Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
For the last two years 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!
I am fortunate enough to still have a Granny and, until I was 12, I also had a Nana. Nana, my mother’s mother, was sick throughout my childhood so we spent a lot of time at her home in Oldcastletown. Some of my early memories revolve around her Aga-warmed kitchen – the centre of the house – where there were always a selection of queencakes in a tin or fruitcake slices to be buttered for afternoon tea. Saturday was the baking day in that house. I remember being wrapped up in an apron before being shown how to fold in flour to a sponge cake or slicing apples to fill an enormous roasting tin-sized apple tart. That was the house of mushroom gluts and energetic jam making as us grandchildren were sent down the fields to pick mushrooms or into the orchard to gather windfalls and blackcurrants. Even when Nana wasn’t able to do the work herself, she kept an eagle eye over my mother and aunts as they completed the work to her satisfaction. I pored over her old cookbooks – subsequently having to buy Maura Laverty‘s Full and Plenty in homage – learned baking skills at her kitchen table, inherited her interest in hens and now live in a cottage just the other side of the hill from Oldcastletown.
If you’re in the North Cork area this month, then don’t miss the Killavullen Farmers’ Market, which takes place on Saturday 14 (tomorrow!) and Saturday 28 March, from 10.30 am to 1pm at the Nano Nagle Centre.
With meat so easily available from the supermarket in bloodless plastic packs, we seem to be moving further and further away from knowing where our food is coming from. Going to the butcher as a child – I always loved the queues so I could watch the butchers at work for a few minutes – at least I got to see the carcasses hanging up and the hard physical work that goes into preparing them. When the Little Sister (I predate supermarkets, she’s rarely been near a butcher) caught sight of sides of beef hanging in a truck recently she almost got sick.
Congratulations to The Daily Spud who won the Best Food/Drink Blog on Saturday night’s Irish Blog Awards – I had to leave a little early and was driving but it looked like an evening and a half was about to be had by many of the people who were attending! There’s a full list of winners here.
If you’re based in or around Cork and interested in growing your own food, take a look at the Cork Food Web. It’s been described as “facebook for foodies” and is dedicated to encouraging and facilitating local food production, with a series of groups for members interested in poultry, seed saving, compost, growing vegetables and all things garden related. I missed their seed swap last weekeend but one of the very helpful organisers is going to send me some of the left over seeds, including my favourite pumpkins, as we try to get the garden up and running for 2009. With all the sunshine today, it really feels like a day for getting out and planting.
Congratulations to the five who are shortlisted for the Best Food/Drink Blog at this year’s Irish Blog Awards. I’ll be looking forward to seeing who walks away with the award on the Saturday night! Click any of the links below for lots of good reading and there’s lots more in the other shortlisted categories over here.
After a relaxing, sunny weekend in Baltimore we’ve returned home with headfuls of ideas, lots of notes, a handful of mail order catalogues and lots of inspiration for our garden in 2009. Jean Perry, who owns the five acres and house at Glebe Gardens with her artist husband Peter, was our teacher for the two day course. They run a popular café on site, producing most of the organic vegetables, fruit and herbs that they use there from the raised beds and polytunnels in the gardens.
