November 2006 Archives

I didn't have much time for shopping on my recent Berlin trip but I did manage to make a selection of purchases around the themes (although I didn't notice this at the time!) of cherries and chocolate, mostly from the fantastic Kollwitzplatz Saturday Market.

In the cherry category we have:

1 x bottle of Griotka cherry liqueur from Prague Airport. Very useful when you arrive at a cold cottage late on Friday nights, especially when sips of the liqueur are alternated with sips of caramelised cinnamon hot chocolate.
1 x bottle of kirschwasser or cherry brandy from Berlin. Still unopened. I'm limiting myself to one bottle of alcoholic cherry drink at a time!
1 x small tin box of Pulmoll cherry sweets, also from Prague Airport.
1 x bar of Nestle Noir Cerise chocolate. Decided to pass this to the family - it then disappeared too quickly for me to test it.
1 x jar of amazing cherry-laden jam from Scandinavia, I think, that I ended up buying after starting a conversation with a Very Persuasive saleswoman in Kollwitzplatz Market.

I recently got a mail from a New York PR company about a Nextbook podcast featuring one of my favourite cookbook writers, Middle Eastern food enthusiast Claudia Roden. Nextbook's interviewer, Hugh Levinson, visited her kitchen in London and talks to her while she prepares Poulet aux Dattes (Chicken with Dates) and Salade de Tomates et Poivrons Grillés (Grilled Tomato and Pepper Salad), both from her last publication, The Book of Jewish Food.

It is a lovely, relaxed interview with Claudia cooking and talking about how she became involved in food writing, her own family's food history and the importance of understanding how food and culture are intertwined. A word of warning though - don't listen to this at work. It will just make you much too hungry! The interview is online here and the same page also has copies of the great-sounding recipes that she cooked while talking to Hugh.

The second episode of Richard Corrigan's show, Corrigan Knows Food, will be on RTÉ One this evening at 7pm. While I think Corrigan can sometimes go a bit overboard (his recent Late Late Show appearance was embarrassing, to say the least) when he's on form, he's an enthusiastic presenter and inspiring cook. Why, however, someone felt the need to shoehorn the man into a badly-fitting magazine format, is a mystery. Anne Kennedy has a good review of the first programme in the series here on Greatfood.ie and you can watch the show online here.

Corrigan also makes an appearance on last night's Questions and Answers, responding to the question "Does Richard Corrigan think he is promoting Irish food and tourism when he criticises Irish food products?". John O'Donoghue, Minister for Arts, Sport & Tourism, brings up the old chestnut of Ireland: The Food Ireland (recently debated at the Euro-toques forum in Brooklodge) and there are also contributions from Kevin Sheridan of Sheridans Cheesemongers as well as a whole heap of good sense talked by a gentleman - whose name I didn't catch - from the Associated Craft Butcher's of Ireland.

We are nearly through our first apple season at the cottage - the few that have been too small to pick are still grimly clinging on to the tree through November wind and rain, while the fallen ones are being enjoyed by our still-prolific rabbit population and I've got a stash for myself upstairs in the spare room.

My granddad, who had a small orchard beside his house, tried many different ways of storing apples, especially cooking apples, through the winter but they often disintegrated into a soup of rotten apples in the bottom of the wooden boxes he used come spring. I'm starting my own system of trials this year, lovingly hand-picking unblemished apples and hauling enamel bowlfuls upstairs to carefully arrange in a single layer on the slatted shelves of the wardrobe.

Storing aside, I've been cooking with the apples every weekend and Barbara's version of Taste Magazine's Cinnamon Apple Cake was a well-timed entry on Winos and Foodies. I've been making this in a double mixture for an after-lunch pudding, so you get more cake to apple ratio - plenty of soakage for lashings of hot custard - and using Muscovado sugar to deepen the flavour. If you've a vanilla pod lying around, do as my little sister did last weekend and scrape the seeds into the custard to give your traditional Bird's Custard Powder - necessary for all family meals! - a bit of an oomph.

Here are a few Irish food sites that I've been spending time on recently...

* Greatfood.ie - I wrote about this site when I first discovered it in April and I've been enjoying it ever since, especially the recipes for spice blends from Orgapod's Nafisa Brennan. Between her ideas and Barbara over at Winos and Foodies talking about her own homemade curry powder, I'm getting inspired!

* The Irish Foodie - "tastes and scribblings" from Hamlet Sweeny in Dun Laoghaire. Check out his rant on the homogenisation of eating-out food in Ireland.

* Where's the Salt? - a Cork perspective on food for families (and Kieran Murphy's superb Chocolate Chip Cookies)

* martindywer.com - lucky Martin is just recently back from Terre Madre 2006 in Turin. Read about his experiences with Antonio Carluccio et al here.

* Though small, it is tasty - after recently becoming the very proud owner of my own damson tree, I was particularly taken with this entry on Damson Gin. Make sure you check out the Caraway Vodka too!

Cookies, especially chocolate chip ones, are always a winner. But, when they also contain the nutty goodness of oatmeal and you get your hands on them, fresh from the oven so that the chocolate is still warm and melted, they are a treat indeed. A recipe that caught my eye recently on one of my regular wanders around Nic's bakingsheet blog (her buttermilk pancakes are a regular weekend breakfast favourite) was this one, for Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies from The Frog Commissary Cookbook.

I packed my hand mixer for a recent long weekend at the cottage - I was intending to make Barbara's Cinnamon Apple Cake with apples from our own tree - and I decided to use it to mix up a batch of these cookies before an old school and college friend called over with her new baby. It looks like the hand mixer may become a permanent part of my cottage-going luggage in the future. Life is really a whole lot easier when you don't have to cream ingredients by hand! On Friday I cooked half of the dough and the cookies were very popular, especially with a Boyfriend working hard on ridding the half-acre behind the cottage of nettles. The School Friend turned up with a loaf of homemade brown bread so she took home a stack for her own husband in return.

Nic says that these are the kind of cookies that everyone should have in their repertoire and I would agree. The dough is easy to make and happy to sit in the fridge for a few days. I cooked the second half on Monday, and had them out of the oven just before my cousin arrived but make sure you add a few minutes to the cookie baking time if you cooking them direct from the fridge. They have the right amount of chewiness and crispness, decadent chocolate balanced with (slightly) healthy oatmeal. These are the kind of cookies that don't sit around for long and no one ever manages to stop at one, or even two or, sometimes, three... For my adaptation of the recipe below, I used Muscovado sugar as I love the depth it gives to baked goods and I converted (in a somewhat random way) the American cup measurements to imperial. Perfect cooking for a rainy Sunday afternoon.

To give my new cooker a good working test last weekend, I invited my family - Mum, two sisters, a brother and my Granny - to lunch on Sunday so, together with the Boyfriend and myself, we were seven. This, naturally enough, entailed several last minute phone calls home to see if they could bring an extra chair and several sets of cutlery!

Luckily the oven was able to cope with a very un-traditional Coq au Vin (a recipe that developed according to the foodstuffs I had in the house - not so easy to get extra ingredients at the drop of a hat when you're a couple of miles from the nearest town!) as well as two layers of roasting vegetables - one of potatoes, without which no family lunch is complete, and the other a mixture of carrots, onion, garlic, courgette and pumpkin. Amongst all the lurid-coloured pumpkins-for-carving on sale around the place, I was thrilled to discover a very decent crown pumpkin during the trip to the English Market in Cork City on Saturday, which also supplied me with a half-dozen meaty organic chicken pieces.

This recipe was inspired by Frances Bissell's Coq au Vin in her comprehensive Real Meat Cookbook (which also, luckily, contains recipes for rabbit!). I didn't have enough red wine in the house hence the mixture of red and white that I used - it didn't seem to cause any harm. The best dish to cook this in is a cast iron casserole as it lets you do the whole thing in just one pan, from frying the ingredients on the stove top to cooking it in the oven and onwards to the center of the kitchen table for serving. If you have any left-overs (if your little brother leaves any behind, that is!) they make a good supper, reheated and tossed with some freshly-cooked pasta.

The dates and presenters for Savour New Zealand 2007 have just recently been announced and, as a participant at the 2005 event, I cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone with even the slightest interest in food and wine. It takes place in Christchurch, from Friday 27 to Sunday 29 April 2007, and this year Lauraine Jacobs, Cuisine magazine food editor, is the Programme Director.

Presenters that she has lined up include one of my favourite cookbook writers, Tamasin Day-Lewis; New York cheesemonger extraordinaire, Rob Kaufelt; San Francisco's Nancy Oakes of the acclaimed Boulevard restaurant; Gabriela Llamas, from Madrid's famous cooking school, Juan de Altamiras; and British food writer Tom Parker Bowles, author of the recent Year of Eating Dangerously. As at Savour NZ 2005, the international is well balanced with the local - Martin Aspinwall of the wonderful Canterbury Cheesemongers; South Island Chef of the Year and Best Young Canterbury Chef, Guy Stanaway; Marlborough winemakers Matt Thomson and Patrick Materman; and Australian representatives - Geoff Lindsay, chef/owner of award-winning Melbourne restaurant Pearl and Max Allen, best-selling author and Australia's most published wine writer.

Do be aware, however, that a delegate pass is NZ$685 but this does include eight classes over the weekend, all the food and wine that you can possibly eat and drink during those classes, lunches (just in case you're a bit peckish!), coffee breaks, the opening cocktail party on Friday night and the Great Farewell send off on Sunday. The Boyfriend and I were trying to plan our next trip to NZ to coincide with Savour New Zealand but a family wedding in January has put paid to that. I'll have to try and sign up for 2009!