Somehow I can manage to get food into most reports that I do for Lyric fm’s Culture File.
Ireland’s first Sacred Harp Convention took place in University College Cork over the first weekend in March. I was there, recording and enjoying the singing – but also asking people about Dinner-on-the-Grounds.
On the eve of St Patrick’s Day, one’s thoughts turn – quite naturally – to Irish Coffee, especially if you’ve been at all following L Mulligan Grocer‘s search for the best of the best...
We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. A simple idea – organising an Irish Food Blogger Association dinner at Harry’s Bar and Restaurant – got out of hand very quickly, in the best...
Steak is always a very special treat at the cottage but, when Pat Whelan of James Whelan Butchers sends a couple of wagyu beef steaks, that’s into another stratosphere entirely. They arrived in a brown paper parcel, all tied up with string, neatly labelled and sealed with red wax.
With all that’s happening in my former home of Christchurch, New Zealand at the moment – victims of the earthquake still being named, constant aftershocks some up to 4.1 in magnitude, work continuing on...
You wait for something to happen on the underground dining scene in Ireland for years – and then they all come along at once. Two weeks ago I wrote about Clonakilty by Candlelight, last week my feature on that plus Lilly Higgins’s Loaves and Fishes Supper Club was broadcast on Lyric fm. Then, on Friday myself and the Writer took ourselves for a post-gallery launch, pre-bookclub dinner at Crackbird, the pop up restaurant on Crane Lane in Dublin’s Temple Bar.
Blogger Lilly Higgins runs an underground restaurant called the Loaves and Fishes Supper Club and I interviewed her for a feature that was broadcast on Lyric fm’s Culture File last week. As the piece was very short, I couldn’t use very much of her interview but, seeing as there is so much interest in the whole idea of underground dining at the moment, here’s a podcast of the chat we had at her home in Cobh last month.
I hadn’t intended on cooking beef cheeks for a family lunch but a chance trip to the English Market to meet Clare and her MM on Saturday morning gave me an unexpected opportunity. Queuing at Tom Durcan Meats, there was a bit of banter with the man ahead of me about the lamb’s liver for one that he was picking up – like myself at the cottage, no one else in his house will eat it – and then, rather than ordering a kilo of stewing beef, I asked the butcher what would he recommend for long, slow cooking. “I have an idea,” he said, “but I’m not sure you’ll like it. How do you feel about beef cheeks?”