Conor’s Bandon Blog

I was given this heavy tome by the publishers to review and months later I’m finally getting my thoughts down. Whilst it is a fantastic collection of recipes and information that all Irish cooks should own, I fear that along with Darina’s Forgotten Skills of Cooking, we are looking at our past.

The author Colman Andrews is a very well known food-writer and co-founder of the famed Saveur magazine in the US. This may look like a coffee-table staple but it is genuinely jammed with lots of recipes that could easily have been lost forever.

It’s clear reading the book that Colman is not claiming to be an expert in Irish food since he defers to many of the Irish greats like Darina and profiles some of our Irish food heroes like Anthony down the road in Ummera. The only time this becomes a problem is when he refers to things being very common when I know that they are small-scale and highly-localised. The perfect example is fraughan gathering. This is presented as something many people do. The reality is that 95% of the population would have no idea what a fraughan is and most of those live in boggy country areas. Their parents or grandparents may have gathered them but they are now buying Chilean strawberries in SuperValu.

This leads to the biggest problem I ran into when reading it. Quite simply it does not reflect mainstream current Irish eating or food. It is a lens on our food history and it tells us what foodies, Slow Food people and gurus like Myrtle or Darina are interested in, but it has no relationship to where most people are now.

My mother was flicking through it recently and ran into a word I had never heard of: stir-about. It’s an old word for porridge. Neither she nor my father had heard it for decades. This is a perfect example of what we are losing as we “modernize”.

I don’t see this as a problem with the book, I see it as a problem with us. Is our future going to be 100% Tesco-ized? Everything pre-prepared, cooked and packaged? Or Tesco-Finest for those with money? Is U.S.-style obesity heading our way? Is the idea of cooking with incredibly small budgets using things like cheap cuts of meat gone and replaced with take-aways and extruded shapes?

Anyone who reads this blog know I love food and love seeing artisan produce do well but at the back of my mind I worry we have gone from “proper food” being something everyone ate, due to economic necessity, to something utterly middle-class and slightly sniffy.

The current recession should be an opportunity for this type of cooking to come back but the skills are gone. Is there any hope? What could be done in the education system to bring these skills back?

Having stupid men on the sides of buses telling us how easy it is to cook certainly isn’t the answer either. How about replacing compulsory Irish in schools with compulsory cooking? Imagine a government doing something audacious now to solve a future health epidemic whilst finally admitting failure in an 80 year language effort.

Apologies for such a negative post about such a great book but I think I’ve been depressed since watching Food Inc. Movies like that along with efforts like Jamie Oliver’s and Hugh F-W’s are mainly just preaching to the converted. How do we convert those who could benefit most from a return to the past?

Colman’s book is not the solution but at least it is helping to preserve the knowledge.

In case the review was lost in my brain-dump above, this is a superb book. If you want a broad sweep of traditional Irish cooking you should buy it.

With a single episode, the greatest TV show RTE have made about food in at least 25 years. Martin Shanahan jumps out of the screen, grabs you by the scruff of the neck and demands that you watch him and start loving fish.

After decades of dreary formulaic yawn inducing food programmes on Irish TV or worse, the “crayzzzzze kooky” shows, someone in RTE finally saw an episode of Jamie Oliver and realised what was missing – personality.

Where has Martin been hiding all this time? In the kitchens of the rightly legendary Fishy Fishy in Kinsale? He’s a force of nature. He is everything that made Darina a legend – knowledge,passion, humour. But he goes far beyond that, he’s an absolute TV natural. He belongs in front of the camera. Dammit he _owns_ the camera.

Honestly, I was rivetted for 30 minutes. It is perfect food TV. This show doesn’t just have potential, this could go global. With sub-titles of course. Joke joke!

And the fish, lord the fish. We’re not having our regular Friday Chicken Tikka Masala tonight, we are doing the mackerel dish that Martin showed instead. He had that much impact. And that’s the other thing, every bloody RTE food show tells you how to do dinner party food. Who the hell has dinner parties? Martin shows you how to cook gorgeous tasty healthy food quickly, for you!

If you missed the first episode, kick yourself hard and just be thankful RTE now has it on the RTE Player (even if it built on the proprietary dying Realplayer technology, but that’s a topic for another blogpost).

Hopefully this show will also be the kick up the arse Kinsale needs to start living up again to its long-undeserved 1970s “Gourmet Capital of Ireland” tag. Quick, name five places in Kinsale you would travel an hour to eat in. Exactly.

Top Chef is the only food TV show for years that I actively look forward to seeing each week. Martin Shanahan has created a second.

We recently discovered this shop as it seems to be the only one in a few hundred miles of Bandon that sells Sodastream gas refills. Catherine popped down a few weeks ago to get two refills and raved about the place. I drove down yesterday to have a look and get some of the Sodastream flavours.

They are just at the top of town on the main street, impossible to miss. I went in with 4 of our monsters so couldn’t spend as much time as I’d like. Suffice to say, if you like cookware or kitchenware, you’ll adore this shop. It is jammed with tons and tons of everything you could possibly need in a kitchen. In just a few minutes I got my Sodastream flavours (highly recommend that you start using this 1970s classic again to save yourself a fortune. Also less damaging to the environment!), spatula, pouring nozzles for oil, bun cases and oven thermometer. The owners were extremely friendly and helpful too.

The highlight for us all was this coffee maker. Slightly out of our budget but a wonderful design.

The Cookware Company is worth a drive no matter where you are in Cork.

I popped into the fish shop in Bantry today and spotted these. A fully sealed pack of live local mussels. I have long lamented the lack of fresh shellfish in shops in Cork and now they have no excuse. All you need is a cooler cabinet with no need for special shellfish expertise or having to deal with smells or things going off. These could literally be sold in every garage and convenience shop in the country.

Not only is it easier for shops but mussels are the ultimate fast food. All I did this evening was open the pack, rinse them, throw out the ones that were still open and cook them. Cooking consisted of chopping some garlic and onion, cooking that for a sec, lobbing in a ton of wine, one more minute, lob in the mussels, 4 minutes, add some cream, serve. Probably less that 15 minutes from taking pack out of fridge to eating my dinner.

And wow were these fresh. I could still smell and taste that seaside ozone without a hint of fishiness.

Demand these from every shop you frequent that limits itself to selling fish fingers.

It’s time to put Masterchef out to pasture. I’m watching an average show in about 10 minutes using Sky+. The formula isn’t working any more. No tension, no excitement, the same stupid catchphrases. Cooking doesn’t get any harder than this. Yeah, it does.

Scallops. If I see one more bleedin scallop on that show, I’ll explode. Fabio Viviani, in the far superior US show Top Chef, described the same problem perfectly back in January 2009:

And to prove the point yesterday, whilst bent over double in pain from a tummy bug, I lashed this together in 5 minutes, and I’m not even a good cook!

So Greg and John. Time to re-invent Top Chef again or give it up. I don’t know what the viewing figures are like but the ways it’s going, the contestants will be shown working in a chipper in the next season.

The recent review of CX Oriental by Messy Chef was the final push I needed to check this place out today after months of saying I must. It’s just fantastic. If you have ever raved about Asia Market in Dublin, this is 10x better.

If you have driven past Kinsale Road Roundabout in the past few months you can’t have missed the huge signs for CX Oriental Cash and Carry. Whilst Cork has had the brilliant Mr Bell’s in The English Market for years, it suffers from lack of space and the awkwardness of getting to it so this morning I finally made the trip to the Cash and Carry.

It’s pretty easy to find. Head past Harvey Normans off the Kinsale Road Roundabout, take the left at the lights onto Tramore Road and watch out for the many signs. My first surprise (and relief) was that they take credit cards. My second was that they have a noodle bar restaurant there open 7 days a week which was hopping.

The place is massive. It starts with a lot of huge freezers filled with all sorts of fish, meat and desserts. I got some tiger prawns and some spring roll sheets.

The fresh produce area and fridge is small but jammed full of stuff you just won’t get elsewhere including veg I’ve never seen before, multiple types of tofu, chillis, enoki mushrooms, mangoes and drinks. The fresh fish section looked awesome too but I didn’t get anything today.

I put together a list of ingredients from Rick Stein’s new Far Eastern book and found everything on it with no problems. They also obviously sell in bulk to restaurants and had lots of the Musgraves type things like foil containers and cups, in addition to woks, chopsticks, strainers, steamers etc.

Not much else to say except if you are doing any sort of Far Eastern cooking then it will be hard to keep you away from the place. The value is also stunningly good compared to supermarkets.

Here are some pictures I took whilst shopping:

We were recently taken out to dinner by my parents and decided to try the Malt House Granary in Clonakilty. We had only been once before, 5 years ago, and had not liked the heavy food. But a recent review which highlighted the new ownership made us want to try again. And oh boy were we glad we did.

We like eating very early and sat down at 7.30 to a totally empty restaurant which had me worried. I needn’t have. By 9pm they were turning people away at the door.

The menu is a great mix of local produce with a strong focus on fish and shellfish. Finally a restaurant in West Cork that offers something other than 5 different types of white fish!

As with other great meals I have had recently (like in Fenn’s Quay), I’ll let the pictures do the talking below. In summary, superb cooking with fantastic deep savoury flavours and a lightness of touch.

The portion sizes were on the overly-large size but the value was amazing. Where most places seem to try and get €22+ for mains, they were mid-teens for almost everything. We all raved about the food but were bursting at the seams as we left. We agreed that a main+coffee would make a fantastic early quick filling dinner for little more than you’d pay in a thousand crappy restaurants all over Ireland.

On the drive back through Clon we spotted several other restaurants that looked almost empty. If they want to stay in business, they should study what Elaine McCarthy and her team are doing in the Malt House Granary. It’s simple to say but hard to do: “fantastic fresh food, cooked with skill and sold with value in mind”.

I think I’ve found my new favourite fish restaurant in Ireland. Yes it is that good.

This won’t be a long review, it doesn’t need to be. Fenn’s Quay gave us a fantastic meal last Saturday night with wonderful service in a lovely room. You can’t ask for more than that.

My lovely parents were down in Cork for the weekend for the GAA thingy and offered to bring Catherine and me out for a meal. We’d heard great things about Fenn’s Quay from my sister and Julian Alubaidy and, wanting somewhere new to us, booked it.

Luckily we found parking at the door of the Mardyke and walked the few yards to the unassuming door. Inside was quite large and broken into two rooms. The service from the very first minute was friendly, light-hearted and helpful, exactly the way I like it.

I was thrilled to see they were quite busy for the entire night but that didn’t impact on us at all. The menu had something for everyone but for whatever reason we all picked fish mains and 3/4 picked fish starters.

To go with the meal, diligent wine-student Catherine picked a lovely Sancerre which improved quickly with opening.

I need say little more other than to highlight that this is in the top tier of restaurants in the country and if you are in Cork it should be top of your list to try. Whilst other local establishments appear to be resting on their laurels, Fenn’s Quay isn’t letting-up for a minute. The pictures can do the rest of the talking.

This isn’t good food, it’s fantastic food. The Irish have forgotten the power of preserving and this is a big wake-up call. Lip-smackingly gorgeous duck confit that is an absolute bargain and a doddle to prepare.

Disclosure: I received several of these products for free and did not pay delivery.

Quite a while back Laurent of Confit de France contacted me and a bunch of other foodie bloggers about his new ecommerce store which was selling a variety of preserved French foods including confit, pate, rillettes and foie gras. (yeah yeah vegans, we’ve heard it all before, do something useful and go annoy someone about battery chickens instead).

Laurent was particularly excited by the confit and I went to order some. Unfortunately whilst the products themselves were great value, the delivery was very expensive if you didn’t order a lot. Therefore Laurent offered to send me some for free to try out. The great news is that since then, he has dropped the price of delivery by a huge amount and everything is now a bargain.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying the various things he sent me and I’ll mention them all. But first, the duck. I got a large four-portion tin which was filled to the brim with duck fat. I poured off the fat and the gelatin and put the four very large legs into a frying pan.

I kept them on the heat until they were hot through and the skin had started to crisp up. However I think the oven method would be better for crisping and will try that the next time.

We just had it with a simple green salad and it was stunning. When you see how expensive duck breast is and how many times I’ve messed up the cooking of it, these confit legs are a doddle and more tasty in many ways. The fat makes amazing roast spuds too!

The other products I got were as follows:

• Goose Rillettes: I discovered the joy of rillettes at Taste of Cork and had tons of it on holidays in France. It’s basically pate with the meat shredded rather than pureed. Gorgeous on toast.
   
• Confit Duck in Orange: The duck and sauce were excellent but there wasn’t enough fondant potatoes.



• Cassoulet de Castelnaudary: This is a classic cassoulet with goose confit, sausage and beans. Very tasty and filling.



• Foie Gras: Not eaten yet. Will report back.

As I mentioned above, we seem to have forgotten the importance and usefulness of preserving. With all the money people were making in recent years, it was like curing/pickling/preserving/canning were somehow from our poor past. Apart from bacon, all we wanted were expensive cuts of meat or stupidly priced “premium” ready meals.

The tin of baked beans is one of the most perfect food products ever. Our holidays in France reminded us of all the other things like duck confit and casoulet which came from poverty and lack of freezers but which are now pinnacles of gourmet food.

I hope one of the upsides of this recession is that we look again at our past and start learning how to cook the cheaper tastier cuts of meats, how to use pulses and grains, how to use preserved goods and how to live on a budget whilst still eating beautiful food.

Some might think this is the wrong time to be launching a site like Laurent’s. I disagree, I can’t think of a better time.

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.