February 2007 Archives

Fairtrade Fortnight kicked off on Monday this week and, if you're not off chocolate for lent this year, you can indulge and feel suitably virtuous at Amnesty Ireland's launch of their fairly traded and organic bars of chocolate. It takes place tomorrow night, Thursday 1 March, at 7pm in the Freedom Café on 48 Fleet Street in Dublin's Temple Bar and admission is €5 per person. Rumour has it that there'll be a chocolate fountain in situ.

Incidentally, if you're about town and looking for a decently priced, delicious lunch, the Freedom Café is definitely the place to go - and, if you're interested in chocolate supplies for baking, pick up a doorstopper 1kg bar of their Amnesty Fairly Trade Chocolate.

For more information on fair trade and the Fairtrade brand, there was a good article in Sunday's Observer Food Monthly Magazine (I'm only getting through Sunday's papers at this stage in the week!) here and you can also listen to a feature on RTÉ's Morning Ireland.

I'm heading off to Barcelona with the sister for three days in a few weekend's time and I'd love some food suggestions! We've never been there before so this is completely new ground for us both. The Boyfriend has been recommending the "silky" coffee to me, the sister has lists of places to try out (she arrives several days before me) and, my appetite whetted by the Mediterranean Food Company's tapas class and several nights consumption at Dublin's Market Bar, I have every intention of eating my way through as much as possible of everything on offer in Barcelona.

After having very positive experiences with using the Lonely Planet World Food Guides in Thailand, Malaysia and Morocco - handy little books which incorporate information on food history, vocabulary, specialities and recipes in one pocket-sized package - I've ordered one on Spain to add to my collection. Fingers crossed that it arrives in time!

We're staying at a self-catering apartment in the Barceloneta area, which will give us the chance to ramble through the markets, buying fresh produce to prepare at home. What I would really like to do is a cooking class or walking tour of the markets with a local guide. Anyone know where I could find any information on something like this?

I have made this dish a couple of times for Pancake Tuesday as I love to have a pancake main as well as desert! One of the best things about it is that many of the elements can be made beforehand. This year I made the pancake batter on Sunday, the pancakes and tomato sauce on Monday, then assembled, baked and served on Tuesday.

I was feeding six people after work on Tuesday night - hence no pictures! - so I did a double mixture of the pancake batter and also doubled the amount of Simple Tomato Sauce. The ricotta and spinach filling that I use isn't a mile away from the one I normally make for Spanakopita and it's also good when used to stuff cannelloni.

Not being very clued in with dates, the first notice I received of the annual pancake flipping day was a display of bottles of squeezy lemon and pancake batter mixes at Morton's in Ranelagh. Pancakes really are one of the easiest things to make so don't bother with the mix - it's normally nothing but flour anyway - buy a real lemon and whip up your own pancakes in minutes with some of the recipes on Greatfood.ie - try sweet pancakes, crêpes, savoury French Galettes or even some fluffy American Buttermilk Pancakes from Bakingsheet.

With a few friends coming round for pancakes and hot chocolate (maybe some Mexican Hot Chocolate?) this evening, I'm using my old recipe for pancake batter (100g plain flour, a pinch of salt, 1 egg, 250ml milk and a dribble of melted butter all whisked together) to make a savoury Ricotta and Spinach Pancake Bake. Sweet pancakes will depend on the mood of the cook afterwards! And always remember, the first pancake invariably sticks and turns into a scrunched up mess. Don't get discouraged - just toss it onto a plate, sprinkle with caster sugar, squeeze a half lemon over and eat it to sweeten you mood while you get stuck into the rest of the batch. Non-stick frying pans have their fans but I wouldn't be without my very heavy cast iron frying pan - no flipping for me, you'd have to have wrists of steel to manage to move this baby so fast - which does a great job every time. Enjoy your pancakes!

...unfortunately Bibliocook didn't manage to make it through to the shortlisted stage of the 2007 Irish Blog Awards. However, some of my favourites did so best of luck to Beaut.ie, Sinéad Gleeson, One Breast Less, Conor O'Neill, The Waiting Game and Ice Cream Ireland on 11 March at the Alexander Hotel. You can see the full list here and a particularly big thank you to all who voted for Bibliocook!

First, get your hands on a small round soft cheese called Vacherin Mont d'Or. It is a seasonal French or Swiss cheese, which means that you can only have this kind of meal between mid-September and March - like asparagus, it makes it all the nicer as a result.

Preheat your oven to 200°C and take the cheese out of its little wooden box. Remove any waxed paper and sit it snugly back into the box. Tear off a sheet of tinfoil and scrunch the tinfoil around the box to make a nice nest so that nothing can flow out in the oven. Prick the top rind of the cheese with a fork and then, using a spoon, scoop enough of the rind sideways enough so that you can push a small bunch of thyme and a couple of cloves of garlic into the heart of the cheese.

Open a bottle of decent white wine - you'll be drinking this with your dinner later on (New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is a good option) - and pour a generous splash of it over the rind. Land the cheese into the oven for 25 minutes.

You can use this time to lay the table with two plates, a selection of apples from your garden (if the winter stores haven't already been used or gone rotten), some pears, a dish of walnuts that you bought in a Berlin market, the rest of the wine, crusty bread and a good green salad. A simple bowl of floppy butterhead leaves, dressed with a mustardy balsamic dressing will be perfect. When your cheese is warmed through and happily bubbling, serve it up and eat by candlelight, dipping your bread into the cheese and alternating with the nuts, fruit and salad. The molten, creamy unctuous cheese is like fondue in a box - with none of the hassle.

It's a very filling meal so you can get away with making no desert although, if the mood should take you, you could stretch to a few squares of ultra-luxurious Valrhona chocolate or, even closer to home, some of Cocoa Bean's exquisitely-flavoured dark chocolate bars - star anise and ginger or orange zest would both be particularly good contrasts to the richness of the cheese.

Since returning from New Zealand we've been spending most weekends down at the cottage, the Boyfriend inventing new and more ingenious ways to catch the rabbits (score so far - Boyfriend: nil, rabbits: merrily increasing by the day) and me pottering around in the kitchen, baking cakes and slices to fill the tins. It's a great opportunity to try out recipes that I've been hoarding away from other blogs and websites (does everyone else have a word document on their desktop which they update regularly with recipes that take their eye?) as well as working my way through the piles of cookbooks currently on my desk, including Bill Granger's latest, Cook with Jamie, the Rose Bakery cookbook, Sophie Conran's Pies and Cook by Thomasina Miers. Bakingsheet is a rich source of recipes and Nic's Mexican Chocolate Loaf Cake, albeit without the orange rind and made in a round tin, was a successful gift for our hosts in Cobh last weekend even though I felt that my cinnamon was past its freshest date. A Maya Gold-flavoured variation of Thomasina Miers's chocolate cake, baked in a Bundt cake tin from my NZ kitchen which I manage to cram into our luggage this time, was a success with one sister - who liked its fudgyness - and a failure with the other, for being too rich! Sometimes you just can't win.

Being out in the country with limited shopping opportunities available locally (hence the stale cinnamon), recipes are often a triumph of available ingredients over specified ingredients and many days find me scrabbling through my collection of recipe books in the cottage for something I can make with what's at my disposal. No butter for the Mexican Chocolate Loaf Cake? The recipe is quite muffin-like so I used sunflower oil instead. Wanting to make muffins for a family gathering? Allyson Gofton's Great New Zealand Baking Book stepped into the breach with chocolate chips substituted for the berries in her Chocolate Berry Muffins.

With my electric hand mixer living in Dublin at the moment, I'm also used to figuring out ways around the instructions "cream the butter and sugar together". There were alterations and substitutions aplenty when I decided to make shortbread using Jamie Oliver's recipe in one of my Christmas pressies, Cook With Jamie. Instead of creaming, I used my pastry blender to rub the butter into the flour and used extra flour instead of the cornflour that had suddenly gone amiss. Still, the end result more than justified the means - not as short as it would have been if I had used the cornflour or some rice flour, but its buttery goodness more than knocks the spots off any bought biscuits. Just what's needed for dunking in hot chocolate on cold Friday nights when we arrive down from Dublin.

PS - Happy Valentine's Day!

Wow! I'm delighted to see that Bibliocook is on the Best Specialist Blog longlist for this year's Irish Blog Awards. You can read more about the awards goings on here, all the longlists for the various categories are here and - very important this! - you can vote for your favourites here.

The best thing about these kind of longlists is the opportunity to discover lots of different blogs. I've also noticed several old favourites like Beaut.ie, Maguire's Movies, The Sigla Blog, Maman Poulet, Blogorrah, Conor's Bandon Blog, Winds and Breezes and Bubble Brothers. Other food blogs in my category - there are a total of 32 of us so forgive me if I don't post the whole list - are Random Grub and Ice Cream Ireland. I've also come across An Irish Craftworker's Good Life, Siopa Eile and Munster Pubs before but sites like One Breast Less, The Waiting Game and Burma Review also look well worth spending some time with.

Voting for this round will close on 16 February at 5pm and the award ceremony will take place on 3 March in Dublin's Alexander Hotel. Big thanks to Damien and Jason for all their work on this and best of luck to all the nominees!

Thanks to Marco and Marcello, my hosts at the Italian School of Cooking, where I attended a class on pasta making last night. As well as learning how easy it is to make pasta without a machine - I was dead proud of my attempts at orecchiette! - I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening, eating and drinking, meeting people and being serenaded over dinner by a very enthusiastic Marco.

The school, which is centrally located in Rathmines, is definitely worth checking out. Time to pick up a bag of durum flour from the Italian shop in Ranelagh for some pasta-making experiments down at the cottage.

Italian School of Cooking

Although we may be back in Ireland, today we are celebrating Waitangi Day, a national holiday in New Zealand, with that ubiquitous Kiwi desert - the pavlova. After bemoaning the lack of pavlovas in Irish supermarkets, the Boyfriend went off to work this morning laden with boxes of meringue nests, tubs of cream, my hand whisk and a nice pink bowl to assemble a selection of impromptu pavs for his workmates. Bron has an entertaining defence of the NZ claim to the pavlova here, along with many delectable pictures of her own fabulous Waitangi Day creation.

Boiled, Baked & Basted, the brilliant RTÉ Radio 1 programme that I mentioned in October, featuring chefs and cooks talking about their favourite cookbooks, sadly came to an end on 30 December. A simple but effective format - just the voice of the interviewee, interspersed by actors reading from cookbooks that they mentioned - made this essential listening for the cosy Saturday nights that we spent in the cottage. You can listen back to the whole 13-programme series on the all-new redesigned RTÉ.ie website here.

I've just discovered another informal wine course in Dublin. This one is on in The Vaults and starts on Tuesday 13 February at 6.30pm. The sessions are hosted by a Master of Wines from Findlater Grants and run every second Tuesday for four weeks, costing €35 per person per night. More information is online here (they also do a - pricy - cookery course and details for that are here).

Tuesday 13 February
Wines from Australia

Tuesday 27 February
Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir from around the world

Tuesday 13 March
Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon from around the world

Tuesday 27 March
Wines from Italy