Read: ABV15 Beer Festival
Any excuse to visit Belfast, right? After a gap of 13 years, I was blown away by the quality of food when I went there in January. I jumped at the chance to return...
Category: Food Events
Ravenous! The Cookbook Chronicles at Kerrygold Ballymaloe Litfest
Talk about cookbooks? I could go on and on for hours – that’s exactly what I’ll be doing this weekend, along with thousands of other fans of writing about food and history and beer...
Craft beer & cookbooks for Kerrygold Ballymaloe Litfest 2015
Counting down the days? I am! The Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food & Wine (and other good things!) is kicking off this day week, Friday 15 May, and running for that entire weekend. I’ll...
Kerrygold Ballymaloe Litfest of Food & Wine (and beer, gin, cocktails…)
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...
Listen: Culture File – The Butter Vikings at Ballymaloe LitFest
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...
The unmissable Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine: 16-18 May 2014
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: Joe Fitzmaurice of Cloughjordan Wood-fired Bakery
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.
30 Years at Ballymaloe by Darina Allen
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.