March 2007 Archives

It's moving week so there's not much cooking and baking going on, apart from me making loaves of brown bread to try and use up some of the six - yes, count them, SIX! (and that's not mentioning the few that are down at the cottage, ahem...) - bags of flour that I have sitting on my shelves. The flat that we are moving into in Dublin is much smaller and doesn't have a freezer so for a while there was a mad race to finish up all the frozen foodstuffs at our current place. Then we made a quick trip to DID Electrical so we now have a new under-counter freezer and the pressure is off. It still leaves me scratching my head at some of the things that I have in there though. Who knows why I froze a brioche loaf or what kinds of curry are in all those little plastic containers that I use for lunches? Certainly not the person who should have been labelling them!

The dry food cupboards are also well supplied - too well supplied. My habit of bringing food home every time I go travelling makes every cupboard clear-out a memory trail. There's a little leftover honey and argan oil from Morocco, along with some dukkah that didn't get used up when the weather turned cooler. My baking supplies at the cottage have been supplemented with vanilla bean paste and natural almond extract from our December stop in Norfolk, there's wine from New Zealand and Spain to move, not to mention the other fruits of that trip to Barcelona - membrillo (quince paste), fig and nut cake, several chorizo from the Boqueria food market, assorted chocolates and the most of a kilo of garlic. All week we've been eating soups and Socca, quinoa (very good used instead of bulgar wheat in this salad with Pomegranate Molasses Dressing) and a Chocolate Biscuit Cake with coconut, nuts and wheatgerm (decidedly tasty, despite being made from a ragbag of ingredients). I now have a new cooker and kitchen to break in - once I get everything out of their boxes - but, before that we're off on a long-promised trip to try out the much lauded Old Convent in Clogheen with the cousins and their partners...

If my (cracked and misshapen!) Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake has whetted your appetite, check out Peabody's round up of cheesecakes from around the world. There is a grand total of 54 cheesecakes and all votes have to be in by next Saturday, 31 March.

Warning: this is not something to go looking at in the run-up to lunchtime. All the photos of fabulous cheesecake concoctions will definitely have you drooling!

It's been a long time - and two rabbit traps, one from Norfolk and one from New Zealand - coming but this weekend the Boyfriend finally managed to catch a rabbit. When he announced that there was a rabbit in a trap at the back of the garden on Sunday morning I didn't initially believe him but when fresh back steaks and legs arrived in the kitchen there was no doubting. That's one rabbit down - probably about 9999 left to go, judging by their attacks on our newly planted beech trees.

Fortunately I've been collecting recipes for just such an event since we moved into the cottage last year but, as usual, I took my inspiration from several and made it up as I went along. In the interests of Hayden's sustainable cooking challenge, we cooked this with Irish carrots and onions - and some garlic that I personally imported from Barcelona. Although the wine was imported from Chile, most of the ingredients were Irish-made or grown (Odlum's unbleached flour, Kerrygold butter) and locally sourced. As it was a cold weekend, we had our little wood and coal-burning stove running so we were able to keep the house toasty, heat up our hot water and simmer this stew on top of the stove. The stove is not normally used for cooking - we do have an electric cooker too - as it normally takes too much stoking to get it hot enough but on a cold, miserable evening, what else is there to do? Not for the first time, I blessed my cast iron pots as they really are the best thing for cooking on the stovetop.

Because our rabbit was wild, it certainly needed all of the two hours' cooking that it got. Inspired by Jamie Oliver, the Boyfriend put together some herb dumplings which we landed on top of the stew for the last 20 minutes, browning them under the grill for a few minutes at the end. The meat was lean, rich and (almost) tender - it filled me up in minutes - accompanied by plenty of savoury gravy, butter-soft carrots (if you're a fan of not-so-well cooked carrots, just add them in towards the end, before the dumplings go on top) and light as a feather dumplings, crusty on top from the grill, and soaked in gravy underneath. It's a great one-pot meal, perfect for a wintery evening. Now, to try catching another one...

Because I know I won't be able to post from the cottage on St Patrick's Day - we're down for the weekend to get the spuds planted on the traditional day, 17 March, in the Boyfriend's painstakingly rabbit-proofed garden - I'm going to celebrate Paddy's Day with a round-up of new Irish food blogs. If there's anyone else out there, just let me know!

The Humble Housewife - an American Irishwoman, living in Edenderry with her American husband and two daughters, Deborah definitely has her hands full with a couple of blogs but is also thinking of getting back into food catering. Check out her recipes for Sticky Cinnamon Buns, Deborah's Divine Dinner Biscuits and lots of family-friendly dishes.

Organico Bantry - this independent family-run café, shop and bakery in Bantry has a blog, although it takes a little fiddling around to locate it, with lots of great healthy recipes using organic, fairly traded and locally sourced products. Next time I get my hands on some beetroot, I'm going to try out their Organic Beetroot Salad. The last time we had beetroot I pickled it, using a recipe from Darina Allen's Simply Delicious Vegetables, and it was good but it did linger around a little longer than necessary. Anyhow, anything with yoghurt can always get my attention.

Stuff Yer Bake - although based in England, Sarah's is very definitely an Irish blog, with a subtitle like: "The mad ramblings of a Northern Irish foodie". Take a look at her picture of a delectable pork belly, just after an update on cake decorating and before one on her diet, which she illustrates with a picture of and recipe for the River Café's Orange, Almond and Cardamom Cake. Diet? What diet?

Superyacht Chef - Niall Harbison is a private chef on super yachts and there's plenty of video footage of his cooking on board. He's also working on raising money for an orphanage in Africa and you can find more information on that project here.

The Diet Cast - Hayden's blog about eating healthily, with plenty of information and links on growing your own food, sustainable living and food concerns. He has also just announced a competition on fellow site My Diet Friends for anyone interested in writing about sustainably sourced and prepared food. If we ever manage to grow anything in our rabbit-infested garden - or even manage to catch a few of the pests - I'll definitely be up for that.

Val's Kitchen - Val always has fantastic photos on her site - check out her spectacular St Patrick's Day cookies - and I always love to read reviews of local eateries.

And here's also a couple of websites about sustainable living in Ireland that are well worth taking a look at:

The Good Life: Self-Reliance In An Uncertain World

Irish Sally Gardens: living the sustainable dream in rural Ireland

A baked cheesecake is one of those dishes that I've been meaning to make for a long, long time. So, when I saw that it was the theme of Hey Hey it's Donna Day #10, as hosted over on Culinary Concoctions by Peabody, nothing was going to stop me from participating. I had also fully intended to get involved with HHDD #10, soufflés, as well but that kind of fell by the wayside when we had to start flat hunting in Dublin again. Spending your evenings getting frustrated with trying to find somewhere to live and the calmness necessary for soufflé cooking just don't seem to go hand in hand.

This time around, though, when the announcement of the HHDD theme and the presence of a frozen packet of cream cheese in my needing-to-be-emptied freezer co-incided it was obviously A Sign. While poking around in the freezer, I also discovered a substantial amount of chicken that also needed to be used up so I had a chat with the Connoisseur and volunteered to host the latest episode of bookclub at mine before we downsize and everyone has to sit on the kitchen counter.

Let me tell you, my baked cheesecake was not an easy task. Of course, this was not helped by my devil-may-care, I'm-too-lazy-to-go-to-the-shop-again substitutions. The fact that I was also working from about three recipes didn't help either! I started off with Nigella's Chocolate Cheesecake and, because of a(nother) freezer discovery of a bag of frozen raspberries and my love of this sweet and tart combination, decided to make a Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake.

When I couldn't find any digestives (graham crackers) for the base - none in Dunnes, what is the world coming to? - I decided to use Hob Nobs instead. Because I was after a thicker base than Nigella likes, I wandered over to Nigel's Kitchen Diaries for quantities, while still following Nigella's method. No custard powder? No stress. Just leave it out. Can't be bothered to separate eggs? Throw another couple in instead of just the yokes. Just short of the cream cheese needed? Sure, it'll be grand. And then there was crème fraîche instead of sour cream, blending the whole lot in the food processor instead of using the mixer (down at the cottage!) and a mis-wrapped tin that leaked. I also forgot to put the raspberries into the tin before the filling so they sat on top, rather than being buried, as I had intended, as a tart little surprise in the depths of the cheesecake.

It cracked, it broke, it had to be disguised by a quickly sieved layer of cocoa. Oh, my mistakes were legion. But, and this is always the killer when you produce a dish and tell people that it's not quite what you had intended but hopefully it is ok, it went down so well that I'm now going to give you my own lackadaisical recipe. If you want to cook the proper version, just go here.

One warning: do not, under any circumstances, make this if you're about to have guests over that night. It's something that very definitely is a make ahead desert. As a matter of fact, I made both this and the main course, a Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons, the night before dinner. It certainly makes having friends over a lot easier and, being lazy by nature, I take any short-cuts I can!

Last night's Slow Food evening was the perfect introduction to Harry's Café Bar in Dún Laoghaire. Since reading about the Polish food on offer there, especially the pierogi (dumplings), this had been a long-anticipated - but never quite realised - trip. Although there was no sign of pierogi on the menu circulated with the email about the event, the mention of dishes such as Marinated Roast Beef (Pieczen Wolowa) and Roast Pork Shank (Golonka) were more than enough to convince me.

Although I was happy with my menu choices (Clear Chicken Soup (Rosol) and Beef Goulash (Gulasz wolowy)), they paled in comparison with the Boyfriend's choices - Herring in a Sour Cream Sauce (Sledz w smietanie) and Pan-Fried Trout (Pstrąg). The creamy dill sauce that accompanied the trout was good enough to be eaten on its own. My large helping of meaty, savoury Goulash arrived in a choux pastry basket with boiled buckwheat on the side (none of us in my corner could identify the grain - my memory was jogged by the menu this morning!) and a beetroot chutney. Large plates of multicoloured 'slaw were scattered around the large communal table so that everyone could help themselves although, given the size of the portions, no one could do enough justice to this extra food. Although almost replete, I still managed to share Beza, a light meringue topped with whipped cream and red berries, with my neighbour. At that stage the Boyfriend had called halt and, after one forkful, laid down his cutlery.

With plenty of good substantial food at great prices, Harry's Café Bar is well worth a trip to Dún Laoghaire. Just make sure you come with a solid appetite and definitely check out the fish dishes. Also a warning: walls pasted with letters to and from Ireland's legendary agony aunt, Dear Frankie, may lead to bathroom trips being prolonged.

Harry's Cafe Bar, 21 Upper Georges Street, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, 01 2808337.

Did I mention that I was a bit dotty with dates recently? I'm raging that I managed to MISS the Irish Blog Awards, thinking that it was on next weekend. It actually took place last night and I only discovered when I did a wander around the Irish blogosphere this morning. Although I'm disappointed that I didn't manage to make it along, it was great to see that some of my favourite bloggers were among the winners. Take a bow Ice Cream Ireland (Best Business Blog, Best Specialist Blog), Conor for Best Blog Post (You may feel a small prick), the lovely ladies at Beaut.ie (Best Design and Best Newcomer) and The Sigla Blog (Best Arts and Culture). Congratulations all!