Delighted to see that food writer Dianne Curtin has launched a new web-site. If you are into food, you should check it out. She has news, tips, recipes and podcasts already. Since the site is built on Drupal, I think we can expect lots more features to appear over time.
Browsing Posts in Food
Deeply important piece by Ivan on food security and our future. Don’t just read it, leave your thoughts too.
The ability of a country to feed itself and have a sustainable agri-business must surely have been a major motivator of Reddy Brennan and his team in Avonmore in the early 1970s. A man of great vision with incredible negotiation skills, he is one of the heroes of Irish industry. Our family will always be grateful to him. Reddy Brennan 1924-2009, RIP.
This is just a superb idea, well done to everyone involved! Why not enter?
The inaugural Grow Bake Cook Awards Ceremony honours and celebrates the skills of amateur cooks, growers, bakers and preservers – in fact anyone with a talent for creating good food!
Supporting local communities throughout Cork city and county, these awards aim to give our hidden food heroes the opportunity, tools and encouragement to sell their wares through farmer’s markets,country markets, local supermarkets and food fairs.
Award winning and shortlisted produce will be displayed at Cork City’s Midsummer Festival Feasta market on Sunday June 28th , with the Award Ceremony taking place that evening at a city venue tbc.
For further information and entrance criteria contact Dianne Curtin 086067 6249 or Elke O’Mahony 087 3168855or email to grow.bake.cook@gmail.com.Deadline for submission is 23rd June 2009
I love bread. Can’t put it any more simply than that. So when I hear that someone who lives just up the road from me is now making craft and organic breads and they are selling them at the Bandon Farmer’s Market every Saturday, well that make me very very happy.
Check out the alphaomega blog for a list of their current products. I’ll be checking out the bread.
I was enraged on Thursday whilst listening to the latest Restaurant Guys’ podcast. They were interviewing a New York restaurateur who is being picketed by fois gras protestors. These ugg-boot-wearing idiots think they can intimidate a small business owner and effectively put him out of business. These cowards don’t have the balls to go after large fast-food chains who sell industrially produced chicken and figure they’ll go for easy marks instead.
Unfortunately for these hypocrites, this restaurant owner is Irish and (like the rest of us) he doesn’t like people telling him what to do. I was then thrilled to discover who he was. The restaurant is Knife + Fork and he is Damien Brasel. He was made head chef in Peacock Alley in Dublin at the age of 20! Two of my top ten meals of all time were in Peacock Alley in its heyday before it all went pear-shaped.
His response to these lazy cause-of-the-week nitwits? Put a fois gras tasting menu on! The outcome? His business has improved. Result 
If you are in New York and wondering where to eat, can I recommend you try Knife + Fork? Bring some chicken nuggets with you to throw at the wastes-of-oxygen picketing outside at the weekend.
We’ve just had the third annual waste of time known as Earth Hour where millions of people worldwide pretend to do something useful about global warming and turn off lights for an hour. For 99.999999% of those people, that’ll be it for another 365 days. End result for the Earth, big fat zero. Perhaps if we take all the energy expended by the media covering this story, we may even have a net negative?
Imagine if, instead, those millions of people went outside, dug up a square metre or two of their perfect lawns and planted some vegetable seeds? Or if they lived in an apartment in Ireland, they contacted Irish Allotments about organising patches in their locality?
Then instead of some silly hour-long nonsense they could:
- Reduce CO2 throught the action of the plants
- Reduce petrol consumption through less shopping
- Reduce fuel miles by not buying foreign vegetables
- Save money
- Get their kids outside
- Take part in Seed Saver schemes
- Eat healthier
- Get fit
We could call it Gardener’s World
Of course taking care of this veg patch takes a wee bit longer than one hour a year and isn’t news-worthy so maybe we should just turn off the lights and keep playing mushroom instead.
I was given this lovely book for Christmas 2007 and finally finished it last month. What initially appears to be a coffee-table resident turned out to be one of the best books on food I’ve ever read.
The title says it all. This is a book about pork. Every single bit of the pig gets a mention and use. The author, Stéphane Reynaud is the grandson of a village butcher from the Ardeche plateau in France. He runs a restaurant near Paris that specialises in Pork. I want to eat there!
The recipes themselves are fantastic but so too are the notes, anecdotes and pictures and people. This is a book centered on the relationship between a community and its food. The way it is sectioned up is unusual but it works. The “chapters” are as follows:
- Pig-killing time at Saint-Agreve
- Black Pudding Recipes
- For the love of Sausages
- Sausage Recipes
- Hamming it up
- Ham Recipes
- Pates and Terrines
- Jacquy’s terrine
- Granny Pig
- Barbecued Pig
- A piggy Party
- Wild Boar
It’s been quite a while since I’ve read a cookery book which stirred up such desire to cook but this did it. Whilst I know recession-talk is starting to wear people down, this book will hopefully be part of a return to cooking cheap tasty food with a bit of soul.
Rated /5 on Jan 11 2009
Vote on Conor O'Neill‘s reviews at LouderVoice
The Empire may have done its best to kill the pork industry in Ireland but the producers are fighting back. Barrie Tyner from Slow Food Ireland just let me know that the West Cork and Cork City Conviviums are coming together to bring us ‘The Pig Extravaganza’.
I was disappointed to find that this did not include dancing pigs but it’s the next best thing To celebrate National Pork Weekend, an evening of eating and great chat is planned down west on Sunday, the 18th of January.
Speakers include award winning butcher Martin Carey. Willie and Avril Allshire of Caherbeg Free Range Pork Farm and Rosscarbery Recipes, Frank Krawcykz, salami maker and artisan, Anthony Creswell of Ummera Smoked Bacon plus guest chefs.
Over the years I’ve driven past many signs for the Ballyjamesduff Pork Festival. I hope we could have something like that down here every year too. Imagaine a giant cook-out with BBQs and Smokers going all day? Yummmmm!
I’ll post an update it when the venue (probably in Bandon) is confirmed. If you love anything made from pork and you want to show your support for fantastic local producers, then I hope to see you there.
UPDATE: The details of the day have been finalised:
Time: 12.00 Noon, Sunday January 19th. Location: Heron Court, Market Quay, Bandon. A 3 course lunch will be served with talks and demonstrations from artisan food producers including award winning Bandon butcher, Martin Carey, Willie and Avril Allshire of Caherbeg, Frank Krawcykz of West Cork Salamis, and Anthony Creswell of Ummera Smoked Products. €30.00 for Slow Food Members, €35.00 for Non-Members. Booking essential as numbers limited. slowfoodwestcork AT gmail DOT com or 086 067 6249.
I just got a mail from the lovely people in The Good Things Cafe in Durrus to tell me that the awesome Carmel was on the Foodtalk programme on Newstalk Radio.
Foodtalk is hosted by one of the best food bloggers anywhere, Caroline Hennessy from Bibliocook.
If you want to listen online and subscribe so that you get each broadcast, then there are a bunch of different ways of doing it.
On your PC, one of the best tools is MediaMonkey. Install it, tell it about Foodtalk, leave it running in the background and it’ll automatically download the new episodes so you can listen at your desk.
If you have a newer car stereo or (like us) one of the replacement Lidl/Aldi ones, then you can copy those audio files onto a memory card or USB stick and play them in the car when you like.
Lots of the newer phones with Wifi also have podcasting capabilities. The Nokia N95, N95-8GB, N96 etc come with the software built in. Owners of the E51, E63, E71 etc can download it from here. You have to manually tell the application to check for new episodes but it takes care of the download etc once you do that. You can listen directly on the phone or plug it into the line-in on your stereo or car-stereo.
If you have an iPod, I’m sure it’s all very similar.
Note that most of the radio stations, in particular RTE, have a ton of podcasts you can get like this. I recently listened to all of a year-old series about De Valera I grabbed from the RTE site on my N95-8GB.
So 47 farms used contaminated pig feed. Unless the FSAI confirms that Gubbeen or Caherbeg are two of those farms, I’ll be having a lovely bacon sarnie for my breakfast.
If the State’s Chief Medical Officer says that dioxin is only dangerous if a person is exposed to it over a long period of time, then why the hell are we destroying millions of Euro worth of food?
We all eat chicken that spends its life sitting in its own faeces in the dark and lots of the pork we eat is dosed up to the eyeballs in sub-therapeutic antibiotics, so how is a slight possibility of a touch of PCB going to make our health any worse?
Related to this, I’ve met with a few small food producers recently and I don’t know how they stay in business with the nonsensical levels of paperwork and measurement that they have to deal with. Is this actually part of the problem? An unbelievably bloated bureaucracy unable to measure and react quickly because they are drowning in irrelevant form processing? A bit like Sarbanes-Oxley in the US causing people to be so obsessed with process, they forgot about the intent and allowed the banks to trade recklessly for years.
Finally, I thought we had full meat traceability from field (or concrete pen) to fork? Why not just release the tracking codes of all the individual batches we need to destroy? Or are we all a bit too thick to manage that?
This Sunday’s rasher sandwich brought to you by the letter P and the Caherbeg Television Workshop:
