Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
Yesterday was the Boyfriend’s birthday so I decided to throw a small surprise birthday dinner. The plotting and planning for this has been going on for a couple of weeks but, after pondering various options, I only decided on what we were going to eat fairly late in the day. Eventually I decided on one of the Boyfriend’s favourites – the good old Kiwi meat pie.
One of the nicest meals out that I ever had with my family occurred in a small, unpromising, cellar-type Italian restaurant on the Douglas promenade in the Isle of Man about five years ago.
When I was a kid, Bread and Butter Pudding was the desert that we all loved. I wasn’t too impressed with other traditional milk puddings like Farola or semolina and often would walk away from the dinner table with my pockets full of secreted spoonfuls rather than actually eat a bowl of the insipid stuff.
Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt and that has surely been the case with one of my trademark dishes – Lemon and Garlic Chicken. This is a dish that I have been cooking for years. It gets trotted out at regular intervals if friends are coming round for dinner and for many years it, and a variation on Apple Crumble, were my fail-safe dishes for those occasions.
Food for Friends / Storecupboard Specials
by Caroline · Published June 5, 2005 · Last modified June 23, 2016
If you’ve ever seen photos of Morocco, you’ll be familiar with the piles of vividly coloured spices in the market places. My one-time housemate, on a trip to Morocco a long time ago, brought me a mysterious little bag from one of the piles.
Cauliflower with Roasted Cumin
Adapted from a recipe in Tamasin Day-Lewis’ evocative West of Ireland Summers. Very good served with Mughali Chicken and Chickpea and Tomato Curry.
Chickpea and Tomato Curry
This recipe was adapted from a wee Family Circle Step-By-Step Indian Cooking book that I picked up for 50c in the charity shop. Very good served with Mughali Chicken and Cauliflower with Roasted Cumin.
We were having five people over for dinner on Saturday night and, as I was digging through the cookbooks looking for inspiration, the boyfriend asked if I had ever cooked an Indian curry from first principles. Well, with a challenge like that it didn’t take me too long to dig out a few recipes that I’d been wanting to try for a while.
