Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
Kitchen / Life / Lovely Lunches / Travel
by Caroline · Published August 19, 2009 · Last modified February 12, 2018
Last year, on a trip to London, I picked up a spork – a light plastic utensil which features a spoon at one end, fork at the other and serrated knife edge on the fork side – in a kitchenware shop and I’ve rarely been without it since. The last quarter of 2008 was taken up with train trips to Dublin as I worked on the Foodtalk documentary series and, food on the train being what it is – or isn’t – my spork was invaluable.
Glorious sunshine, lots of people (especially before the match kicked off) and stalls well-laden with a large variety of good food meant success all the way for yesterday’s Mallow Food Festival. URRU had a stall there so the Mallow Girl and I were kept busy, filling and selling pottles (note use of Kiwi term!) of URRU nibbles – paper cups filled with slices of Gubbeen chorizo, salami, chunks of their extra mature and oak smoked Gubbeen cheese, topped with a Gubbeen cheese biscuits. We were also selling a selection of afternoon cakes – lemon drizzle, flourless chocolate and almond and carrot loaf cakes – from Richard Graham-Leigh who, with his wife, Jane, supplies URRU with all variety of tarts, café bars, cookies and cakes. All of the cakes were pre-wrapped, fortunately, as the wasps were also attending in force and the Natural Foods Bakery next to us were inundated by black and yellow-striped fans of their sweet offerings.
When the days get brighter and longer, a girl’s thoughts turn to salad lunches. Based about 15 minutes walk away from any shops or cafés and blessed/cursed with a sloppy canteen, I bring my lunch to work year-round. Brown Bread and a fridge in the office are my lifesavers – the bread for toasting in the canteen and the fridge to store endless blocks of cheese for my normal lunch. Sometimes food bloggers eat boring food too! With the arrival of the summer, however, I start wanting a little more variety, particularly as the canteen is closed at the moment so I have no access to my toaster.
If there’s one thing nicer than Murphy’s Seacláid (chocolate) Ice Cream, eaten straight from the tub beside the fire (yep, it’s still cold in Ireland!), then it’s got to be that self same cold, intensely flavoured ice cream topped with great generous spoonfuls of creamy sweet/salty confiture de lait. Perfect for an Easter treat! Literally translated as milk jam, confiture de lait is a truly luxurious, indulgent toffee caramel sauce, similar to the Argentinean dulce de leche, and often used as a spread for bread, or even to sandwich cookies together.
If you’re interested in cheese, particularly of the Irish variety, it’s worth picking up this month’s edition of Food & Wine Magazine for a series of profiles of Ireland’s leading cheese makers, a piece by Sheridan’s Cheesemongers‘ Dan Fennelly on how cheese changes with the seasons, recipes from the Ballymaloe matriarch Myrtle Allen and the best accompaniments for a plateful of cheeses. Read restaurant reviews of Dublin’s Café Úna, a truffle orgy at the K Club and Conor favourite Boqueria tapas bar in Cork. You can have your own say on the discussion forums at editor Ernie Whalley’s own Fork’n’Cork website. For fans of goat’s cheese, there’s a piece on Tom Biggane, maker of the very special Clonmore Goat’s Cheese from Newtown in North Cork written by, ahem, one Caroline Hennessy. April’s Food & Wine Magazine – in the shops now!
Do / Eating Out / Lovely Lunches / Travel
by Caroline · Published March 15, 2006 · Last modified February 12, 2018
Last Friday, over a glass of wine and some nibbles at a city centre tapas bar, the Boyfriend – after WEEKS of mystery – handed me my passport and…a guidebook for Paris! He had told me that we were going away for the weekend, we would be spending time in a city and that I had to pack for cold weather. Despite lots of guessing – I thought Galway, or maybe Belfast – I hadn’t even come close to figuring out where we were going.
In the twelve months that I spent in New Zealand, most weekends of which were involved in exploring a variety of markets, there seems to have been a mushrooming of farmers’ markets in Ireland. Or maybe it’s that I’m more aware of it now! Last Saturday, after just two days in the country, and my mother suggested that we go to the Fermoy Farmers’ Market. Although we only had the directions “it’s down by the river” – and there are four sides to the river in Fermoy – we didn’t have too much difficulty in finding the place where the stallholders had set up shop and plunged in.
In the twelve months that I spent in New Zealand, most weekends of which were involved in exploring a variety of markets, there seems to have been a mushrooming of farmers’ markets in Ireland. Or maybe it’s that I’m more aware of it now! Last Saturday, after just two days in the country, and my mother suggested that we go to the Fermoy Farmers’ Market. Although we only had the directions “it’s down by the river” – and there are four sides to the river in Fermoy – we didn’t have too much difficulty in finding the place where the stallholders had set up shop and plunged in.
