Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
If – like me! – you didn’t make it up early enough to catch The Wine Geese, the first part of the series is online here (I can’t seem to find it on the Lyric podcasts page) and there’s more information about the documentary on the Lyric FM website here. Well worth a listen.
Soundsdoable, the independent production company behind Foodtalk, the documentary series that I presented for Newstalk earlier this year, has a new series starting on RTÉ Lyric FM this Saturday. The Wine Geese is presented by Sunday Business Post wine correspondent Tomas Clancy and it looks at the role of the Irish in the world of wine.
Five days in the Lake District didn’t give me as many opportunities to try local food as I would have liked but I did manage to eat vicariously after picking up Jane Grigson‘s authoritative English Food in a second hand book shop in Cockermouth. Reading it with the help of an English map helped me to properly place its regional references so, after a few days, I was getting much better at understanding where dishes like Dartmouth Pie, Cumbrian Tatie Pot and Grasmere Gingerbread came from.
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!
Things will be quiet about here next week as the Husband, Little Missy and myself are heading down to West Cork for a few nights. We’re staying in one of the Irish Landmark Trust’s restored properties on Galley Head, just south of Clonakilty, and I’m hoping to do lots of eating!I’d love to make it to Durrus to eat at Carmel’s Good Things Café, check out the Friday market in Bantry, visit Baltimore for lunch in the Glebe Gardens (and to see what Jean has done with the garden since we were there in February) and eat some more Ardagh Castle goat’s cheese.Any suggestions for food-orientated things to do in the area?
Ever since Louise Sowan of Sowan’s Organics put me on to Cork Coffee Roasters I’ve been a fan. Their full bodied Rebel City Espresso is a fixture in my kitchen and I rarely manage to go past their stall at the Mahon Point Farmer’s Market or events like the Mallow Food Festival without getting my hands on a caffeine fix. The Sister is even worse. She is luck enough to live around the corner from the Cork Coffee Roasters café. As a result, weekend phone calls between us are punctuated by her frequent stops at CCR to order yet another cappuccino. Meanwhile – especially since Urru Mallow closed down – I’m stuck in the sticks with nothing to comfort me except my stove top espresso maker.
Mornings have gotten spicier in recent times, not to mention more chocolaty, as I’ve been using some of Carluccio’s hot chilli oil to fry my breakfast egg (ah, maternity leave: time – Little Missy willing – for a full breakfast!) and grating lots of the birthday cacao over. Mouthfuls of intense, savoury yumminess, and plenty of lovely runny egg yoke to mop up with homemade fennel-aniseed-caraway bread.
I’ve just been enjoying the trailer for Julie & Julia, a film based on two books: My Life in France by American chef Julia Child and Julie Powell’s laugh-out-loud memoir Julie & Julia. Meryl Streep plays a suitably patrician Julia, while the lovely Amy Adams takes on the role of Julie. Check out the trailer below and watch out for the film, which should be out in Ireland on 11 September. I just might have to smuggle Little Missy in to the cinema!
