Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
Culture File on RTÉ Lyric FM / Food Events / Work
by Caroline · Published April 7, 2015 · Last modified June 15, 2016
In 2013, we came with no expectations and were subsequently blown away by the Litfest experience, listening to and learning from cookery legends Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey and Stephanie Alexander. 2014 brought the world’s...
Culture File on RTÉ Lyric FM / Food Events / Radio / Work
by Caroline · Published June 13, 2014 · Last modified April 13, 2023
Bringing butter back? Well, if it’s on the cover of Time Magazine, it must be true (just try and forget about this one, which fronted a 1984 story on cholesterol entitled Hold the Eggs...
Last year’s Lit Fest was – officially – a blast. Three whirlwind days of ideas and education and inspiration from cookbook heroes. I learned how to ferment cabbage from Sandor Katz, make Claudia Roden’s...
Culture File on RTÉ Lyric FM / Do / Food Events / Radio
by Caroline · Published January 21, 2014 · Last modified September 21, 2022
Joe Fitzmaurice runs the Cloughjordan Wood-fired Bakery in North Tipperary. The bread he makes there is a thing of beauty, meant to nourish and feed in the most elemental way. Listen here to my Lyric FM Culture File report.
Cookery Books / Food Events / Read
by Caroline · Published October 9, 2013 · Last modified October 25, 2017
In 2007 I did the 12-week cookery course at Ballymaloe. I only had to come down the road for it; many of my classmates had travelled much further, coming from England, Spain, Sweden, Australia and America to study in this internationally known Irish cookery school. It was an intense, hard-working, food-filled transition time for me, a hiatus between full-time work in Dublin and freelancing from a country cottage.
It was also pure luxury, three months spent immersed in a kitchen. We cooked all morning, ate the results for lunch, watched demos in the afternoons and – hungry again – queued eagerly to devour what had been produced. Just as well there was some time spent hoovering the demo room, carrying buckets of scraps to the hens (two of the students’ chores) and walking to the pub (not such a chore!) to balance it all out.
Culture File on RTÉ Lyric FM / Food Events / Radio / Work
by Caroline · Published June 7, 2013 · Last modified October 25, 2017
Cabbages empowering people? Stranger things have happened, especially in the bubbly, fizzy, pungent world of fermentation legend Sandor Katz. His demonstration at the recent Ballymaloe LitFest was one of the hottest tickets of the weekend,...
It’s a simple thing: pay a fiver in to the local primary school on a sunny Sunday for a purple wristband, a bowl and fork. Wind your way through the throng in the main...
When I lived in New Zealand, I was exposed to lots of unfamiliar ingredients and food terms. Things like kumera and feijoa were unknown, Egg and Bacon Pie and Ginger Crunch new taste sensations,...
