Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
Culture File on RTÉ Lyric FM / Food Events / Work
by Caroline · Published July 27, 2016 · Last modified October 25, 2017
We came, we learned, we loved every minute of it. The Kerrygold Ballymaloe Litfest 2016 was an absolute corker, from Francis Mallman’s 4am fire vigal, the Claire Ptak-Jeremy Lee comedy duo /cookery demo, Irish cider...
Making lists. Checking them twice. Ordering books… No, I’m not stuck back in pre-Christmas hell, I’m glorying in a morning spent wandering through the website for the Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine. Each and every year,...
Talk about cookbooks? I could go on and on for hours – that’s exactly what I’ll be doing this weekend, along with thousands of other fans of writing about food and history and beer...
Food Events / Irish beer & cider / Read
by Caroline · Published May 8, 2015 · Last modified October 25, 2017
Counting down the days? I am! The Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food & Wine (and other good things!) is kicking off this day week, Friday 15 May, and running for that entire weekend. I’ll...
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...
Last year’s Lit Fest was – officially – a blast. Three whirlwind days of ideas and education and inspiration from cookbook heroes. I learned how to ferment cabbage from Sandor Katz, make Claudia Roden’s...
Cookery Books / Food Events / Read
by Caroline · Published October 9, 2013 · Last modified October 25, 2017
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.
Culture File on RTÉ Lyric FM / Food Events / Radio / Work
by Caroline · Published June 7, 2013 · Last modified October 25, 2017
Cabbages empowering people? Stranger things have happened, especially in the bubbly, fizzy, pungent world of fermentation legend Sandor Katz. His demonstration at the recent Ballymaloe LitFest was one of the hottest tickets of the weekend,...
