May 2006 Archives

Bibliocook is on tour! The Boyfriend and I travelled to Casablanca last weekend to meet with a friend - the Australian - and spend a couple of weeks travelling around the country. It's a good opportunity to practise the languages that we've been learning, French for me and Arabic in the Boyfriend's case, as well as doing a thorough investigation of the food and flavours of Morocco. Not to mention continuous stops to feed the BF's addiction to the refreshing, sweet mint tea available on every corner. Unfortunately, the lack of internet cafès in the Sahara and absence of QWERTY keyboards may mean less frequent updates for the moment but I'll remedy that as soon as I get back to Ireland. Now, time for tonight's tagine...

A wee while ago, Sinéad over at Sigla sent me a link to a piece on Irish language podcast blog An tImeall on Cócaireacht agus Filíocht (Cooking and Poetry). My prowess as gaeilge not being what it should be, I had to get a friend to translate it for me - many thanks to the Schoolteacher - and am finally able to appreciate Conn's kind words. There's a link to the page here or, for my non-Irish readers, a couple of paragraphs translated below. Isn't the Irish word for blogging - ag blagadóireacht - absolutely gorgeous? Compliments like these just might be the way to encourage me to improve my Irish.

Cookbook sections in secondhand bookshops can be a little hit or miss. There's always a pile of microwave cookbooks - no one, for some reason wants to hang onto these dodgy and dated texts - a scattering of horrible diet books and often lots of ancient Family Circle publications, with their "triple-tested in the test kitchens" claim, but, rarely something that you actually want to cook from, let alone buy. Still, I live in hope, so a recent trip to Athlone had to include a browse in the local secondhand bookshop (I still haven't discovered its name) which turned out to be a most amazing example of its kind.

Just a couple of shelves were devoted to cookbooks but what was on offer was enough to have me standing there, leafing through the pages, for quite a while. My eye was taken by a red hardbacked book from the 1960s, the gold letters on its spine saying "Monica's Kitchen". Opening it, I was so entertained by Monica Sheridan's humorous prose that I had to read it out loud to the Boyfriend - something that I continued to do through the weekend's café interludes, car journeys and meals in the tent.

Apart from her unfortunate love of unsweetened condensed milk in soups and the like, Monica's Kitchen is actually a breath of fresh air. Well travelled, she carelessly mentions dishes from France and the continent (she once spent months learning the foie gras business, "with the intention of setting myself up as a Goose Girl in the West of Ireland") alongside the plain, simple Irish recipes. Her roast chicken, unstuffed and dressed with the pan juices, would be appreciated by Nigel Slater and there are definite French influences to many of her vegetable recipes which are, fortunately, a long way from the traditional Irish boil-it-until-it-turns-grey method.

Some of her opinions are laugh-out-loud hilarious. I particularly liked her take the things necessary to make a cook:

"Another essential to good cooking is a husband or son with an adventurous palate. Women do not cook for other women, or for themselves. If they are cooking for other women, it is to annoy them or dazzle them..."

A few of her recipe asides veer towards the demented - ideas on dye in pea soup ("Any fool can make pea soup, but here are the refinements that give it an air. You should add a good spoon of green vegetable dye to the soup just before you serve it. That will take the anaemic look off it."), boned chicken ("Frankly, I wouldn't recommend it, but, if you want to see green in the eyes of the women and hear the praise of gluttonous men ringing in your ears, well, here goes."), brown bread ("The longevity of the men and women of rural Ireland may be directly attributed to their simple diet of porridge, wholemeal bread and stews - together with their uncompromising refusal to fraternise with Income Tax Collectors.") - but Monica's Kitchen is chock-full of useful suggestions and recipes as well as being a complete treat to read. Well worth looking out for.

Monica's Kitchen by Monica Sheridan is published by Castle Publications Ltd.

The Boyfriend and I are about to head off to Morocco in a week's time so I thought I should use up my last year's supply of Moroccan spice blend ras el hanout on a meal for the Writer - who brought me my first taste of spices from Morocco - and her husband. I decided to make my favourite Moroccan Lamb Tagine and, to accompany it, thought that I'd jazz up my usual plain couscous a little.

A lonely-looking squash in the fridge from the tail end of last season's shopping, tossed with some olive oil and spices (I used Ras al hanout but you could easily substitute a mixture of ground cumin, coriander and chilli powder) happily roasted in the oven alongside the tagine. While it tenderised and caramelised, I prepared the couscous, adding in some thinly sliced red onion (for tang), toasted pine nuts (for crunch) and dried cranberries or "craisins" (for sweet tartness). Inspired by an idea from New Zealand cook Allyson Gofton, I grabbed a couple of oranges from the fruit bowl, threw the zest on top of the couscous and used the juice for a dressing. Living in a first floor flat without window sills means that there's a dearth of fresh herbs these days, unlike last summer in NZ, but I had a little bunch of chives which I added to the salad although, I have to say, parsley (as suggested below) would have been much better.

Spiced Squash and Couscous Salad is good with a tagine but nearly even better in a lunchbox the following day, with a dollop of natural yoghurt, so you get to appreciate all the tastes and textures. This is also a very good salad for stuffing in pita breads or rolling up in a flatbread but do make sure that you serve it at room temperature - the flavour is very much dulled when it is refridgerator-cold.

I've often intended to but never quite got round to getting involved in Sugar High Friday. It's a reoccurring blog event that was originally, once-upon-a-long-time-ago, started by Domestic Goddess Jennifer. This round is being hosted by Ruth, who is physically situated in Toronto - virtually at Once Upon A Feast and the theme she has picked for this month is ginger. I love this spice in all its incarnations, ground and used in a delicious little Ginger Gem, chunks of crystallised ginger studing a moist, sticky slab of Gingerbread or - at the other end of the spectrum - slices of the fresh root simmered in a savory chicken stock for soup.

Ginger is well loved in New Zealand and that's very evident in any café or bakery that you go into. One of the (many) things that I love about NZ is the easy availability of great sweet treats to have with a cup of coffee - things like Tan Slice, shortbread, Millionaire Squares, countless oaty slices, amazing looking cookies and, one of my all time favourites, Ginger Crunch. Six months back in Ireland and suffering from a Ginger Crunch deficit, I decided that this was going to be my contribution to the latest round of SHF.

I'm not sure where this recipe for Ginger Crunch came from as it is an amalgamation of several different versions - I'm sure it has its roots somewhere, at some stage, in the New Zealand classic Edmonds Cookery Book. Wanting to to make it particularly gingery I added at two teaspoons of ground ginger to the base, along with some chopped crystallised ginger. Just perfect with a cup of coffee on a Sugar High Friday afternoon.

Watch out for the idiosyncratic food columns by Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos in The Guardian newspaper. After tip-off from my workmate about Kapranos being about to publish a collection of the columns, I went searching for them online. They're pieces about the foods that former Glaswegian sous-chef Kapranos encounters while on tour with the band - a burger at Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles, blowfish in Osaka, the best New York donuts, street food in Singapore. Here are a few links to his most recent articles:
05.05.06 Alex Kapranos: The Formosa cafe
28.04.06 Alex Kapranos: The kluski pasta
21.04.06 Alex Kapranos: It came from the east
31.03.06 Alex Kapranos: Eating habits
24.03.06 Alex Kapranos: Guilty pleasures
17.03.06 Alex Kapranos: Donut delights
10.03.06 Alex Kapranos: Carnivore's corner
03.03.06 Alex Kapranos: Big fat pig
24.02.06 Alex Kapranos: Fast food revenge
17.02.06 Soundbites

When the days get brighter and longer, a girl's thoughts turn to salad lunches. Based about 15 minutes walk away from any shops or cafés and blessed/cursed with a sloppy canteen, I bring my lunch to work year-round. Brown Bread and a fridge in the office are my lifesavers - the bread for toasting in the canteen and the fridge to store endless blocks of cheese for my normal lunch. Sometimes food bloggers eat boring food too! With the arrival of the summer, however, I start wanting a little more variety, particularly as the canteen is closed at the moment so I have no access to my toaster.

At one stage in my life I lived in a little hobbit-hole of a basement flat with other two girls and, for a brief time, we took it in turns to make lunches for each other - pasta salads, bean salads, couscous salads - that kind of thing. It had to be a dish that was happy to be made the night beforehand and sit around in the fridge. One of my favourite lunches then, and now, is a simple Puy Lentil Salad with Balsamic Dressing. There aren't very many ingredients needed here but what few there are should be very good. I always use the small, speckled blue-green Puy lentils in preference to the normal plain brown or green varieties (there's a very good page on the different sorts of lentils with pictures here). The Puy lentils are better at keeping their shape - always a useful trait in a salad, otherwise it can be very sludgy - and they have a lovely deep, almost peppery, flavour. They're also slightly more expensive than the others but they're definitely worth it.

Quality control should also follow through to the salad dressing which is nothing more complex than an amalgam of several of my store-cupboard favourites - a fruity extra virgin olive oil, richly intense balsamic, pungent wholegrain mustard, freshly ground pepper and Maldon sea salt. The basics mastered, there are many different ingredients that you can add to the salad. The one in the photo, along with the ever-present chopped red onion and garlic clove, has a diced red pepper and handful of snipped chives. I often add cheese, either chunks of mature cheddar or cubes of feta. Goat's cheese is also good but, between the Boyfriend and myself unable to leave it be, it rarely sticks around long enough to see the inside of a salad bowl. The small rice-like pasta shapes called orzo are also good in the lentils as are fresh soft herbs, tomatoes, olives, rocket or anything that you like. Just show some good judgment and don't add them all together.

A quick look round at other people's blogs for a few ideas throws up a myriad of great Puy lentil salad recipes. There's a fabulous looking Puy Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese on Moira's Who Wants Seconds blog and, to travel to the home of Puy lentils, you could try Salade de Lentilles Pomme et Cumin from Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini in Paris. Veggie Evangelist Alanna Kellogg has a Lentil Salad with Tomatoes, Dill & Basil or you could try Julie's Aromatic Lentils and Orzo at A Finger in Every Pie. Check out Albion Cooks' Lentils Du Puy cooked in White Wine with Goat Cheese or, for another taste combination, try Jules's warm green lentil, chorizo & cavolo nero salad at stone soup.

Watch out next month for Taste of Dublin 2006, running from 22 June to 25 June in the gardens at Dublin Castle and described in the press release as Dublin's "first outdoor gourmet food and drink festival". Ha! There's a reason why there aren't more outdoor events in Ireland - talk to the shivering, drenched stallholders at any of the markets around the country and see why. Anyway, festival visitors can expect signature dishes from a selection of the city's restaurants, including a few of my favourites - the lovely Silk Road Café in the Chester Beatty Library and the more sophisticated Cellar Restaurant at The Merrion.

Other restaurants participating are Bang Café, Chapter One, Diep Le Shaker, Jaipur, King Sitric, La Stampa, L'Ecrivain, Peploes, Town Bar & Grill, Unicorn, Yo Thai and Chai Yo. I've eaten a few times, years ago, in Bang Café and always enjoyed the experience while Town Bar & Grill was the setting for our work Christmas dinner (never a good time to assess a restaurant - I will draw a veil over the rather inebriated proceedings!) so I look forward to browsing and tasting.

The big draw for me will be the Chef's Theatre with demonstrations from the ever-interesting Richard Corrigan of London's Lindsay House and Bentley's Oyster Bar and Grill along with Irish kitchen heroine Darina Allen. And, for those of you who are fans of her daughter-in-law, Rachel Allen is also one of the chefs lined up to demonstrate. Of course, as the event is ticketed according to time (two sessions daily, 12pm to 4pm and 5.30pm to 9.30pm), getting to see Richard and Darina in the same session is going to prove a challenge. Think I'll pass on Rachel!

The tickets, priced from €25 to €75, depending on how many florins - the currency to be used in paying for your Taste(s) of Dublin - you want to buy in advance. Apparently the exchange rate is one florin to one euro and dishes will be priced from €5 to €8. Fair enough, but the Ticketmaster booking fee is pricy at best (€2.95 on the €25 tickets), rising fairly sharply to something nasty (€5.95 for the €75 tickets). For my money, the best deal looks like the €35 option which works out at €15 entrance fee plus €20-worth of florins. Now, I just wonder what's the best way around around that €4.38 booking fee?

Our first weekend of the year under canvas couldn't exactly be called an unqualified success. We did actually remember to pack the sleeping bags (and Anzac Biscuit morale) but, despite such forethought, it wasn't exactly the weather for camping in the west of Ireland. The heavens opened early on Sunday morning, raining us off Achill Island and we had to retreat to an old-school bed & breakfast in Westport back on mainland Mayo. At least we managed to have a cold, but fine, Friday night breaking our journey at the ever-reliable Lough Ree campsite in Ballykerran, near Athlone before moving on to the beautiful-on-a-fine-evening Seal Caves Park in Dugort on the north side of Achill Island. We cooked dinner outdoors on our little gas burner - a typical simple one-pot camping meal of Clonakilty Black Pudding, roughly chopped mushrooms and baked beans - and drank red wine in the still-warm late evening sunshine, feeling like summer had finally arrived.

When we went to bed on Saturday it was a glorious night, clear skies and stars overhead. Alas, after about six hours rain on Sunday, it was time to abandon our damp and wind-buffeted tent. Still, bad weather allows for some investigation of local hostelries and eateries and there was surprisingly good pickings on our ramblings.

A new arrival on the Dublin grocery scene is the gorgeous-looking Fallon & Byrne, a classy supermarket along the lines of Donnybrook Fair, on Exchequer Street in the city centre. They've been renovating the building for a while and, seeing it opened at last, I just popped in for a few minutes last Saturday week. A former telephone exchange, it's an airy, echo-y space, all parquet floors and food everywhere. Right inside the door is a juice bar and, dotted around the periphery of the vast floor space, were also an in-store butchers, a long deli counter filled with take-home dishes, a coffee bar, complete with high stools and tables, and a well-stocked cheese and charcuterie counter which I could have spent the rest of the afternoon poring over.

One row was filled with piles of unusual vegetables and fruit - I was sorely tempted by the heads of perky looking chicory or Belgian endive, having enjoyed a dish in Paris where they were rolled in slices of ham and baked in a béchamel sauce. But I was already late to meet with friends so I had to leave with nothing but a little packet of saffron from the intriguing spice range, a lot of it sourced from London's The Spice Shop, across from Books for Cooks on Blenheim Crescent. Although my brief visit was only to the ground floor, apparently Fallon & Byrne encompasses another two levels - a wine bar and cellar downstairs and there's going to be a restaurant on the first floor.

It's definitely a place that I'm going to want to explore more. Meanwhile, there's an interview with F&B food hall manager, Rachel Firth, on new Irish foodie website Greatfood.ie (another place well worth taking a - virtual - look around) which explains more about the ethos behind and aims of the store.

Fallon & Byrne, Exchequer Building, 11-17 Exchequer Street, Dublin 2.