June 2009 Archives

Things will be quiet about here next week as the Husband, Little Missy and myself are heading down to West Cork for a few nights. We're staying in one of the Irish Landmark Trust's restored properties on Galley Head, just south of Clonakilty, and I'm hoping to do lots of eating!

I'd love to make it to Durrus to eat at Carmel's Good Things Café, check out the Friday market in Bantry, visit Baltimore for lunch in the Glebe Gardens (and to see what Jean has done with the garden since we were there in February) and eat some more Ardagh Castle Goats' Cheese.

Any suggestions for food-orientated things to do in the area?

Tablefuls of tapas, full English breakfasts, bags of cherries, good coffee aplenty, savoury bacon baps and decadent brownies - just a few of the things that Little Missy enjoyed, albeit second hand, while in London at the weekend. After a hissy fit at Cork Airport - yes, we were that couple carrying a screaming baby through the plane as the other passengers turned their heads, hoping that we wouldn't sit near them - she settled into enjoying her first trip abroad.

As we were over for a brief, all-too-short meeting with her Kiwi grandparents, we didn't have our usual list of things to do and eat. We just took it easy, spending quality time with Nana and Poppa, taking time out when LM wanted to eat to relax over a coffee ourselves. When not feeding, she spent her time travelling on my hip in a sling or in the pouch on her father's chest, looking around with big blue eyes and charming the inhabitants of London.

We stayed near Spitalfields so, although I didn't to get to St John Bread and Wine this time, we did manage a dinner at Meson Los Barriles with the Artist. Tapas and babies turned out to be a good mix and meeting up with the Artist, a former housemate during our Dublin years, was an unalloyed joy. She knows me well, presenting LM with a baby-sized pink spatula for future cooking adventures, with instructions to make sure she gets to lick the bowl out properly!

We were back at the Spitalfields market the following morning to try out Leon for breakfast. Much of the menu was familiar from the my well-used Leon cookbook, the baps were good and we finished up with a yummy Black Forrest Knickerbocker Glory while LM slept on the bench beside us. We also wandered over to the famous - and crowded - Borough Market for a quick look but, with baby, Husband and suitcase in tow, I did no more than check out the busy stalls and grab provisions for a picnic in Hyde Park.

We didn't get to cover as much ground as we normally do on our London trips but it was more than made up for by the fact that Little Missy seemed to thrive on the experience. Hopefully this is a good omen for New Zealand at Christmas time!

We were slow off the mark this year with our planting but now - finally - we have some produce from our garden. The salad seedlings that the Husband set in large pots (they are easy targets for the slugs and whitefly if planted out in the garden) are taking off so we now get to have more than just the one leaf per meal.

Herbs that I thought were dead - tarragon, marjoram, lovage, garlic chives - have resurrected themselves to be repotted and join the little container garden that lives outside my kitchen. I already have bay, rosemary, thyme, lemon thyme, both curly and flat leaf parsley, chives, sage and a large fennel there for the picking. The mint is taking over a damp patch near the ditch, we have high hopes for the corriander this year and the two basil plants that we got at the Killavullen Farmers' Market are recovering from a somewhat bumpy trip home.

Being able to use handfuls of herbs in cooking is one of the great joys of growing your own. I never could be bothered with those measly supermarket packets, especially after living close to Middle Eastern shops in Dublin that sold parsley, mint and corriander by the large bunch rather than the stalk.

The four raised beds out in the garden are playing host to a variety of vegetables, including beetroot, cucumber (a Siberian variety, hope it can cope with Ireland!), tomatoes, carrots and some very healthy looking shallots. So far, at least, they've survived the demise of Little - we don't seem to have much luck with cats - and the resurgence of our rabbit population. The Husband went to town with the potatoes, which are divided between one of the raised beds and several adjacent ridges. It's looking like we won't have to buy spuds for a while to come.

The most prolific edible crop, so far, has been the radishes. A variety from Brown Envelope Seeds called Scarlet Globe, their skin is a vivid red colour, a gorgeous contrast with the snow white flesh. We've been eating them tossed in with all leaf salads, they make a crunchy addition to my Warm Potato and Chorizo Salad on cooler nights and I'm loving Clothilde's combination of radishes, mashed avocado and smoked salt. I still have a little garlic and chilli manuka smoked salt from our last NZ trip which goes particularly well with this line-up of ingredients.

Clothilde also has a Radish Leaf Pesto recipe, although our leaves are a little too hairy to be really palatable, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves. If you also have a radish glut - some day we really will learn about successive sowing! - you can find some more recipes here.

Ever since Louise Sowan of Sowan's Organics put me on to Cork Coffee Roasters I've been a fan. Their full bodied Rebel City Espresso is a fixture in my kitchen and I rarely manage to go past their stall at the Mahon Point Farmer's Market or events like the Mallow Food Festival without getting my hands on a caffeine fix. The Sister is even worse. She is luck enough to live around the corner from the Cork Coffee Roasters café. As a result, weekend phone calls between us are punctuated by her frequent stops at CCR to order yet another cappuccino. Meanwhile - especially since Urru Mallow closed down - I'm stuck in the sticks with nothing to comfort me except my stove top espresso maker.

While I was pregnant with Little Missy I suddenly, to my absolute horror, went right off coffee. I had to turn to hot chocolates (not too much of a problem if it's from Urru or the Ó Conaill Chocolate café but horrible most other places) for my caffeine highs during those months. Cork visits were more likely to involve a trip to French Church Street for a dark cardamom at Ó Conaill Chocolate than a visit to CCR. Fortunately, not long after LM was introduced to the outside world, I was back on the black stuff with a vengeance.

Today's trip to Cork made me realise, once again, how much I love Cork Coffee Roasters. Firstly, there's the coffee which is dark and rich and tastes so good, even when I make it at home. CCR is owned by Master Coffee Roaster John Gowan who, after 20 years in Seattle, returned to his native Cork to specialise in hand-roasted small-batch coffee blends. Not content with producing the best coffee in Cork, John then opened the café on Bridge Street. It's a simple set up - great coffee with a few good things to eat (courtesy of the Natural Foods Bakery) - but there's a relaxed, friendly feeling about the place that adds up to far more than the sum of its parts.

If you're not doing the dive-and-roll quick takeaway coffee, Cork Coffee Roasters is a great place to sit in while watching the world go by. Little Missy gives it the thumbs up too, having had her second breakfast there today, nursing away while myself and the Sister were downing our coffees. There's also a changing table in the bathroom for any nappy emergencies. Now all I need to do is persuade John Gowan to open a CCR outpost in Mallow, Fermoy or Mitchelstown.

A quick marinade to make, with herbs from the garden, while someone else is lighting the barbecue. Avoid chicken breasts - overpriced and tasteless pieces of cotton wool that they are - and grab yourself some cheap and tasty chicken thighs instead.

I normally allow two per person or one if I have a lot of other edibles on offer. Because I have a tiny barbecue, I always finish the cooking in the oven to make space for other things - and to make sure that the chicken doesn't dry out too much.

Great research is the key to Mark Kurlansky's The Food of a Younger Land. The subtitle - A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal - explains the what of the latest book on food from the author of Salt, Cod and The Big Oyster.

The why stems from the 1930s. The Federal Writers' Project, part of President Roosevelt's New Deal, sent writers out across the country to write about and record the food of the land. This project, called America Eats, was shelved after America became involved in WWII and never fully completed. Although untouched for years. Kurlansky takes the bones of the research, some more fleshed out than others, and puts it in context, explaining who the writers were - some were just typists, others authors in their own right - as well as giving more information about food and customs mentioned in the text.

I grew up on classic American children's literature like the Little Women series by Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books, and the What Katy Did books by Susan Coolidge so the descriptions of sugaring-off, baked beans, spoon bread and pop corn are richly evocative. The Food of a Younger Land fills in the fascinating back stories of many dishes that appear not only in children's books but also in American novels and films. Parts of it will also be familiar to fans of the Kitchen Sisters' Hidden Kitchens radio series.

The Food of a Younger Land is an epicurean tour of a time long disappeared. Wend your way, in Kurlansky's friendly company, along the backroads of a different America, a land where squirrels were regarded as game, the mint julep causes controversy and hush puppies come from Florida. A book well worth savouring.

The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky is published by Riverhead Books.