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

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

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...