July 2009 Archives

The third part of The Wine Geese radio documentary is on Lyric FM tomorrow morning at 8.30am. In this show, Tomas Clancy meets the far-seeing Francis Mahoney, devotee of Pinot Noir and the man who pioneered it in California 35 years ago. You can read more about Mahoney here and the programme will be online after broadcast on the Lyric FM Features page.

At the moment, just in case you missed it last week, you can listen to part two of the series on that page, with Jim Concannon of the Livermore Valley in Southern California and Jim Barrett, the man whose Chateau Montelena chardonay topped the blind tastings in the 1976 Judgement of Paris. That tasting - fictionalised and filmed as 2007's Bottle Shock - put Californian wine firmly on the map.

When I was small, picking blackcurrants was a big job. My Nana had several large, old bushes in the orchard under her apple trees. Every year, little fingers were pressed into service to strip the bushes of their black bounty so that she could make, or supervise the making, of the pots and pots of blackcurrant jam that were to see the household through the winter.

Although I tried a couple of blackcurrants every year, at the time I didn't much like them as they seemed too bitter to my childish taste. The jam was another matter, however. When we would call to see Nana and Grandad after school, a doorstep of bread, slathered with butter and spread with inky goodness kept us fed till suppertime.

When we bought the cottage, I was delighted to discover a threesome of blackcurrant bushes out in the back garden. We missed the harvest the first year, still living in Dublin and only at the cottage over the weekend. Last year we were in France so the blackbirds beat us to the berries so I was determined to get my share this year. Last weekend I started picking, getting well over half a kilo from the first of the bushes.

Observed with interest by Little Missy, sitting happily outside in her chair, I used Sarah Raven's technique of picking and pruning at the same time. As I cut the fruiting branches, I stripped them of the blackcurrants but rain and grumpiness from LM sent me indoors before I could finish the job. And it seems that the blackbirds noticed. When I went back outside on Wednesday, to my annoyance the remaining berries had been plucked by beak.

Fortunately I had stashed the weekend's pickings in the freezer and, although there's not enough for jam this year, I do have enough for three of these cakes, much to the Husband's delight. This is easiest made in the food processor as you can whizz up the whole almonds in the bowl first before using it to process the rest of the mixture. You could use blanched almonds but I love the brown speckled effect from the unblanched nuts and the cake is extra moist as a result.

Seventeen gooseberries does not a summer make. I have a pair of bushes that were planted out next to the blackcurrant bushes last summer - one that should produce green berries, the other red. But this year, between the two of them, I could only hunt down a total of seventeen gooseberries. I think that they may be too sheltered where they are. There is a ditch behind them and the sycamores growing there tend, despite much cutting back, to hang over the fruit bushes. Come this winter, it may be time to move them to our developing mini-orchard at the back of the garden. The apple and pear trees wouldn't give too much shelter at this stage.

So what did I do with my scanty harvest? To make the most of it, I took a tip from Jane Grigson and stewed them for a little time with a bit of butter and a drop of water. We were out of elderflower cordial or I would have used that instead of the water. When the berries had broken down a little, I added some sugar, crushed them with the back of a fork, then swirled the cooled mixture through some natural yoghurt for a simple (cream-less) fruit fool. Don't sweeten the character out of the gooseberries. You want something tart and well flavoured. In fact, if you have the red gooseberries, I find they are so sweet that you may not need any sugar. They didn't actually make it into the photo, getting eaten by the Little Sister and I as we peered around the bushes, looking for more.

While nice in small amounts - and good for making the most of the few berries that you may be able to gather - this recipe would also be well worth trying if you had more than the seventeen gooseberries in your garden.

Last summer, when we had the Mallow Farmers' Market running outside Urru, we saw a lot of Patrick Frankel, a local organic vegetable grower. When he started coming to the market he had just started producing vegetables on his family farm near Doneraile and customers were delighted with the early fruit of his labours: spring onions, yellow and green courgettes, an assortment of tomatoes, new potatoes, peas and, my favourite, mangetout. I bumped into him a few times at the Killavullen Farmers' Market, always making sure to stock up on the mangetout - great shredded and tossed raw into salads or briefly steamed and served as a side - but hadn't seen him around for a while so I was delighted to see that the North Cork Organic Group had organised a farm visit.

The NCOG take their meetings out and about during the summer months. In June there was a visit to the Secret Garden Centre near Kanturk which we unfortunately missed. August's outing - the Sunnyside Fruit Farm in Rathcormac - is already up on the calender. After getting a total of 17 gooseberries off two bushes this year I need to pick owner John Howard's brains for some soft fruit- growing tips.

Although we had plenty of sunshine and showers last Sunday, luckily the rain stayed away for our walk. The four acres Patrick cultivates are situated on his family farm so alongside two busy polytunnels and many neat rows of outdoor vegetables are his father's working Percheron horses, a collection of pigs - one of which, much to the delight of the children on the walk, was nursing a couple of tiny piglets - a fabulous old walled garden, and, in the stables, a magnificant black Percheron stallion. He grows garlic in the walled garden alongside the old apple trees and a variety of other fruit and, in a one-for-everyone-in-the-audience-stylee, we were all allowed to pull a bulb to take home. Wet garlic - yum!

While admiring the neat rows of vegetables, the appreciative audience picked up tips on avoiding carrot fly infestation (Patrick uses a ground cover material to keep down weeds which doesn't give the flies anywhere to lay their eggs) and found out where he sourced the movable electric fence that keeps his hens away from the growing area. We've found our hens (now, sadly, down to two) happily digging up seedlings and making a nuisance of themselves around the raised beds, especially after an afternoon's weeding. The fence that Patrick uses might also give us a chance of keeping the rabbits away from targeting the few cabbage, kale and bean plants that are left.

Patrick, who is making tentative noises about a future vegetable box scheme for the area, is currently selling at the Coal Quay Market in Cork every Saturday. Watch out for the mangetout...

Here's a desert that's perfect eaten outside in the late evening sunshine - or to cheer up a rainy day. There's no real need for quantities as the amounts depend on how many people you are trying to make the strawberries stretch between, how big the glasses are and how greedy your audience!

Chop up the fruit before dinner and toss with the sugar so that the juices start to run then assemble the sundaes just before eating so that the biscuits don't get soggy. With each mouthful of sweet fruit, fragrant juice, cool yoghurt and almond crunch you could be almost forgiven for thinking that it's summertime.

If - like me! - you didn't make it up early enough to catch The Wine Geese, the first part of the series is online here (I can't seem to find it on the Lyric podcasts page) and there's more information about the documentary on the Lyric FM website here. Well worth a listen.

And, staying on the wine theme, there's a competition over at GreatFood.ie to win a trip to Bordeaux, staying at Château Magnol, the home vineyard of Barton & Guestier. When you listen to The Wine Geese, you'll hear more about the Barton family and their ties to Ireland from Lillian Barton.

Soundsdoable, the independent production company behind Foodtalk, the documentary series that I presented for Newstalk earlier this year, has a new series starting on RTÉ Lyric FM this Saturday. The Wine Geese is presented by Sunday Business Post wine correspondent Tomas Clancy and it looks at the role of the Irish in the world of wine.

While Ireland may never take a place amongst the serious wine-producing regions of the world, the Irish diaspora have played a disproportionately large part in international wine production and development. The Wine Geese is the name given to emigrant Irish families - and their descendants - who became involved in the wine trade in the countries where they settled. Names such as Hennessy and Lynch will be familiar to many from areas of Old World wine production. However, Irish emigrants also work in some of the principal wine-growing regions of the New World, including North America, Chile and New Zealand, and they often stand out for their innovative approach.

For the first episode, Tomas travels to Fountainstown, Co Cork, to meet Ted Murphy, wine historian and author of A Kingdom of Wine. He proceeds onwards to the vineyards of Léoville-Barton, to talk with the dynamic Lillian Barton, descendant of the great wine business genius, Thomas Barton, whose family still run the company that bears their name. The picture to the right is of his grave in France, with the château's vines in the background.

I was lucky enough to transcribe some of the interviews that Tomas did in France and America before the arrival of Little Missy and I'm really looking forward to hearing the finished product. The first programme in the four-part series will be broadcast on Saturday 11 July at 8.30am, with a second outing at 5.30am on Sunday 12 July.

Five days in the Lake District didn't give me as many opportunities to try local food as I would have liked but I did manage to eat vicariously after picking up Jane Grigson's authoritative English Food in a second hand book shop in Cockermouth. Reading it with the help of an English map helped me to properly place its regional references so, after a few days, I was getting much better at understanding where dishes like Dartmouth Pie, Cumbrian Tatie Pot and Grasmere Gingerbread came from.

The map was making frequent appearances anyway as we had to navigate our way from the ferry at Holyhead to the north-western part of the Lake District for a wedding. The English Engineer was marrying the English Geologist (friends from the Husband's Cambridge days) on Saturday so our little family of three made the long - it took us 6 hours - drive on Friday afternoon, another of the times when I've been very thankful for being able to breastfeed Little Missy rather than trying to manage bottles while travelling.

The high point, food wise, of our five days was definitely the wedding hog roast. Served in a large marquee pitched in a field belonging to the bride's brother, this feast was far from rustic. Immaculately trained waiting staff were on silver service duty with platters of tender roast pork and crispy crackling, dishes of salad (a colourful heirloom tomato one and a French and dried bean salad) and minty new potatoes. There were seconds for everyone before we finished with slices of a cinnamon-scented Dutch Apple Cake, bowls ofstrawberries to pass around, the whole pudding finished off with streams of rich, yellow cream from the jugs proffered by the waitresses (why do the English pour cream while the Irish whip it?).

Dinner at our table was regularly interrupted by small people making their needs felt as there were four children under 18 months between eight of us. Fortunately the couple who were getting married, with their own 11-month-old to deal with, had set up a chill-out kids' room off the marquee for just this situation. No one could have gone hungry at this wedding with facilities to warm food for the smallies available so close by.

While camping with Little Missy at Dalegarth Campsite on the shores of Buttermere Lake we did get to try some local lamb chops (big enough to count as mutton chops although still lamb-sweet), freshly made Cumberland sausages, Buttermere Ayrshire Ice Cream and, of course, the sugar fix for walkers that is Kendal Mint Cake. Just enough of a taste to encourage me back - at least I have English Food to help me plan our next visit!

For two years now we've had sunshine - during some very dodgy summers! - for the Mallow Food Festival and hopefully this year will make three in a row. At the last festival myself and the Mallow Girl had a great laugh manning the Urru stall and now, despite the fact that Urru Mallow is gone, she's already got the preparation for this year's festival well in hand. See below for a press release and mark Sunday 23 August into your diary!

The 23 of August - the day of the Mallow Food Festival - is the day that all foodies in North Cork look forward to. On Sunday 23 August, from 12 noon until 3.30pm, Mallow's main street will be lined with food stalls offering all kinds of tasty treasures. The previous years have been extremely successful with traders selling out long before the 3.30pm closing time.

This year the organising committee are hopping to increase the number of traders that participate in the festival. If you currently hold a regular stall at a farmers market or if you are involved in the catering industry and would be interested in getting involved please contact Claire on 085 1211004 or Roisin on 087 0554382 or via email at MallowFoodFestival@gmail.com.

Driving to Galley Head Lighthouse is a bit like a magical mystery tour. Although easy to see from a variety of locations along the West Cork coast, the lighthouse - like an ever-receeding mirage - seems to disappear from sight the closer you get. Eventually, however, after driving constantly south of Clonakilty, past numerous private property signs and along a low-lying road, protected on either side by stone walls, you get to where you can drive no further. The lighthouse stands at the tip of a peninsula, surrounded by the sea, and the lighthouse keeper's house that we were staying in is part of a two-sided structure that shelters the parking area at the front from the northern and western winds.

We got the perfect weather, opening the window shutters - no curtains could blot out the lighthouse beams - to sunshine every day. Hours were spent lying on the near-deserted beaches nearby but we got just enough of a sea mist in the evenings to justify lighting the sitting room fire. With such a fabulous place to stay, there was no point in going out for dinner so we shopped in Clonakilty, especially in the well-stocked Scally's SuperValu, and cooked in every night.

The Husband came up with this Lighthouse Ling, which was so good that it made an appearance two nights during our stay. You can also try using any other firm white fish but ling, which I like for its good flavour, was also the cheapest on offer on Scally's well-stocked fish counter. They also had Spanish asparagus so we tucked the spears into the cooking dish alongside the fish to roast at the same time, serving it with a chunky vegetable stew (thanks to my Kildorrery Aunt who gave us a box of veg left over from a post-wedding barbeque!) and some crusty bread for mopping. This is also good with some chopped chorizo scattered on the base of the dish along with the garlic.