Recently in Foodtalk on Newstalk 2008/09 Category

So, we didn't win last night - but, as my producer said, that doesn't mean that we aren't great! An Australian show - The Main Ingredient: New Years Day, which was presented by Kelli Brett and produced by ABC Radio - took the 2010
Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Award for Best Food/Drink Radio Programme.

Disappointed? Yes, of course. But I'm still fiercely proud of the Foodtalk series and we didn't do too badly to make it onto a shortlist of seven out of all the food radio shows in the world. Better luck next time, hopefully.

Today's the day when the results of the 2010 World Food Media Awards will be announced in Adelaide. Fingers crossed for Foodtalk: Spices and the other Irish nominees.

After I recovered from the excitement of the Foodtalk: Spices nomination in the Best Food/Drink Radio Programme for this year's Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards - it's taken a while! - I found a few fellow Irish nominees on the list.

Two RTÉ-produced television programmes - Catherine's Italian Kitchen with Catherine Fulvio (one of the few dark-haired female chefs working in a sea of blonds!) and Trish Deseine's Trish's Paris Kitchen - are competing against each other for Best Television Food and/or Drink Show. The other Irish nominee - although categorised under United Kingdom - is Darina Allen for her hefty Forgotten Skills of Cooking (Kyle Cathie) in the Best Hardcover Recipe Book (over €35) category. One of the books that Darina is up against is the heartbreaking Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen (Murdoch Books), which I've just finished, a book on Vietnamese food as told through a prism of pain and miscommunication.

Also on my bookshelves is one of the nominees for Best Soft Cover Recipe Book, KOTO: A culinary journey through Vietnam by Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl (Hardie Grant). I picked this up in Hanoi while doing a cookery class at the Hanoi Cooking Centre and, with my recent purchase of a corriander plant, I'm hoping to actually use some of the recipes! Andrew Pern's magnificant Black Pudding and Foie Gras (Face) is up for a Best Food Book award, as is the thought provoking Bottom Feeder by Taras Grescoe (Harper Collins).

It's also good to see New Zealand's Cuisine Magazine nominated in a total of six categories, between photographers (Aaron McLean, Ken Downie), writers (David Burton, Ralph Kyte-Powell), as well as being up for Best Food Magazine and Best Drink Magazine for their Cuisine Wine Country publication. 

But, naturally enough, the most important category is my own! Here is a list of my fellow nominees, with - when I could find them - links to their radio programmes.

BEST FOOD/DRINK RADIO PROGRAMME
Foodtalk: Spices - Presented by Caroline Hennessy and Kevin Thornton, produced by Soundsdoable, IRELAND
Talking Food with Lyndey Milan - Presented and produced by Murray Wilton and Lyndey Milan, AUSTRALIA
Kathmandu Kitchen: Spiritual Sustenance - Presented by Elaine Corn, Produced by Capital Public Radio, USA
Cooking with Lynne Mullins - Presented by Lynne Mullins, Produced by Fairfax Media, AUSTRALIA
Cooking with Kindness - Presented by Kate Nelson and Geoff Hutchison, Produced by ABC Radio, AUSTRALIA
Sue Zelickson Holiday Special - Presented by Sue Zelickson, Produced by WCCO Radio, USA
The Main Ingredient: New Year's Day - Presented by Kelli Brett, Produced by ABC Radio, AUSTRALIA

There was big excitement at the cottage when I learned that Spices, one of the Foodtalk documentaries that I presented for Newstalk, is a nominee for the 2010 Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards! These awards celebrate the very best in international food publishing and broadcasting. With a total of 700 entries across 21 categories, now whittled down to 181 nominations, it is a true honour to make it this far. Spices is nominated in the best food/drink radio programme category alongside six other programmes from Australia and America.

The programme, which was presented by Kevin Thornton and myself, featured Carmel Somers of the Good Things Café in Durrus together with Green Saffron's Arun Kapil. Spices was just one of the six programmes in a documentary series that was first broadcast on Newstalk from December 2010 to January 2009 and produced by Soundsdoable, a small, inspirational independent production company. Gents, I love your work!

I was fortunate enough to be involved in the Foodtalk series from an early stage. Together with Soundsdoable, I worked on putting the pieces together during the non-summer of 2008 and spent that golden autumn driving around the country to interview amazing people about the food that they love. That was occasionally stressful - sometimes journeys took far longer than anticipated! - but also a fascinating learning experience and enormous fun.

We also spent two incredible days in Kevin Thornton's kitchen, recording the sounds of him cooking: cream boiling, knives sharpening, the sizzle of frying tuna, the crunch of a lobster shell being penetrated by a knife. It was like having a personal cooking class from the best chef in the country, with the added benefit of getting to eat the finished product. Noisettes of venison, flambéed with Madeira? Yes please!

The recordings gathered together, my producer got to work and I have to credit him with having the vision to produce such an amazing finished piece. He wove the interviews with the people featured, evocative introductions that I wrote and recorded, chats between myself and Kevin and the sound of Kevin's kitchen with beautiful original music into a dream-like, seamless whole. I loved working on this series, getting to talk to many amazing people and - always important - getting to eat the very best food.

Fingers crossed for Monday, 3 May, when the results will be announced at an awards ceremony in Adelaide.

If you haven't already heard it, you can listen to the Foodtalk on Newstalk Spices programme here and there is more information on the rest of the Foodtalk series here.

If you're interested in listening back to any of the Foodtalk shows that were broadcast on Newstalk over the last six weeks (no more sending text alerts online - my Sunday nights have suddenly gotten very quiet!), they're now all available as podcasts from the Newstalk website. You can see them all here and full details of the interviewees are below.

• Programme 1 MP3: Livestock - Jacque Barry from Jacques Restaurant, Cork and Fingal Ferguson of the Gubbeen Smokehouse, Schull, West Cork.
• Programme 2 MP3: Seafood - Tony Daly from The Lime Tree, Kenmare, and Paul Kelly, mussel farmer and goldsmith, from Kilmackillogue.
  


• Programme 3 MP3: Spices - Carmel Somers from The Good Things Café, Durrus, Co Cork and Arun Kapil of Green Saffron, Midleton, East Cork.


• Programme 4 MP3: Wild Food - Áine Maguire from Kueppersbusch and Seamus Moran of LoTide Fine Foods, Westport, Co Mayo.


• Programme 5 MP3: Dairy - Aoibheann McNamara, Ard Bia, Galway and Kieran Murphy from Murphy's Ice Cream, Dingle.
  


• Programme 6 MP3: Garden - Henry Stone from The Sha-Roe Bistro, Clonegal, Co Carlow and Ultan Walsh of Gort-Na-Nain Organic Farm, Nohoval, Cork, who grows the veg for (among others) Denis Cotter of Café Paradiso.

Sunday sees the last in the Foodtalk series with Garden being the theme of the final show. We travelled to Clonegal, Co Carlow to meet with Henry Stone of the Sha-Roe Bistro and then to Nohoval in Cork to talk to Ultan Walsh of Gort-Na-Nain Vegetarian Guesthouse and Organic Farm.

I stayed at Gort-Na-Nain back in May and was only too delighted to have an excuse to return and talk to Ultan at length about the vegetables that he grows (Denis Cotter of Café Paradiso is a big fan too - check out his last book, Wild Garlic, Gooseberries...and Me). There wasn't so much going on in the polytunnels at that stage in the year but I did get to admire Ultan's magnificant crop of Crown Prince squash, all sitting around on benches in one of his polytunnels, just seasoning in the dry before they get stored. I had a close encounter with them on New Year's Eve as well, when I was sitting next to a display of Crown Prince in the window of Café Paradiso. What else could I pick for my main course other than a squash gratin, which came with walnut and gingered kale, lemon-cumin cream and star anise-braised salsify.

The Sunday that we had lunch at the Sha-Roe Bistro proved to me that sometimes it's worth travelling a distance for food, although driving 2½ hours for a meal isn't something I wish to make a habit out of. In this case, however, it was more than justified. The Husband and I arrived first so we had plenty of time to relax beforehand in the elegant reception area and toast ourselves at the roaring fire. We were joined by the Producer, his father and girlfriend for a delicious lunch, made all the more memorable by the fact that we were seated at the chef's table, right next to the kitchen so we could watch Henry as he cooked. Every mouthful was a pleasure, with tastings being swapped around the table - nobody's dinner was safe! After much testing, we figured that the ultimate dinner would be the Wild Pheasant and Apple Burger (the Husband's choice), followed by the meltingly tender Slow Roasted Pork Belly (my lucky pick) but the desert would be a toss up. I had the Fig Tart Tatin, which came with Toffee Ice Cream, but there were lots of other tempting options. A leisurely, hospitable three course Sunday lunch is just €34.

You can catch me talking to Ultan and Henry on Foodtalk: Garden on Newstalk 106-108fm at 7.30am tomorrow, Saturday 24 January, and Sunday 25 January at 9.30pm or listen online here: Foodtalk on Newstalk - Garden.mp3

Just discovered that Foodtalk: Spices is available to listen to as a podcast from the Newstalk podcasts page – Foodtalk on Newstalk is at the top of the page so you can't miss it! Check out Conor's Bandon Blog for useful information on listening and subscribing online.

On Newstalk 106-108fm tonight at 9.30pm the third of my radio shows on food – Foodtalk: Spices – will be broadcast. This was one of the real wild cards of the series. Most of the other categories were easy to figure out: Livestock was a given, as was Dairy and Seafood. Being interested in foraging and gardening since childhood, and doing plenty of that at the cottage, Wild and Garden were also easy areas to work in, but Spices was an area that just came out of the blue.

Then I focused in on Carmel Somers of The Good Things Café in Durrus and Arun Kapil of Green Saffron and everything just fell into place. Carmel does amazing things with good quality Irish produce like lamb, turnip and cabbage, matching them with imaginative spice combinations, while Arun imports the absolute best of spices direct from India and has woken Irish people up to the possibilities of such really, really fresh flavours. See what you think tonight.

I was thrilled to hear the first Foodtalk on Christmas Day at 1.30pm, just as we were basting the turkey, making gravy and chopping vegetables for dinner.That programme - very topically - was on Livestock, focusing on Irish pork. Jacque Barry (Jacques Restaurant) talked about her love of good quality ingredients and food eaten with family while Fingal Ferguson of the Gubbeen Smokehouse explained how the cycle works on the Gubbeen farm in West Cork - the pasture is eaten by the cows who produce the milk for the cheese, the whey of which is fed to the pigs who are turned into the best pork, sausages, salami and chorizo by Fingal.

The next show, on Seafood, will be broadcast on Newstalk 106-108fm tomorrow, New Year's Day, at 4.30pm and features mussel farmer and goldsmith Paul Kelly from Kilmackillogue and Tony Daly from The Lime Tree in Kenmare. We've also got the scheduled times for the rest of the series so I'll post them below.

Foodtalk on Newstalk

+ Programme 2: "Seafood" (New Year's Day, 4.30pm)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy share their pleasure in eating seafood.
Guests: Tony Daly from The Lime Tree, Kenmare, and Paul Kelly, mussel farmer and goldsmith, from Kilmackillogue

+ Programme 3: "Spices" (Saturday 3 January, 7.30am and Sunday 4 January, 9.30pm)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy marvel at the power of spices.
Guests: Carmel Somers from The Good Things Café, Durrus, Co Cork and Arun Kapil of Green Saffron, Midleton, East Cork

+ Programme 4: "Wild Food" (Saturday 10 January, 7.30am and Sunday 11 January, 9.30pm)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy gather up an armload of free, wild food.
Guests: Áine Maguire from Kueppersbusch and Seamus Moran of LoTide Fine Foods, Westport, Co Mayo

+ Programme 5: "Dairy" (Saturday 17 January, 7.30am and Sunday 18 January, 9.30pm)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy explore all things creamy.
Guests: Aoibheann McNamara, Ard Bia, Galway and Kieran Murphy from Murphy's Ice Cream, Dingle

+ Programme 6: "Garden" (Saturday 24 January, 7.30am and Sunday 25 January, 9.30pm)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy marvel at the good things a garden has to offer, and wonders how many more of us will now start to grow our own.
Guests: Henry Stone from The Sha-Roe Bistro, Clonegal, Co Carlow and Ultan Walsh of Gort-Na-Nain Organic Farm, Nohoval, Cork, who grows the veg for (among others) Denis Cotter of Café Paradiso.

Don't forget to tune in to my first Foodtalk programme on Newstalk 106-108 fm which will be broadcast today at 1.30pm. Happy Christmas!

We were thrilled with the wee mention of Foodtalk in Saturday's Irish Times - click here to read the piece (or continue reading below) and see another picture of Kieran and Sean Murphy's cutest little ice cream snowmen.

Just in case you didn't yet know, the series starts on Newstalk 106-108 fm on Christmas Day at 1.30pm when I'll be discussing Irish Kobe beef with Kevin Thornton as well as talking to Jacque Barry from Jacques Restaurant and Fingal Ferguson of the Gubbeen Smokehouse about Gubbeen pork.

If you don't think that you'll be near a radio at that stage in proceedings, you can also subscribe to podcasts from the Newstalk website (scroll down to the Documentaries on Newstalk section). Hope you get to tune in!

Gubbeen have started sending out a great email flyer recently to their mailing list with information on their well-known cheese, Clovis' garden, cooking the fabulous Gubbeen hams, the rare breed chickens that Giana rears around the farmyard and how Fingal makes Gubbeen Salami.

Fingal is one of the people that we talked to for Foodtalk and the afternoon that we spent with him at the Gubbeen Farm – it's a large mixed farm so there were plenty of pigs grunting, banabhs squealing, chickens clucking and calves mooing – was one of the many highlights of our recording days. The show featuring himself and Jacque Barry of Jacque's Restaurant in Cork will be broadcast on Newstalk 106-108 fm from 1.30pm on Christmas Day.

You can sign up for the newsletter here – it's well worth it: this month there's even a piece on Willie Harcourt Cooze's Venezuelan Black chocolate (remember Willie's Wonky Chocolate Factory on C4 a few months ago?) as well as a recipe from another Foodtalk interviewee - Carmel Somers of the Good Things Café.

On Monday night we launched Foodtalk on Newstalk at Thornton's Restaurant on Stephen's Green. It was great to see so many of the people that I interviewed on my trips around the country there – Fingal Ferguson came armed with cheese and lots of other Gubbeen goodies, Green Saffron's Arun Kapil had plenty of spices to smell and taste (just put me near his fennel seeds and watch them disappear!), while the Murphy's Ice Cream boys - Kieran and Sean - turned up with a selection of ice cream snowmen which had us oohing and ahhing in delight before we dug in and promptly demolished them.

All over now, just the broadcasts to look forward to, starting on Christmas Day at 1.30pm. I know the Husband and I will be back at Pruntus with all my family for Christmas so it's going to be a real traditional gather 'round the wireless while in the midst of Christmas dinner preparation at the Hennessy household! Don't forget to tune in...

It started with a phone call in the early summer. The brothers behind Soundsdoable wanted to know if I was interested in working with them on a series of radio documentaries about food. I didn't need to be asked twice. It was the start of an intense and fascinating time - journeys around Ireland in all kinds of inclement Irish summer weather to interview a variety of producers and chefs and the chance to record with chef (and fellow blogger) Kevin Thornton.

Now all the hard work has paid off and we are good to go, the series - Foodtalk on Newstalk - kicking off on Christmas Day on Newstalk 106-108 fm. Hope you get to listen!

Foodtalk on Newstalk

Program 1: "Livestock" (Christmas Day, 1.30pm)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy hunt down some fine meats and discuss Kevin's project to rear Irish Kobe beef.
Guests: Jacque Barry from Jacques Restaurant, Cork and Fingal Ferguson of the Gubbeen Smokehouse, Schull, West Cork

+ Program 2: "Seafood" (New Year's Day, 4.30pm)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy share their pleasure in eating seafood.
Guests: Tony Daly from The Lime Tree, Kenmare, and Paul Kelly, mussel farmer and goldsmith, from Kilmackillogue

+ Programme 3: "Spices" (11th Jan)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy marvel at the power of spices.
Guests: Carmel Somers from The Good Things Café, Durrus, Co Cork and Arun Kapil of Green Saffron, Midleton, East Cork

+ Program 4: "Wild Food" (18th Jan)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy gather up an armload of free, wild food.
Guests: Áine Maguire from Kueppersbusch and Seamus Moran of LoTide Fine Foods, Westport, Co Mayo

+ Program 5: "Dairy" (25th Jan)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy explore all things creamy.
Guests: Aoibheann McNamara, Ard Bia, Galway and Kieran Murphy from Murphy's Ice Cream, Dingle

+ Programme 6: "Garden" (1st Feb)
Kevin Thornton and Caroline Hennessy marvel at the good things a garden has to offer, and wonders how many more of us will now start to grow our own.
Guests: Henry Stone from The Sha-Roe Bistro, Clonegal, Co Carlow and Ultan Walsh of Gort-Na-Nain Organic Farm, Nohoval, Cork, who grows the veg for (among others) Denis Cotter of Café Paradiso.