So, in no particular order, here follows my Fantasy Festive Food & Wine Wishlist (as it appeared in IMAGEdaily today, only with links, and some pix in case my words don’t cut it for you):

1.     A very generous voucher for Ireland’s Blue Book, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary with the addition of Thornton’s Restaurant (where the canapé bar is one of Dublin’s most underrated food-fun nights out); the remote Clare Island Lighthouse (a spectacularly located guesthouse overlooking Clew Bay); and Liss Ard Estate in Skibbereen (which has the coolest magical-mystery gardens, complete with an otherworldly Irish Sky Garden where humdrum clouds are elevated to works of art). Now when I say ‘a very generous Blue Book voucher’ I would of course graciously accept any kind of a Blue Book voucher. Especially if it came with the latest glovebox-friendly copy of Georgina Campbell’s Ireland Guide or the McKenna’s Irish Food Guide, so I could be sure to eat well en route too.

Some view, huh? That there’s Clew Bay.

2.     A full set of Riedel’s ‘varietal specific’ wine glasses so that I could have the perfect glass for every wine I drink, whatever the grapes or style. (I attended a Riedel tasting recently and their glasses really do make an incredible difference to different wines.) The only problem is that, with separate glasses for Cabernet or Pinot Noir, Riesling or Chardonnay, and so on, I’d really need a bigger kitchen to keep them all in. And logistically, that would involve moving out of my tiny apartment, which I’m really rather fond of. So to avoid all that hoo-ha, I’d settle for the Syrah set, the most versatile of the lot.

3.  A year’s supply of one of the following:

a)     Pata Negra Iberico ham, to be delivered to my door by a swarthy Spaniard. (Failing that, a voucher for Black Pig in Donnybrook might do it, and I could go collect my own whenever supplies run low, and pick up a bottle of something delicious while I’m at it.)

b)    M&L Szechuan’s chilli-fried green beans. (Or failing that, a new stainless-steel wok from the Asian market, a supply of dried bird’s eye chillies and the recipe for said green beans.)

c)     Green papaya salad, like what used to be on the menu at Diep Le Shaker restaurant and what I could have lived on in northern Thailand. (Or failing that, a mandolin slicer and a voucher for the Asian Market so I could get a fresh supply of unripe papaya, chillies, nam plaa fish sauce and limes to make my own.)

4.     Speaking of mandolins, I’d also love a new Microplane grater, which happens to be the best grater in the world. I left mine at a party (don’t ask) and I really miss it for everything from grating Parmesan to finely grating garlic (beats crushing it by a mile). Okay, if you have to know, it was my own party but in a rented place and we were cooking and I thought I couldn’t cook without my Microplane. That’s how much I love it.

That’s what I mean by Microplane

5.     A case of Highbank Medieval Cider, because I know that it’ll probably be sold out by Christmas if it isn’t already. If you haven’t tried it, look out for it next year: it’s an amazing new honeyed cider that is sweet at first and then dry thanks to the tannic apples. Or failing that a mixed case of Irish craft beers and ciders. (A year’s supply is harder to define, right?)

6.     A wine course. If I hadn’t already done the WSET course run by Cooks Academy (‘Dublin’s School of Food & Wine’) and tutored by the brilliant Liam Campbell, I’d do that all over again. It was such a treat to go in every week, taste different wines and learn about different styles from all over the world. (WSET stands for Wine & Spirits Education Trust, a global professional wine educator, but they offer courses at all levels from introductory to Masters of Wine.) But seeing as how I’ve done the WSET thing, I’d go for a voucher for Ely Wine Bar’s weekly Thursday night wine tastings, which are only €15 a pop and give you a chance to taste some gorgeous wines you mightn’t otherwise try.

7.     A pair of stockings from Avoca (have you seen them? Cute or what!) stuffed full of hot and salted Pulparindo candy bars and fizzy cola bottles and Wham bars. (There’s a reason that tangy green papaya salad is my favourite dish ever.) What are Pulparindo bars? They are the penny sweets of gods, courtesy of some Mexican genius who thought to turn tangy tamarind into a sweet candy, and to flavour it with salt and chilli. Bam!

chilli-hot, salted and tangy tamarind – that’s what I’m talking about, right there

8.     A stainless steel stove-top moka pot for home-brewed coffee, possibly from Coffee Angel on South Anne Street, who seem to sell every kind of coffee accessory you could possibly want, not to mention every kind of coffee. (My current favourite is their Kebel Demersa from Ethiopia which tastes like Turkish delight, in a good way.) Oh and they’re also selling really sweet little stocking filler snowflakes made out of Finnish birch for €6, 100% of which goes to Barnardos. Sweet.

9.     A voucher for Inis Meain Restaurant & Suites so I could go back and recreate one of the best short breaks I’ve ever had. And maybe I could go towards the end of their season and they’d let me stay on and write that novel I always thought I’d get around to. It’d be the perfect stop for it, and the food is pretty darn spot on too. (I could do island lobster and fresh spuds on a daily basis. No problem!)

The Inis Meain Breakfast Box, delivered to your door early morning to be eaten whenever. That’s my kind of breakfast.

10.    An essential cookbook. Maybe Darina Allen’s 30 Years of Ballymaloe, which just won Best Irish Cookbook at the Bord Gais Energy Book of the Year awards. Or From Lynda’s Table by Lynda Booth of Dublin Cookery School, where I did the life-affirming one-month cookery course a few years back. Or Ross Lewis’s startling Chapter One: An Irish Food Story. Or whatever cookbook looked fun and interesting and solidly written. I wouldn’t mind which one.

Whichever.

I’m really very easy to please.

Honest.

The Chapter One cookbook, a soulful thing with very beautiful photography by Barry McCall

If you’re one of those people who’s thinking, I really should get up out of bed and go buy some Christmas presents, well here’s my brief Top Five Cookbooks of 2012 to guide your way through those last minute Christmas shoppers.

1. The Ard Bia Cookbook

…and not just because I co-wrote it with the inimitable Aoibheann MacNamara of Ard Bia in Galway. I genuinely love the restaurant’s imaginative mix of wholesome, Irish and exotic flavours, and the fact that these are doable restaurant dishes. Plus I also love love love Cian McConn’s series of photos of Ard Bia staff and friends which punctuate the book (that tattooed lady on the cover is the lovely Giusy) as well as Eimear McCormack’s beautiful hand-drawn illustrations. But then I would say that.

2. The ICA Cookbook

…and not just because I edited it. (Yes there is a pattern emerging here but I’m about to change theme, don’t worry.) Made up of the beloved, treasured, never-failed-me recipes of over 40 ordinary ICA members, this cookbook is for all of those people who can’t stomach another idealised aspirational lifestyle cookbook making us feel guilty about taking an hour to cook what apparently should only take 30 minutes. These ICA recipes (from the Irish Countrywomen’s Association) are real recipes, from real women, and while making shepherd’s pie with a tin of oxtail soup may not be for everybody there’s enough variety within the book to have something for everyone.

3. The Cake Cafe Bake Book

…and not just because The Cake Cafe is one of my favourite Dublin institutions from one of my favourite Cork women. Teaming up with her good mate & designer extraordinaire Niall Sweeney, Michelle Darmody turned down a publishing deal and decided to go it alone with this gorgeous little collection of some of her favourite baking recipes. The result is totally unique and a whole lot of fun to flick through, let alone bake from. It’s sleek size makes it a perfect stocking filler too.

4. The Saba Cookbook

…and not just because proceeds go to The Bone Marrow Transplant Unit in Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin and to The Thai Red Cross Society. Head chef Taweesak ‘Tao’ Trakoolwattana is a great teacher, as anyone who has been on one of his Thai Cooking Day with Fabulous Food Trails will know. That patience in explaining his native Thai cooking to an Irish audience comes through in this beautifully produced cookbook, as does restaurateur Paul Cadden’s passion for the Thai cuisine that has become so much a part of his life.

5. How to Write About Food

…and not just because it’s written by my one-time  desk buddy, FOOD&WINE Magazine editor Ross Golden-Bannon. Okay it’s not actually a cookbook and you can’t buy it in a bookshop, but RGB’s kindle/ipad-friendly ebook would make a great stocking filler for that food blogger or aspiring food writer in your life (if that’s you, get hinting fast!). Ross has gathered all the things he wished food writers knew, peppered with his trademark humour, and put it all together in this handy little collection of the Top 50 Bloopers to Cross an Editor’s Desk. You can buy it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00AP2SM1M/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

So there you have it. There were loads more great books too – Let’s Go Disco, The MacNean Restaurant Cookbook and Catherine Fulvio’s Eat Like an Italian for starters. But it really is the 11th hour, so you’d better get going!

Happy Christmas… and happy cooking!

And as cookbooks that focus largely – if not both fully – on the recently re-embraced art of baking, both are perfect stocking fillers for a budding baker you know and love this Christmas.

I’m talking (in part) about The ICA Cookbook, a tidy tome which I came to know and love at the start of our short summer, when I spent the guts of a month editing recipes from over 40 contributors from ICA guilds all around the country.

The ICA Cookbook, what I edited

Each recipe was edited by me and tested by the ever-cheerful Marie McGuirk down in An Grianán, Termonfeckin (which is ICA HQ). The book includes gorgeous photography and styling by Joanne Murphy and Orla Neligan and elegant design by Tanya Ross.

Favourites include the clever Parsnip Cake with Walnuts & Raisins (move over Carrot, you’re so yesterday), Fraughan Buns (good excuse to get out for a day’s picking in the Wicklow wilds) and Grandma’s Rhubarb Tart (part soda-bread, part tart, totally retro and totally Irish).

But there’s two parts to this tale. For I’m also talking about The Cake Cafe Bake Book, which I had a very small but proud part in helping produce – well, me and the many other friends and supporters of Michelle Darmody’s gem of a café who helped fund her self-published book through Fundit. The result, designed by the uber-talented Niall Sweeney, is so darn stylish that an international publisher has gotten on board to distribute the book to all good bookshops around the world, no less!

The Fundit-funded books hot from the oven

Fundit allowed people like me pay up in advance for the book, knowing we’d love it. Which allowed Michelle and Niall go ahead and make their Bake Book. And one of the exciting things about self-publishing is that there’s no nervous publishing company telling you that you can’t take risks. Risks like not having any photos. At all. IN A COOKBOOK! A COOKBOOK FULL OF DELICIOUS CAKES!

But anyone who knows how Michelle and Niall work – or indeed knows the Cake Café tucked away off Camden Street on Pleasants Lane – knows that their risk is going to pay off. And I can tell you that even before my pre-bought copy wings its way through my letterbox. I don’t need luscious photos of Michelle’s cakes to convince me they’ll be delicious. I’ve eaten them often enough to know I love them.

If you’d like a little preview of what a photo-free bake book might look like, check out their Youtube trailer, or just head to your nearest good bookshop on Saturday morning, where you’ll find both new cookbooks fresh from the presses, on the shelves and representing an interesting snapshot of where Irish baking has come from and where it’s at today.

Anois, cá bhfuil an cáca milis? Níl ocras orm ach…

Hola hola! (she said, twice)… I need to cook simple Irish dinner for some Argentinian friends. (They’re great cooks so I’m nervous!) Any suggestions?

The challenge of it. The waves of doubt, of cultural inferiority. I was nervous on her behalf, on our collective national behalf. Argentinians, living in Barcelona, feasting on all those great tapas and creme Catalana, or remembering home by rustling up some empanadas or pigging out on an asado (a meat feast of a grill-up). What’s our equivalent? Tayto and peanuts with a pint and stewed apple and custard? Toasties and a full-fry?

It brings us back to that old chestnut: what can we claim as real Irish food? I mean the kind of thing that you would cook to show off a little (well you’d have to make the effort when representing the nation, wouldn’t you?) but that’s simple enough that you wouldn’t look like you were going to too much effort, especially if you’re not sure the whole thing would go exactly to plan, what with not having to hand Irish spuds or Irish butter or Irish cream or Irish lamb or, well you get the point. I mean the kind of food about which you could say, yes, I grew up eating that, and also yes, I’m proud to call that Irish.

I didn’t grow up eating coddle, though I have been known to do so, and think it’s rather tasty too. I used to have a colleague who would go all dreamy when you mentioned coddle. She might cook it for her Argentinean friends if they were asking, but I wouldn’t.

My Barcelona friend said she was thinking of doing a Shepherd’s Pie – even though she never really ate it at home and had never made it before.

I thought of cockles and mussels, alive until cooked in wine or cider – oh, that’s not very Irish is it? (Unless of course you used David Llewellyn’s cider, or his wine, both of which he makes in Rush, Co Dublin, but I’m not sure you can get either in Barcelona.)

And I thought of a beef and Guinness stew, if you could get the Guinness, though of course you wouldn’t get the great Irish beef. Then I thought of a really gorgeous oyster and Guinness beef pie that features in Mairin Ui Chomain’s book, Irish Oyster Cuisine. And that made me think of Prannie Rhatigan’s wonderful cookbook, Irish Seaweed Kitchen, in which I’m fairly sure there’s a version of Mairin’s pie, but featuring seaweed too. I tried it as part of a most extraordinary feast cooked up in Sligo once to launch the book, where everything from the bread to the desserts were based on sea vegetables (which is the PC name for a much under-rated national resource). And in looking for that recipe I came across The Daily Spud’s version of dillisk mash (I recommend both blog and mash to you).

I thought of some of the more traditional or old-fashioned things our mother used to make us, much of which seemed to feature offal. Liver and bacon and sauteed potatoes. Beef tongue with parsley sauce and mashed potatoes (I used to love the sweet flavour of the meat). Steak and kidney pie (I never did like those kidneys, but the pastry! and the onions! and the beef!).

I thought of the sound of the chips going into the deep fat fryer and the radio turned up so it could be heard over the extractor fan and the cat meowing at the knives being sharpened which meant that there was a fish about to be filleted and that she would get to eat the scraps and all of this while watching the original Sherlock Holmes after school on one of those good days when it was fish and chips for tea.

I thought of my grandmother (whose birthday it would have been yesterday, happy birthday Bobbie) and the kinds of simple suppers she liked to cook for herself: a lamb chop, some buttered carrots and wholegrain mustard from the big jar that she brought back from Tenerife which myself and my sister used to dip our fingers into and eat mustard straight out of.

I thought of restaurants like The Winding Stair and Chapter One and Ard Bia and their pride in serving up great Irish produce from some of the best smoked fish and charcuterie producers around the land. And of Sheridans and all that they’ve done for Irish farmhouse cheeses.

I thought of flapjacks and brown bread – and of brown bread ice-cream. Of Loop the Loops and JRs and Super Splits and 99s from Teddy’s. I thought of eating so much chocolate cake on my 7th birthday that I couldn’t eat chocolate cake for years. Of double-decker egg salad sandwiches in tupperware on a dune at Brittas Bay and sand in the sandwich and that making them even tastier.

I thought of the smell of stock cooking up to be turned into a endless pot of soup filled with sweet leeks and soft carrots and the comfort of barley and the love that went into making it. Of spaghetti bolognese with chopped carrot in it, which sounds wrong but worked. Of bright yellow curry with raisins in it, which didn’t.

All fine diversions, all treasured food memories that I’m proud to call my own. But no great use to my Barcelona friend.

Really, when it came down to it, in terms of cooking simple Irish food with Spanish ingredients – no Odlums flour, no buttermilk, no smoked salmon and oat cakes and farmhouse cheeses and salted hams and heads of cabbage – it was hard to say.

So I said, shepherd’s pie is nice and easy…

She emailed me back, and after waxing lyrical about the joys of Catalan calcots (Google it) she said:

so i ended up making a banana chocolate chip cake.. also very tasty…
last nite we ate the shipment from ireland.. smoked salmon and burren hot smoked salmon .. mum had also sent all ingredients for her brown bread… and i made my favourite orange sponge butter cream cake..

will defo try get my hands on some guinness and make that stew…
cheers for that
lots of love
A
xoxo

Sounds to me like the Argentinians did well, what do you reckon?

Comfort & Spice: Recipes for Modern Living, Niamh Shiels (Quadrille)

From London-based Irish food and travel blogger Eat Like a Girl, this stylishly produced cookbook brings the likes of Waterford blaas (fluffy bread rolls), Japanese gravadlax, Turkish eggs and beet, beef and horseradish burgers to Shiel’s uniquely personal party. A cookbook with just the measure of personality lacking in so many glossy marketing-driven publications. This is food Shiels loves, for the kind of life many of us now live (ie involving quick suppers, late brunches and maybe even the odd feast of a dinner).

Cooking with Chocolate: Essential Recipes and Techniques, ed. Frederic Bau (Flammarion)

Only the ambitious will carry this luscious tome from the coffee table to the kitchen, but that’s okay. Gorgeous photos from Clay McLachlan, recipes from some of the finest chocolatiers and a foreword from French pastry chef Pierre Herme all make this ‘comprehensive cooking academy in book form’ (as its dust-jacket blurb aptly describes it) as much of a ‘how do they do that’ as it is a ‘how can I do that’. Delicious.

Tweet Treats, Compiled & edited by Jane Travers (O’Brien Press)

This cookbook was made to fill a stocking. With no recipe longer than 140 characters, Ms Travers has fit lots of ideas into a bijou little book. Marshmallow ice-cream, homemade mayo, halloumi and strawberry salad, sherried mushrooms on toast, granola, custard tart, Clonakilty pudding risotto… it’s nothing if not eclectic. And the proceeds go to Medecins Sans Frontiers.

Forgotten Skills of Cooking, by Darina Allen (Kyle Books)

This cookbook sets out to prove that “time-honoured ways are the best”, with over 700 recipes making up quite the convincing book of evidence. The hefty hardback is suitably weighty, being packed full of age-old food skills given a new lease of life. If you’d like to know how your grandparents might have smoked their own mackerel, cured their own bacon and or churned their own butter this is the book for you.

Killer a la Carte, Gerry Galvin (Doire Press)

Chef-restaurateur turned food columnist turned poet turned crime writer, Gerry Galvin’s first foray into thriller fiction is a thoroughly moreish romp from lavish restaurants to blood-stained crime scenes back to meticulously planned last meals. A bit of craic, but quite deliciously executed.

Ireland for Food Lovers, Georgina Campbell

Georgina Campbell’s latest book she makes a nod to the quiet revolution that has been taking place in Irish food tourism in recent years, and takes the story beyond the pleasures of eating out to include the joys of eating in when you know where to get great ingredients. A user-friendly guide to any kind of culinary romp throughout the island of Ireland: whose produce to buy and where to buy it, how to cook it or where to have it cooked for you, and even who to teach you how to cook it.

In Defence of Food, Michael Pollan (Penguin)

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” So starts Michael Pollan’s polemic on food, and it pretty much endeth there too. He does string out another couple hundred pages on the subject, but those seven words capture the simple logic of his argument. Pollan is a voice of great sense when it comes to our relationship with what we eat. This book has been around for a couple of years, but is still worth discovering.

Basket Case: What’s Happening to Ireland’s Food? Philip Boucher-Hayes & Suzanne Campbell (Gill & MacMillan)

Basket Case opens with a cosy little scene, the witnessing of a reveller doing a line of coke off a granite step in Dublin city centre. Welcome to Ireland as we were just before we tipped into the abyss of recession. The authors, both experienced broadcasting journalists with backgrounds in agriculture, ask how we ended up a nation where farming had become a dirty word and where we’d rather do drugs on the streets than live off the land. Their resulting book has been knocking about a couple of years, but it’s still well worth the read.

There are now over 50 Irish farmhouse cheese-makers creating over 140 different styles of cheese – many of them truly world class, as their recent success at the British Cheese Awards proved. One newcomer to the market produced in Waterford by Helen Finnegan of Knockdrinna Cheese, Kilree goats’ cheese was crowned Supreme Champion and several others picked up Gold, including the wonderful Bellingham Blue, a raw milk cheese for true blue lovers.

Cheese makes for a real feel good gift – you’re supporting a great industry, and putting money back into the local economy. And it feels even better if you take the time to go in to your local cheesemonger and ask them to talk you through some of their offerings – with tastings of course.

Throw in a bottle of something delicious or a copy of the new Collins Press publication, Farmhouse Cheese of Ireland: A Celebration, and you could have a really personal DIY gourmet hamper on your hands. And it’s not just about red wine either – many cheeses work just as well if not better with white, sweet or sparkling wines, or even craft beers or cider.

A bottle of David Llewellyn’s Irish cider, produced in north Dublin, would go down a treat with an earthy washed rind cheese such as Milleens, which has been produced by Veronica Steele down in the Beara Peninsula since the mid-1970s. Veronica is widely recognised as the first of the Irish farmhouse cheesemakers, and today her son Quinlan has taken over the business to safeguard it for the next generation of cheeselovers.

Also wonderful with that Irish cider would be a round of mild, creamy Smoked Gubbeen from Giana Ferguson, whose son Fingal produces a gorgeous array of salamis and chorizo, so maybe throw in a sweet sausage of venison salami while you’re at it.

If cider doesn’t do it for you, a bottle of bubbles such as a Cremant de Jura would be a perfect pairing with David Tiernan’s Glebe Brethan cheese. Produced in Co Louth from the milk of his own herd of Montbelliard cows, Glebe Brethan is a gruyere-style cheese akin to Comte from the Jura Alpine foothills. Nutty, spicy, floral, herby – this cheese has it all. Also a great match with bubbles is the creamy Cooleeney, a camembert-style white mould cheese produced by Breda Maher since the mid-80s.

If you’d like more inspiration for cheese and drink matches, check out Bord Bia’s superb Guide to Irish Farmhouse Cheeses, free to download from their website. As well as listing (almost) all the farmhouse cheese available in Ireland today along with contact details, it also recommends wine, cider and beer pairings. So pour yourself a glass of something tasty to get you in the mood, and settle in for a bit of background reading (or you could watch a bit of telly if you prefer, see link for my debut on TV3′s Morning Show today, about 12 minutes in) before heading down the cheesemonger for a spot of feel-good shopping.

It’s been a busy week for cookbook launches. I missed last Monday’s launch of Tweet Treats (it was trumped by a late stint at the desk and then a tribute to one of my personal heroes, the late Kadar Asmal, at Dublin’s Mansion House) but I did get a copy of the cute and clever little book in the post. Compiled and edited by Jane Travers for O’Brien Press, Tweet Treats is short, sweet and all about understatement, being based on tweeted recipes from various celebrities and other online friends of Travers. She’s thrown in a few of her own too, such as this mushroom risotto recipe: Soak dried mushrooms. Saute onions, fresh mushrooms, garlic. Add dried mushrooms, Madeira wine. Reduce. Add Arborio rice. Add stock til absorbed.

Some are more for fun than for serious consumption. Ryan Tubridy has offered up this little classic: “Ok, take one slice of HB ice cream, two fresh wafers & nothing else. Place ice cream between the wafers. Et voila!

With 1000 recipes packed into a book the size of a pair of iPhones, there’s bound to be lots of inspiration in between the wafer sandwiches (which, for anyone who hasn’t tried it, is a genuine classic). What’s more, all royalties have been donated to Medecins sans Frontieres, so you know your €7.99 is being well spent. See www.tweettreats.org for more details.

A week later, it was another Monday, another charity cookbook launch. I made it along to this one, which took place in Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud. The book in question couldn’t have been more different from last week’s sweet little offering. Much like the restaurant itself, Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud: The First Thirty Years is brashly bold and full of very very beautiful food. Barry McCall, one of Ireland’s leading fashion and advertising photographers, is perhaps better known for his portraits of Ireland’s ‘beautiful people’ – and he brings that eye to these painterly portraits of what is deservedly known as some of Ireland’s most beautiful food. Even the recipes know their place in this book – relegated to the back as a kind of reference section for those anoraks amongst us who might want to know such technical details as how you would go about recreating these masterpieces. And as promised in the title, the story is also told of the first 30 years of this venerable institution, written by author Susan Ryan in sometimes poetic tones, prefaced by a foreword from Bono and dotted through with quotes from anyone who is anyone in RPG world. For most of us though, this is a book to leaf through, double-page-spread image by gorgeous double-page-spread image, a book to swoon over in the lounge, darling, rather than sweat over in the kitchen.

Even without knowing that the book is a collaboration with the Irish Hospice Foundation, to whom the proceeds go, I’d venture that it is still worth spendng €50 on. Well you didn’t think this kind of quality came cheap did you? If you did, you’ve clearly never picked up the tab in Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud.

Like I said, a busy week for cookbooks – and that’s before I even mention last Thursday’s launch of the new Valrhona cookbook, or how to win one. But that’s another day’s work.