the recipe for Caroline's Kerstkrans aka Baby Jesus in His Blanket.

British organic and Fair Trade food chain Fresh and Wild teamed up with organic expert Ysanne Spevack, editor of online organic food magazine OrganicFoodee.com, to produce this cookbook. It's both worthy and worthwhile, but sometimes Spevack's party political broadcasts on behalf of Fresh and Wild do get a little tiresome, especially when there's only a limited amount of the shops to go around.

That aside, the biggest problem with this book is the lack of a glossary. There are frequent references to ingredients that probably won't be familiar to many readers - tempeh, spelt, rapadura - and, although Spevack does explain what they are, that's only useful if you read the whole thing in sequence. Things can get confusing if you, like me, tend to dip in and out of recipe books rather than peruse it from cover to cover. An A to Z glossary would save both time and patience, further demystifying all those odd things you find in health shops.

The selection of recipes in the Fresh and Wild Cookbook are undeniably healthy and often intriguing. Worth working through if you're making the effort to move away from meat and two veg.

Fresh and Wild Cookbook by Ysanne Spevack is published by Thorsons.

While looking at the RTÉ website the other day I came across a piece on the Nationwide programme about the Ferguson family of Gubbeen, outside Schull in West Cork. Tom and Giana Ferguson have worked Gubbeen Farm for more than thirty years, starting to produce their delicious prize-winning Gubbeen Cheese in 1978.

Their son Fingal recently started The Gubbeen Smokehouse, where he produces a range of smoked bacon, rashers, sausages, salami, chorizo and lardons, as well as a smoked version of the Gubbeen Cheese. As if that wasn't enough, his sister Clovisse grows organic herbs and vegetables and sells them to local chefs and, as far as I could gather, another daughter Rosie is also involved at the farm end of things.

With all the gloom and doom that is being talked about Irish farming recently it is very encouraging to see this second-generation of artisan food producers, all working on businesses developed from the family farm.

You can watch the clip here, read more about the Fergusons and food producers in Cork in the Observer Food Monthly and the Gubbeen Farmhouse Products website is here.

One of the kitchen items that I regretted having to leave in New Zealand were my gem irons. Gem irons - cast-iron baking tins, divided into a dozen small curved spaces and used to make the light spicy little loaves called Ginger Gems - seem to be indigenous to New Zealand. I had never come across this cooking implement, or the accompanying recipes, in any other country. The first few times I saw the irons at the market I hadn't a clue what they were, despite the Boyfriend's mother telling me all about what I thought were called Ginger Jams and jam irons one day. It took me a wee while to get used to the Kiwi accent!

It wasn't until I came across an article in Catherine Bell's Dish magazine that everything fell into place. With the help of the photo in the magazine I realised what the old cast iron implements at the market were. It also helped me to make the translation from jam to gem and suddenly everything was clear. So, hearing that these were one of the Boyfriend's father's favourites, I set out on a search for the irons - which, at the very time I discovered how to use them, seemed to disappear from the market. I persevered, though, and eventually managed to get my hand on a pair of lighter and more modern aluminium gem irons. Then I had to find a recipe...

While I lived in New Zealand my equipment was limited. I had no food processor, blender or mixer (although I did manage to get my hands on a Breadmaker!) so all recipes were carefully read and assessed to ensure that they were possible to make with what I did have. Dishes which involved beating egg whites to stiff peaks were ignored as were any soups which had to go near a blender. Any recipe which started off "cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy" were similarly skipped over. I've never liked developing my upper arm muscles through beating butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. And, I can tell you from experience, it takes AGES for them to get to the appropriate creamed stage. But all the recipes I found for Ginger Gems involved the creaming step so that plan, despite the presence of the gem irons, got put on the long finger for a while.

While on a trip to the Boyfriend's family bach at Lake Rotoiti, though, I came across a recipe notebook that had belonged to his paternal grandmother, a wonderful cook and baker by all accounts. Her recipe for Ginger Gems was in the notebook and, to my delight, it involved melting rather than creaming. I had fun trying to figure out some of her measurements - she mixed dessertspoons with table and teaspoons - and the method was idiosyncratic to say the least, but a few test cases later I had success.

Although Ginger Gems, served warm with butter, really belong to the era where everyone stopped for afternoon tea at 4pm, they're still good as a light desert. If you have a gem iron - and if anyone comes across one in Ireland, please do let me know! - they're something that can be mixed and baked in about half an hour. A couple of warm Gems, placed on either side of a ball of decent vanilla ice-cream and drizzled over with still-hot caramel sauce take them firmly out of the tea time bracket. A New Zealand classic, just slightly updated.