Bibliocook - All About Food

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

Category: Do

2

Do / Travel

Back from Morocco

My Berber tagine After two weeks of sunshine and heat in Morocco we’ve returned to an amazingly summery Ireland – perfect for last night’s sun-soaked family party to celebrate my Gran’s 90th birthday.Just in the door of our Dublin flat so sour milk has to be thrown out of the fridge, fresh supplies to be bought and the raw clay Berber tagine that we lugged through a couple of taxi trips, two flights, three airports and a pair of train journeys needs to be unpacked, along with assorted spices, dates, olives, tea, honey and god only knows what else from our travel-beaten rucksacks.And then I’ll have time to sit down and write about the meals, tastes and flavours that I’ve encountered during my time in Morocco!

Bibliocook à Maroc 0

Do / Travel

Bibliocook à Maroc

Bibliocook is on tour! The Boyfriend and I travelled to Casablanca last weekend to meet with a friend – the Australian – and spend a couple of weeks travelling around the country. It’s a good opportunity to practise the languages that we’ve been learning, French for me and Arabic in the Boyfriend’s case, as well as doing a through investigation of the food and flavours of Morocco. Not to mention continuous stops to feed the BF’s addiction to the refreshing, sweet mint tea available on every corner. Unfortunately, the lack of internet cafès in the Sahara and absence of QUERTY keyboards may mean less frequent updates for the moment but I’ll remedy that as soon as I get back to Ireland. Now, time for tonight’s tagine…

Táim ag blagadóireacht 0

Do

Táim ag blagadóireacht

A wee while ago, Sinéad over at Sigla sent me a link to a piece on Irish language podcast blog An tImeall on Cócaireacht agus Filíocht (Cooking and Poetry). My prowess as gaeilge not being what it should be, I had to get a friend to translate it for me – many thanks to the Schoolteacher – and am finally able to appreciate Conn’s kind words. There’s a link to the page here or, for my non-Irish readers, a couple of paragraphs translated below. Isn’t the Irish word for blogging – ag blagadóireacht – absolutely gorgeous? Compliments like these just might be the way to encourage me to improve my Irish.

9

Bake / Food Events

Sugar High Friday: Ginger Crunch

Sugar High Friday: Ginger Crunch I’ve often intended to but never quite got round to getting involved in Sugar High Friday. It’s a reoccurring blog event that was originally, once-upon-a-long-time-ago, started by Domestic Goddess Jennifer. This round is being hosted by Ruth, who is physically situated in Toronto – virtually at Once Upon A Feast and the theme she has picked for this month is ginger. I love this spice in all its incarnations, ground and used in a delicious little Ginger Gem, chunks of crystallised ginger studing a moist, sticky slab of Gingerbread or – at the other end of the spectrum – slices of the fresh root simmered in a savory chicken stock for soup.

0

Do

Food and music: Alex Kapranos

Alex Kapranos Watch out for the idiosyncratic food columns by Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos in The Guardian newspaper. After tip-off from my workmate about Kapranos being about to publish a collection of the columns, I went searching for them online. They’re pieces about the foods that former Glaswegian sous-chef Kapranos encounters while on tour with the band – a burger at Anthony Bourdain‘s Les Halles, blowfish in Osaka, the best New York donuts, street food in Singapore.

0

Do / Eating Out / Food Events

Tasty Dublin

Taste of Dublin logo Watch out next month for Taste of Dublin 2006, running from 22 June to 25 June in the gardens at Dublin Castle and described in the press release as Dublin’s “first outdoor gourmet food and drink festival”. Ha! There’s a reason why there aren’t more outdoor events in Ireland – talk to the shivering, drenched stallholders at any of the markets around the country and see why. Anyway, festival visitors can expect signature dishes from a selection of the city’s restaurants, including a few of my favourites – the lovely Silk Road Café in the Chester Beatty Library and the more sophisticated Cellar Restaurant at The Merrion.

Bibliocook.com - Anzac BIscuits 4

Do / Return to Ireland / Travel

A wander round the west

Our first weekend of the year under canvas couldn’t exactly be called an unqualified success. We did actually remember to pack the sleeping bags (and Anzac Biscuit morale) but, despite such forethought, it wasn’t exactly the weather for camping in the west of Ireland. The heavens opened early on Sunday morning, raining us off Achill Island and we had to retreat to an old-school bed & breakfast in Westport back on mainland Mayo. At least we managed to have a cold, but fine, Friday night breaking our journey at the ever-reliable Lough Ree campsite in Ballykerran, near Athlone before moving on to the beautiful-on-a-fine-evening Seal Caves Park in Dugort on the north side of Achill Island. We cooked dinner outdoors on our little gas burner – a typical simple one-pot camping meal of Clonakilty Black Pudding, roughly chopped mushrooms and baked beans – and drank red wine in the still-warm late evening sunshine, feeling like summer had finally arrived.

3

Do / Eating Out

A new shopping experience: Fallon & Byrne

Fallon & Byrne A new arrival on the Dublin grocery scene is the gorgeous-looking Fallon & Byrne, a classy supermarket along the lines of Donnybrook Fair, on Exchequer Street in the city centre. They’ve been renovating the building for a while and, seeing it opened at last, I just popped in for a few minutes last Saturday week. A former telephone exchange, it’s an airy, echo-y space, all parquet floors and food everywhere. Right inside the door is a juice bar and, dotted around the periphery of the vast floor space, were also an in-store butchers, a long deli counter filled with take-home dishes, a coffee bar, complete with high stools and tables, and a well-stocked cheese and charcuterie counter which I could have spent the rest of the afternoon poring over.