Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
Culture File on RTÉ Lyric FM / Food Events / Radio / Work
by Caroline · Published June 13, 2014 · Last modified April 13, 2023
Bringing butter back? Well, if it’s on the cover of Time Magazine, it must be true (just try and forget about this one, which fronted a 1984 story on cholesterol entitled Hold the Eggs...
A gentle introduction to Italian cooking, Catherine’s Italian Kitchen is the companion book to Catherine Fulvio’s well-received television series, which was nominated for a World Food Media Award earlier this year. Fulvio, who runs the well regarded Ballyknocken Cookery School at her family home in Wicklow, is married to Sicilian native Claudio. With this connection and her teaching experience, she is well placed to translate Italian recipes to an Irish audience.
Just enough time to…- attend a dinner to celebrate 20 years of John and Sally McKenna’s Bridgestone Guides and Bridgestone at the just-opened Pinot’s restaurant in Sandyford.- enjoy sumptuous wines from Enrico Fantasia, the all-cooking, all-drinking, opera-singing, Venetian wine importer who – besides having a most memorable name, imagine being the Fantasia family! – brings an buttery, apricoty Arneis (Guidobono Roero Arneis 2009), rich Vignai da Duline Vivernum 2004 and refreshing prosecco (Prosecco Col Saliz) into Ireland. Reason enough, besides his name, to make his acquaintance.
It was dough at the ready for the first Irish food bloggers Twizza Party (think Twitter plus pizza plus party) last Thursday, organised by Reindeersp of Musings of a med student. A gang of newly acquainted bloggers dementedly (or maybe that was just me!) cooked, photographed and tweeted an assortment of delicious pizzas over the course of the evening.
As a child, I was fascinated with our local butcher’s shop. Every time I was sent in there, I’d have my fingers crossed that there would be a big crowd ahead so that I’d have more time to watch, enthralled, as the big men behind the wooden butchers’ blocks speedily and expertly dissected carcasses of meat, saws and knives flashing, all the time keeping up their end of the conversation with their customers. The sawdust on the floor, the posters of cuts of meat on the wall, the chunks of lamb or beef hanging from hooks behind the counter – it all held me so spellbound that I would often forget what I was supposed to be buying for dinner.
Seasonal? What is seasonal? If you were to look in my garden at the moment, you might think that courgettes (and a few caterpillar-eaten cabbages) are the only things that are in season but my shortcomings as a gardener might not be best representative of what vegetables are available at the moment! Take a look at a farmers’ market veg stall (or at a better managed garden) and it’s easy to see that carrots and parsnips, the brassicas – broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower – main crop potatoes, runner beans, rhubarb and even Irish-grown peppers are all plentiful right now.
From Burdass-Reared Wold’s lamb to Ampleforth Abbey Apple Tart Tatin, Andrew Pern’s Black Pudding and Foie Gras is as firmly rooted in the food of Yorkshire as his Michelin-stared establishment is embedded in the village of Harome. Andrew’s Star Inn is a 14th century country pub in North Yorkshire which opened 13 years ago. He laughs as he recalls that it all started with just three people – himself in the kitchen, his wife Jacquie working front of house and her mother behind the bar. Now they run a total of seven interlinked businesses in Harome, including self catering cottages, a deli and a butcher’s shop, employing some 120 people.
Driving to Galley Head Lighthouse is a bit like a magical mystery tour. Although easy to see from a variety of locations along the West Cork coast, the lighthouse – like an ever-receeding mirage – seems to disappear from sight the closer you get. Eventually, however, after driving constantly south of Clonakilty, past numerous private property signs and along a low-lying road, protected on either side by stone walls, you get to where you can drive no further. The lighthouse stands at the tip of a peninsula, surrounded by the sea, and the lighthouse keeper’s house that we were staying in is part of a two-sided structure that shelters the parking area at the front from the northern and western winds.
