Bibliocook - All About Food

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

Category: Cookery Books

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Cookery Books / Read

Irish Cookbooks for Christmas 2013 – part 2

Old school Irish publisher Gill & Mac has been taking cookbook production up a notch in the last few years and both of these hardbook books are lovely to look at as well as to cook from.

If every small town in Ireland had a Dream Deli selling fabulous brunch dishes like Fruit Tabbouleh, Weekend Waffles and Welsh Rarebit, we’d all eat out a lot more. Perhaps it’s best that this doesn’t happen – because instead you can have the fun of cooking your way through Lilly’s book, which includes (my favourite!) inventive devilled egg variations like beetroot and fennel, spiced coriander, wasabi and sesame seed. There are great salads (Mango and Shredded Chicken with Garam Masala Yoghurt, Quinoa with Pistachio and Pomegranate) and an assemble-on-the-spot Sicilian Wedding Cake that could set a new trend. lillyhiggins.ie

Irish cookbooks for Christmas 2013 0

Cookery Books / Read / Uncategorized

Cookbooks for Christmas 2013 – Part 1

Shuush…you may not realise it but Christmas is coming. Or, like me, you may have small people in the house.

It took until June this year until I managed to distract them away from singing Christmas carols; now we’re back in full flow with Frosty the *blinking* Snowman. Sigh.

Still, with all this early concentration on the season in question – we had our first Christmas dinner two weeks ago before the Little Sister headed back to life in Aus – I’m hoping to get well ahead with my preparations. No allowing the Little Brother to order my cookbook presents on 21 December. He’s based in Austin, Texas for the moment.

Bibliocook.com - Rory O'Connell & Darina Allen, Ballymaloe Cookery School 30th birthday celebrations 31

Cookery Books / Food Events / Read

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.

Cookbooks for Christmas 0

Cookery Books / Read

Cookbooks for Christmas 2012

When all the baking and cooking and running around is done, finding a stack of cookbooks under the tree is one of my favourite things about Christmas. It’s also one of the few times of the...