Bibliocook - All About Food

Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.

Category: Do

Mallow Food Festival 0

Do

Mallow Food Festival

Glorious sunshine, lots of people (especially before the match kicked off) and stalls well-laden with a large variety of good food meant success all the way for yesterday’s Mallow Food Festival. URRU had a stall there so the Mallow Girl and I were kept busy, filling and selling pottles (note use of Kiwi term!) of URRU nibbles – paper cups filled with slices of Gubbeen chorizo, salami, chunks of their extra mature and oak smoked Gubbeen cheese, topped with a Gubbeen cheese biscuits. We were also selling a selection of afternoon cakes – lemon drizzle, flourless chocolate and almond and carrot loaf cakes – from Richard Graham-Leigh who, with his wife, Jane, supplies URRU with all variety of tarts, café bars, cookies and cakes. All of the cakes were pre-wrapped, fortunately, as the wasps were also attending in force and the Natural Foods Bakery next to us were inundated by black and yellow-striped fans of their sweet offerings.

Countdown to Mallow Food Festival 0

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Countdown to Mallow Food Festival

The pressure is on – only four days to go to this year’s Mallow Food Festival – and we’re hoping for sunshine! Last year, it was a glorious day, apparently, amidst the damp gloom that was the summer of 2007 (not very different at all from summer 2008) and the kids are due back to school so the weather is bound to perk up. The event takes place on the main street in Mallow on this Sunday, 31 August, from 12pm to 3.30pm and it’s looking like we’re getting at least 50 stalls to take place this year. Unfortunately, the fact that URRU will have a stall this year means that my purchasing power will be necessarily limited so I’ll have to send the Husband and the Cambridge Couple off on many buying trips. Now, we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed for good weather…

Homebrewing at Ballyvoddy 0

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Homebrewing at Ballyvoddy

I’m the Sourdough aficionado, using natural yeasts to raise my bread. Now – and it’s been brewing for a while (pun very definitely intended) – the Husband is just after taking delivery of his own yeasts as he prepares to embark on a long-discussed, thought-over and well-researched foray into the world of making beer at home.After we were both spoiled for choice with microbrewery beers in NZ, it’s become more and more difficult to drink the rubbish that you can find on tap in most Irish pubs (with an honorary exception for Beamish, of course, and both the Franciscan Well Brewery and Bierhaus in Cork). So, this could be a whole new world. And, finally, there’s some good reason for the dozens of empty beer bottles stored in the spare room!

Green Saffron in URRU 0

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Green Saffron in URRU

If you’re in the Mallow vicinity tomorrow, Saturday 23 August, call in to URRU as Arun Kapil of Green Saffron will be in store between 11am and 3pm, talking about his range of fresh, intensely flavoured spice blends and Indian ingredients, offering plenty of tips and tricks for making the most of them.

Baking bread with mud: Hendrik Lepel pizza oven building workshop 4

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Baking bread with mud: Hendrik Lepel pizza oven building workshop

When the Husband and I stayed at Gort na Nain in May, I admired Ultan and Lucy’s recently built outdoor wood-fired oven. A sturdy stone-clad structure that they can use to bake pizza and bread, it sits in a magnificent location, on the then-sunny patio outside their kitchen, looking across the hills to the sparkling blue sea. My interest piqued, they put me in contact with the builder, Henrik Lepel, and I asked him to keep me updated about any future breadoven building workshops.

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Do / Grow

Fresh vegetables at Mallow Farmers’ Market

Moriss' baby carrots Despite all the recent rain and bad weather, the range of vegetables available at the Mallow Farmers’ Market continues to expand. As well as his fantastic salad leaves, which I eat for lunch every day, Morris from Gairdín Eden has been selling huge bunches of rhubarb and carrots. I also picked up some parsnips this week, along with a jar of West Cork Eden Honey – perfect for Honey Flapjacks, if I can save some back from the Husband and his toast!