Bibliocook: All About Food

Although the huge green-lipped New Zealand monsters nearly put me off mussels for life - too big and way too chewy! - last week I tried cooking Irish mussels for the first time. Coming home from work one evening I nipped in to a local shop called Donnybrook Fair to pick up some essential supper supplies. Walking past the seafood counter down the back, a big sack of navy-shelled mussels caught my eye, along with the price - €2.99 a kilo. Instantly, all thoughts of cheese on toast went out the window as I got a kilo of the mussels, picking up a length of crusty French bread and a bottle of sauvignon blanc en route to the checkout.

The fact that I'd never cooked mussels before and didn't actually have a recipe in mind didn't worry me unduly. Sometimes the best inspirations come on the walk home and en route I decided that I wanted to cook them with something gusty and strong, garlic and tomato being the first things that came to mind. While the mussels sat in the sink I grabbed a few books - Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Course, Anne Willian's How to Cook Absolutely Everything and several of Nigel Slater's - and looked for a recipe but nothing appealed. The one thing I did pick up was that the mussels didn't need to be cooked for long. After preparing the mussels - scrubbing their shells, pulling the beards off and checking if the shells closed when tapped - I flung a couple of cloves of chopped garlic, some of the sauvignon blanc and a tin of tomatoes into my deep sauté pan with some lemon zest, left it bubble and simmer for a few minutes, then threw in the whole kilo of mussels and clamped the lid on top.

After a few peeps to see if the shells had opened I judged them done and landed the pan on the table, along with the heated baguette, the rest of the sauvignon blanc, a large bowl for shells and some tea towels for mopping purposes. Mussels, as with fresh artichokes - where you have to peel off the leaves one by one and dip them in melted butter to savour the flesh at its base - are so fiddly to eat that a kilo lasts a long time and easily serves two with bread and wine. Sweet and succulent, their wobbly flesh was delectable and the sauce at the base of the pan, further enriched by the juices released from the opening shells, was good and plentiful enough to be used to anoint a dish of pasta the following night. Or it could be poured off into cups and served as a light, but deliciously full-flavoured, soup.

Continue reading "Irish mussels" »

As charity cookbooks go, Real Food for Real People is a real gem. The book is part of a fundraising drive for Moneystown National School's building fund and was produced and published by the Parents' Committee in this County Wicklow village. But, even though Real Food for Real People was evidentially done on a shoestring, the design quality still shines out. Illustrated mainly with children's drawings and photos, and scattered with quotations from, amongst others, Shakespeare and Lenin, it is a simple and well laid-out book.

The recipes do not disappoint either, with Real Food for Real People gathering together a broad selection of well-loved recipes from local families, some of which have been handed down through the generations. Foreign dishes - Mrs Bittel's Waffles, Flamiche aux Poitreaux - share space with Stuffed Marrow, Nettle Soup and Mrs Doyle's Brown Bread. There's also a substantial selection of biscuits (Congolais, Gigi's Chocolate Chip Cookies), deserts (Chocolate Roulade, Ishy Gran's Trifle) and cakes (Mary Quinn's Currant Cake, Granny Tish's Christmas Cake)

Along with the food, the book also includes a history of Moneystown National School by former principle Frank McGillick, making it a lovely keepsake for anyone in or connected to the community. But - and that's what sets Real Food for Real People apart from so many other similar productions - the design and the recipes are of a high enough standard to let it stand alone, far beyond the confines of County Wicklow.

And it seems like lots of people agree. Priced at an eminently reasonable €10, the first print run sold out in about a month but the book has since been reprinted. I picked up my copy in the Alliance Française in Dublin, I've also seen it in Avoca Handweavers and it is also available online at www.moneystowncookbook.com for €10.00 + €2.50 P&P. A good cause and great cooking.

Real Food for Real People is published by Moneystown National School's Parents' Committee.

After making Nic's Buttermilk Pancakes twice in the last ten days, I just have to sing their praises here. They take minutes to put together, don't involve getting out the weighing scales (just use the cup measurements), are easy to cook, and - if you're on a weekend away - the dry ingredients sit happily together in a zip-locked baggie until you choose to combine them with the buttermilk, butter and egg. Most importantly, they turn out delectable, light, fluffy, American-style thick pancakes without having to resort to a mix. We ate them this morning with oodles of fragrant organic maple syrup from Nenagh's wonderful Country Choice deli, grilled rashers of bacon and, in my case, a little extra butter to further add to the sweet/savoury combination combination.

After measuring the flour and leavening agents into a bag on Friday (I was home sick, that's my excuse for being half-way organised!), I cooked these pancakes for the final meal of a wonderful weekend with the Schoolfriend and her husband at the comfortable Tir na Fiuise just outside Terryglass in North Tipperary, which we found through the Responsible Travel website. After several recommendations, we initially had hoped to eat at Brocka on the Water in nearby Kilgarvan Quay on Saturday night but, even with a week's notice, they were booked solid. We stayed a little closer to home, at Terryglass' own Derg Inn, and were not disappointed with a lovely meal in relaxed surroundings and a friendly barman who even dropped the Boyfriend and Schoolfriend's husband home a few pints after we had departed for the night.

There's plenty of good eating in this area. Lunch - a loaf of still-warm brown soda bread, another of tomato and fennel, a sizable chunk of mature Irish cheddar, sliced ham and turkey breast, sunblush tomatoes and The Old School House Food Company's sweet cucumber and red pepper relish - came, via the Schoolfriend and her husband, from the aforementioned Country Choice, a shop where I could spend quite a lot of browsing time. All that, and we hardly got a chance to check out the places mentioned in Georgina Campbell or the Bridgestone Guides. It's the perfect area for a chilled out weekend with friends and I had the extra bonus of being close enough to home to cheer the Little Sister on to victory at the All-Ireland Junior A Camogie Final (St Mary's, Charleville vs Portumna Community College) in Dolla. Congratulations to the St Mary's girls, clear winners on a muddy pitch with a score of 1-11 to 0-05!

Equipped with one very large mixing bowl (also useful as a basin!) and a scattering of much smaller ones, I was in the market for a medium sized bowl or bowls. When the Boyfriend and I were in Avoca Handweavers a few weeks ago, queuing for our late lunch, I did some wandering around all the gorgeous goods on display. Piles of enticing cookbooks, soft and richly coloured blankets and throws, sparkling jewellery, jars of jams and jellies, sweet-smelling breads - all laid out to entice browsers and shoppers alike.

It's the kind of place that makes the Boyfriend get very tired, very quickly so I had limited time for wandering. I did, however, manage to find these colourful, lipped bowls with handles - one baby pink, one shocking pink with contrasting lids - from a company called Rice and they have more than proven their worth since. Because of the lids they are useful as storage containers, the non-slip ring on the bottom makes them perfect for mixing and they've been a good size for a making a double mixture of Chocolate Chip Chocolate Muffins and some Buttermilk Pancakes (thanks to Nic over on Bakingsheet) for an impromptu cousins' brunch on St Patrick's Day. A word of warning, though. I bought these bowls in Avoca's Kilmacanogue branch in a set of two for €10.95. I've since seen them on sale separately in the Suffolk Street shop, with the big bowl alone priced at €10.95. Still gorgeous - and very useful - bowls but not such a good deal at that price.

After so many years of steering clear of potato dishes or any recipes involving even a hint of the spud, it's now like a whole new world has opened to me. I'm still not a fan of the floury potato, much loved in Ireland, but I have been experimenting with waxy new potatoes in dishes like Frittata. Well, at least it's a step on from the tinned potatoes I tried in New Zealand that first got me interested in the tuber.

A recent cold snap and the presence of some new potatoes in the fridge (a wonder in itself!) got me to thinking about a wintertime recipe for a French dish, Tartiflette, I had seen in Diana Henry's Roast Figs, Sugar Snow. It's a recipe that I might have leafed over in the past but its combination of waxy potatoes, bacon lardons, sour cream and cheese had me hooked. The traditional Tartiflette is made with Reblochon, a soft washed-rind cheese that is good for melting but, in its absence, I substituted some strong Dubliner cheddar. Seeing as tradition was already out the window, I also added some chunks of garlicy fat-flecked chorizo that we had picked up in a Parisian supermarket.

When she first encountered this dish, in a small restaurant in the French Savoie, Diana had it with charcuterie, gherkins and pickled onions. She normally partners it with a plain green salad so, to cut the delicious richness, I served a plain rocket salad on the side and, to ensure none of the savoury juices were lost, some crusty bread rolls. This is not the kind of meal that you would want to eat before any kind of activity. It is, however, perfect cold weather food. No matter how often I get told that we're coming in to Spring, there's little sign of it in Ireland at the moment.

Continue reading "A whole new world: potato cooking" »

Undoubtedly creative and definitely contemporary, Kevin Dundon's Full on Irish is a book that is easy to admire yet, as a collection of recipes, it is not entirely successful. Too much fussing over presentation, as with the beautifully and immaculately layered Smoked Salmon Cake with Chive Cream Cheese, is a huge turn off for me. I want to be able to look at the pictures and think "I can do that" rather than "it's too complicated for me." Maybe it is to do with my style of cooking, which is all about landing dishes on the table and letting people help themselves, rather than delicately plating up little morsels of food, but I find it very difficult to get excited about cookbooks that devote a paragraph to telling me how to arrange the dish before presenting it.

Still, grumbles aside, Full on Irish is a beautifully put together book. Each recipe is illustrated with well arranged photographs from Alan Murphy, who also takes pictures of the chef in action - making Orange Scented Pastry Cages, harvesting spuds, picking Wexford mussels and cradling a hen from the gardens of Dunbrody House, Dundon's award-winning restaurant and luxury hotel in County Wexford. Dunbrody House is also host to a cookery school run by Dundon and he is a great champion of local produce and artisan producers. Traditional butcher Leo Halford in Wellington Bridge, specialist mushrooms from Fancy Fungi and Hook Head potatoes from Vincent and Geraldine Rowe are just some of the foodstuffs that he highlights while Atlantic salmon and Wexford strawberries also get a mention. Dundon also has to be applauded for sensibly valuing local and seasonal foods over organic imports and for growing many of his own fruit and vegetables in the gardens around Dunbrody House.

While I would prefer to admire rather than cook many of the dishes in Full on Irish, it has piqued my interest in visiting Dunbrody House and Dundon's final two chapters - Kitchen Garden and The Larder - have a particularly useful selection of recipes for Balsamic Reduction, Chilli Jam and Dunbrody Cucumber Pickle with Rocket. Eye candy, undoubtedly, but Full on Irish may not get much use in the kitchen.

Full on Irish: Creative Contemporary Cooking by Kevin Dundon is published by Epicure Press.

Listening to Winter Food the other day I heard an interview with Sean and Kieran Murphy of Murphy's Ice Cream in Dingle. They take presenter Clodagh McKenna through the making of their fabulous ice cream, telling her about local milk, flavourings and types of ice cream (Mango and Chilli - is that exported outside the Kingdom?!), taking her into a freezer room piled high with their produce - brioscaí (Cookies and cream), caramal (Honeycomb), bó bhán (Irish cream liqueur), fanaile (French vanilla) - and treating her, much to Clodagh's delight, to sú craobh or Raspberry Sorbet. And don't forget their seacláid - "chocolate, always chocolate', as Kieran says several time during the interview. No secrets where his heart lies, especially if you check out his blog at Ice Cream Ireland and his decadent recipe for Hot Chocolate.

In my continuing quest to discover the perfect Hot Chocolate recipe, I recently tried out - via an online recipe which has since disappeared - Pierre Hermé's recipe for Caramelised Cinnamon Hot Chocolate. Basically, it involves carmelising some sugar with a cinnamon stick, adding milk and a little water, then heating the mixture with LOTS of chocolate. It was amazingly rich - I ended up drinking mine with a spoon - and, I think, best served in espresso cups, rather than the cappuccino mugs that I used. The Boyfriend was not hugely impressed, considering that it was more like chocolate soup than the mug of hot chocolate that he had been promised. Next time I think I'll try Kieran Murphy's take on hot chocolates. Even though I've never been to Dingle I've heard many favourable things about their shop/café there and in Killarney and I know from personal experience how good their ice creams are. Even though summer seems a long way off, maybe I'll just have to grab a tub of ice cream on my way home some evening...and eat it in front of the fire.

Ah, St Patrick's Day. There's very little I can say about this Irish holiday without descending to cliché but, one of the great things about being back in Ireland is that we get a day off work. If you're not busy drowning the shamrock and having a feed of Guinness in some 'Orish' pub around the world (or maybe even if you are!), a big pot of Ham and Pea Soup and a couple of loaves of Irish Brown Soda Bread are as good a way of celebrating as any.

Happy St Patrick's Day!

Last Friday, over a glass of wine and some nibbles at a city centre tapas bar, the Boyfriend - after WEEKS of mystery - handed me my passport and...a guidebook for Paris! He had told me that we were going away for the weekend, we would be spending time in a city and that I had to pack for cold weather. Despite lots of guessing - I thought Galway, or maybe Belfast - I hadn't even come close to figuring out where we were going.

Coincidentally, I had been reading Clotilde's Paris-based Chocolate & Zucchini blog that morning. Between salivating over her descriptions of croissants aux amandes and peering with interest at the contents of her basket at the supermarket (I love visiting supermarkets in other countries), I was mentally planning a trip to Paris. Some dozen years ago, while au pairing in Chamonix, I had visited my friend - a fellow au pair - in Paris. At the time neither of us had any money so we just spent our time walking outside museums, reading menus and gazing longingly in patisserie windows.

Paris is the perfect city for food lovers - especially if you're not flat broke! We spent much of the weekend exploring Le Quartier Latin, thinking, talking about, sampling and eating all the wonderful French food on display. I could spend the rest of the week writing about the weekend but, instead, here are a few of the food highlights of our trip to Paris.

Continue reading "Une vacance surprise à Paris" »

Although these wee cookbooks are small - just 64 pages - they are beautifully formed. The Irish Food books are from the same stable that produces the Bridgestone Top 100 guides to restaurants and places to stay, as well as the Irish Food Guide - Sally and John McKenna's Estragon Press - they are well worth investing in, and at €3 apiece, they won't break the bank.

Slow & Traditional is a celebration of what the McKennas call Irish soul food. Indeed, with a selection of simple and approachable recipes for dishes like Dublin Coddle, Champ and Colcannon, this is comfort cooking at its best.

Waterford's acclaimed Tannery Restaurant chef Paul Flynn teams up with Sally McKenna in Fast & Modern. Concentrating on the best of Irish artisan produce, Flynn and McKenna present a selection of imaginative recipes that showcase wonderful products like mature Hegarty's cheddar cheese (Risotto of Peaches and Mature Hegarty's Cheddar) and Glenilen Clotted Cream (Crab Quiche with Glenilen Clotted Cream).

A section at the back of each book contains background information on associations and individuals working with Irish food as well as a directory of producers. Small packages indeed, but very good ones. I wonder if we'll have to wait long for their big brothers?

Irish Food: Slow & Traditional by John and Sally McKenna & Irish Food: Fast & Modern by Paul Flynn and Sally McKenna are published by Estragon Press.

I have become a cast iron convert. A Thursday night dash into a post-Christmas sale at Kitchen Compliments on Chatham Street in Dublin led to me becoming the proud owner of an oval "Racing Green" enamelled cast iron Chasseur casserole dish (the Chasseur range is like Le Creuset but a little cheaper). Well, I started off being proud until I realised how heavy it was and that I had to drag it - with the Boyfriend's help - to an opening at an art gallery, all the way round the (very large) exhibition, to the after-opening drinks in a local pub, and into a bad Mexican take-away on its way home to my kitchen. It survived its eventful night out in Dublin and, since then, has been put to use on many occasions, some of which have, again, involved trips across town.

This Spiced Chicken Tagine, inspired by Julie Le Clerc's recipe for Spiced Chicken with Apricots and Chickpeas, was the first dish I cooked using my cast iron pot. Being a terribly lazy cook (and refusing to use a dishwasher!), I love when I can use one pot from start to finish. No special serving dishes for me, thank you, as meals normally arrive on the table in whatever they've been cooked in - a "Racing Green" casserole in this case.

One of the first guests I cooked this for - my cousin's husband - is chilli-intolerant so, unlike many of my recipes, this is not hot-spicy. The ginger and cinnamon give it more of a mellow, laid-back, warm spicy flavour. I normally serve it with roasted vegetables - carrots and squash are current favourites - tossed in a little olive oil and a sprinkling of cumin, and a Spinach Bulgar Pilaf or piles of plain buttered couscous.

As with all casserole-type dishes, this Spiced Chicken Tagine gets tastier if made the day before you need it. Depending on the chicken pieces that you use, this can be a little fatty so an overnight sojourn in the fridge lets any excess fat rise to the top and solidify so that you can remove it easily. If you're not that organised - and I rarely am - you can just use a spoon to skim any fat off the surface before you serve up.

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Last week the Boyfriend decided that it was time to move on from making bagels which, though gorgeous, are very time-consuming to something a little faster. As we both take our lunches to work, we're going through a lot of brown bread at the moment (mostly McCambridge's...especially nicely nutty when toasted) so he decided to make a couple of loaves of my Brown Soda Bread. After a few minutes hovering and being more hindrance than help, I decided to leave him to it. I curled up on the couch in the living room with a book as he worked away in the adjacent kitchen - close enough to help if asked but far away so that I wouldn't be interfering!

All went smoothly and I just arrived back at the cooker to see him put the loaves in the oven. Normally I sprinkle them with sesame seeds but these looked like they were topped with sunflower seeds. Curious, I thought, asking the Boyfriend what he had put on the loaves. "Sesame seeds," he said defensively, "like it said in the recipe. YOUR recipe." I did a double take - had I just bought a packet of absolutely enormous sesame seeds? - but no, looking through the oven door they were definitely sunflower seeds. And so they proved. The Boyfriend, after looking at sesame seeds in the list of ingredients, had grabbed the first bag of seeds from the baking cupboard that started with S. I'm glad he didn't make the same mistake between bread soda/bicarbonate of soda and baking powder! As it turned out, the sunflower seed-topped loaves were so good that I've now started sprinkling both seeds on top of the loaves before I put them into the oven. And, after Sunday's trip to Avoca, I might even be adding poppy seeds to the flour along with the normal pumpkin seeds to make some Multi-Seed Brown Soda Bread.

Saturday night dinner for friends staying over meant a late night, a not-so-hurried rise on Sunday morning and a similarly delayed breakfast. We badly needed to blow the cobwebs away so we drove down to Brittas Bay for a long walk in the surprisingly warm sunshine (and a brief snooze on the beach!). When we arrived back in the car about 3pm, lunchless, the Boyfriend and I were ravenous. Driving back to Dublin we took the opportunity to turn off the N11 into Kilmacanogue's branch of Avoca Handweavers. Although initially rather daunted by the long line of lunch-ing and afternoon tea-ing visitors, we were distracted by a blackboard full of intriguing choices. By the time we had decided on dishes, we were almost at the top of the queue and gazing at the generously stocked salad display. More decisions had to be made.

I plumped for the Danish Cream Cheese, Rocket and Sundried Tomato Roulade while the Boyfriend was swayed away from his initial choice of Thai Pork Curry with Basmati Rice by the sight of goat's cheese on top of the otherwise unexciting sounding Roast Vegetable Ciabatta. Both dishes came with three salads so, after a little heming and hawing, I got a serving of sweet grated carrots dotted with liberal amounts of poppy seeds, a pasta salad with cherry tomatoes and one of beans tossed in a creamy dressing. The Boyfriend took the tomato and basil salad, along with Avoca's justly famous broccoli, hazelnut and feta combination and some cumin and vegetable-laced couscous.

After that, it was a matter of trying to find a pair of seats. No easy task in a café packed with travelling families and little old ladies digging into tea and scones, but the turnover is, fortunately, pretty fast (as are the clearing staff) and we soon ended up with a wee table by the windows. The servings were large - as were the plates - and, despite a hunger born of sea-air, we barely managed to get through the platefuls of food in front of us. And the price for this largesse? €11.95 for my roulade and €10.95 for the Boyfriend's ciabatta. We couldn't even find room to sample any of the delicious deserts, biscuits and cakes on offer, all of which - as with the main dishes, soups and breads - are made on the premises with well sourced ingredients, something all too rare at cafés across the country.

Besides pandering to random day-trippers like ourselves, Avoca Handweaversat Kilmacanogue is a great facility for people driving regularly from and to Waterford and Wexford. Luckily Avoca have several other branches, including one on Dublin's Suffolk Street, although do I wonder if they would ever be interested in opening a decent eating station on the Dublin-Cork road?

Avoca Handweavers is located at Kilmacanogue in County Wicklow and several other locations across the country including Suffolk Street, Dublin and Moll's Gap on the Ring of Kerry.

There are seven members of the Bibliofemme bookclub and, every month, one of us hosts a meeting where we discuss the book distributed at the previous meeting. As I had picked the last book - Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider - all the Femmes were coming round to mine on Saturday and, in a change from our normal night-time get-together, we were meeting at 12pm. Normally we just have nibbles and wine - having taken a vow when the club started not to have anyone slaving over a hot stove - but I couldn't resist the chance to try out some brunch recipes. Although, having carelessly tossed off an invitation to brunch to six people (normally seven but the Artist couldn't make it back from London), those recipes seemed to be rather difficult to come by.

Despite being stuffed full of recommendations for other group events, Tom's Big Dinners didn't have one idea for brunch so I had to look elsewhere. A trawl through my collection of Nigella's books left me similarly lost but, somewhere en route, I had decided that eggs were an appropriate thing to have and, after a zoom around the local supermarket to see what was in stock, I settled on a Smoked Salmon, Cream Cheese and Potato Frittata (to try out my new cast-iron frying pan!) served with Mushrooms in Milk. This mushroom recipe, adapted from Denis Cotter's ever-useful A Paradiso Year: Autumn and Winter Cooking, is something that I remember my Nana making on the Aga cooker in Oldcastle town when I was small.

The morning of the brunch I picked up some small crusty bread rolls and made a couple of loaves of fresh brown bread. I had intended to make some chocolate muffins (I've rediscovered the muffin recipe book that Bibliofemme's Writer gave me years ago) but, as I started to weigh out ingredients, I discovered that I was almost out of paper muffin cases so that idea had to go out the window at the last minute. Just as well - I had to keep leaving the apartment to find lost Femmes and lead them home! And The Whale Rider? A disappointment. Which reminds me, I need to go and review it now for the Bibliofemme site...

Continue reading "Bookclub brunch" »

With a subtitle that says, "Big-time home cooking for family and friends" you can't say that you haven't been warned. Tom Douglas, with his wife Jackie Cross, is the owner of several restaurants in Seattle one of which, Etta's Seafood, I've heard about for years from a friend that worked there some time ago. As is evident from the cover photograph, he's a big man with a big appetite - the kind of chef that, in short, you'd trust to cook you dinner or to tell you how to cook your own dinner. Don't go looking for any nouvelle cuisine in this book 'cos you ain't gonna find it. What you will find, however, are plenty of recipes that will make you want to march right into that kitchen of yours and start cooking for crowds.

Douglas writes by menu and the book has a total of thirteen adaptable menus for every (American) occasion, including Puget Sound Crab Feed, Screen Door Barbeque, Kat and Clay's Merlot Release Picnic and Christmas Eve with the Dows. There are no dinners à deux here; rather this is a book to arrange events by. Plan your own adaptation of Pop Pop's Winter Solstice, get half-a-dozen people over for A Chinese Feast or figure out where your local market is so that you can organise a Pike Place Market Menu.

Each menu starts off with a creative cocktail, a most civilised way to start a meal, and Douglas also gives suggestions on appropriate wines to go with the food. There are tips in the side margins and explanations of ingredients and techniques. After years of seeing kosher salt recommended in American recipes I now know why (because it tastes less harsh taste and salty than table salt) and how to make reductions to add intensity to the dishes I cook. One of the best things about this book is Douglas' A Step Ahead section in each recipe where he details anything that you can prepare in advance - something I wish more cookbook writers would make use of.

Douglas is a proud champion of the best of local food producers and this book will be a wealth of information to anyone based in and around Seattle. The rest of us will have to settle for trying a glass of his Homemade Bianco on the Rocks with a Twist followed by - to do a little menu mixing - some Sweet and Hot Fried Almonds, Spring Chickens with Green Marinade and Sweet Pea Risotto, topped off with Bitter Orange Chocolate Mousse. What's not to like?

Tom's Big Dinners by Tom Douglas is published by Morrow Cookbooks.