Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
I put a recipe for Irish Brown Soda Bread on this site several months ago after the first time I cooked it and since then it has become part of our staple diet. Of course, the more I cook a recipe, the more I end up fiddling with it so here is my latest variation.
Spicy Chocolate Biscotti Ever since having Chocolate and Chilli Biscotti at Underground I’ve been wanting to try making these and, biscotti weighing hardly anything in terms of postage for Blogging by Mail, this was the ideal...
Although I was a late entrant to Samantha’s Blog by Mail 2, she very kindly let me get involved and I sent off my package to Deborah in the USA on Wednesday. Figuring out what to put in it was a lot of fun and I eventually settled on a mixture of homemade goodies and local foodstuffs. I just hope that the postal service doesn’t let me down and that it gets to Deborah before anything starts growing mould!
My local Oxfam Fair Trade shop here in Christchurch has started stocking Fair Trade spices, including ground ginger, cinnamon – ground and sticks, whole cloves, whole and ground black peppercorns and chilli powder, all...
Bake / Cook / Living in New Zealand
by Caroline · Published August 28, 2005 · Last modified January 25, 2018
There are so many things that you can’t go near when you’re trying to Eat Local. I had written this piece about Spanakopita ever before I started this challenge but, pressed for choice on Saturday night, it was something I happily turned to. I had spinach and onions from Canterbury, feta from Karikaas, ricotta from Zany Zeus (North Island but still New Zealand!), nutmeg (and couscous for the accompanying salad) from Piko, our brilliant local wholefoods/organic shop but I must admit failure with the pastry, which was Australian. If I had been a bit more organised ahead of time I could have made my own but still, it didn’t turn out too badly!
by Caroline · Published August 11, 2005 · Last modified February 12, 2020
I think that my interest in the Mexican combination of chocolate and chilli may have been originally sparked from watching the film adaptation of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate in college. The fire of chilli and the dark richness of chocolate seems, to me, to be a rather good combination. The Chocolate and Chilli Biscotti I picked up recently to accompany my flat white (coffee) at the Underground Coffee Company Café in Christchurch was a good example of this and put my mind musing over other ways I could use chocolate and chilli together.
It’s been years since I ate porridge regularly for breakfast. Lumpy and overboiled, it was always a one of the foods that I hated as a child – unless it was made in the Aga at Oldcastletown by my grandfather. Put into the bottom oven the previous night, his porridge was one of the highlights if we stayed overnight.
