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

 
Or maybe your idea of heaven is getting lost in the middle of the most beautiful nowhere, on a country boreen twisting through scratchy hedgerows and shining green fields, shading through cool forests and past whispering streams, and finally ending up in a 60-acre farm where a young third-generation farmer metamorphs the cream of his dairy herd’s yield into delicious farmhouse ice-cream?

 
Thomas Baldwin reckons he could get his cream “from cow to cone in an hour”. We didn’t see him milking his cows but we did see the green green grass they were eating, and in the time it took Thomas to talk us through the process, his co-worker Sarah had whipped up a fresh batch of Bailey’s Ice Cream for us to try. Well, as they say in Waterford. Well. Let’s just say the pairing did the country doubly proud. Gorgeous stuff, as you’d expect from an ice-cream producer who emulsifies fresh raw milk with egg yolk and flavours it with natural quality ingredients such as Madagascan vanilla pods or fresh Irish strawberries in season.

 
Thomas’s story is a common one for many artisan producers. By the time the farm was coming into his hands, it had gone from the self-sufficient family farm set-up of his grandparents to a modern dairy verging on unsustainability, and it was time to “sink or swim” – or rather to diversify and invest. A scholarship trip to visit Dutch cheese-makers and ice-cream makers introduced Thomas to ways he might add value to his milk, and a Leader grant allowed him to invest in the necessary infrastructure at the farm.

 
He decided not to go the cheese route – a wise move as his neighbour Eamonn Lonergan has been one of Ireland’s leading farmhouse cheesemakers since the late 1980s. Indeed, Eamonn has insured that the little remote village of Knockanore is a household name for many Irish foodies. It helps that the farms are “in the middle of nowhere but the middle of everywhere”, as Thomas puts it, pointing out that they are just 30 minutes from Cork’s Jack Lynch tunnel, from Dungarvan and from Waterford too.

 
Thomas keeps his supplies of Baldwin Farmhouse Ice Cream fairly localised, but Knockanore Cheese is widely available in various flavourings. I’m most familiar with their delicious smoked version (which Eamonn points out is the result of a genuine smokehouse and not liquid smoke and painted-on paprika, as some are), but the plain version is worth checking out for a cheddar-style cheese with a point of difference. This comes from the facts that the cheese is produced from raw milk, and allowed to mature for up to a year, as well as the fact that they use a special maturing culture to cultivate a sweetness in the cheese. Other flavoured versions include garlic and herbs or black pepper and chives, all of which are added in at the start of the process to layer flavour and not at the end to mask inferior flavours, as some competitors do.

 
Loaded up with cheese, we skipped on to many blaa-lovers idea of heaven: the 125-year-old Barron’s Bakery in Cappoquin where Esther Barron proudly showed us her impressive 100-year-old ovens, still yielding magnificent bread after all these years – at least to those who have mastered how to use it. As fifth-generation bakers, the Barron’s story is entwined with Cappoquin’s story, so no wonder that some 700 local supporters turned up for the launch of their recent book, Our Daily Bread (which came second in the  Gourmand World Cookbook Awards – ahead of a book by the Culinary Institute of America, as Esther proudly announced).

 
They fed us with tea and ham blaas and nettle soup and sent us on our merry way to Dungarvan, where Claire Dalton and Cormac O’Flynn were waiting to show us their Dungarvan Brewing Company headquarters, aka beer-lover’s heaven. The craft beer produced here (Black Rock Irish Stout, Copper Coast Red Ale and Helvick Gold Blonde Ale) stand out from the growing number of Irish craft beers because they are bottle conditioned. This means that the beer is unfiltered and undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle, which makes them naturally lightly sparkling. They’ve also begun to stock a few places with casks (as opposed to kegs) and are part of what seems to be something of an Irish revival of the old art of keeping casks. If you’re looking to try a refreshing lemony blonde alternative to lager, a smooth and complex red ale or a surprisingly light mocha-edged stout, this trio are well worth seeking out.

 
We sadly didn’t have time to take a peek into bagel heaven aka Rosie’s Broadway Bagels run by a native New-Yorker whose bagel production is still a hand-crafted process. We had a date at the gate to another food-lovers heaven, and it wouldn’t do to be late.

 
Paul Flynn is a legend, both locally and nationally. Returning to Ireland some years ago from a stint running a Michelin-starred kitchen in London (Paul was head chef when they secured their second star), Paul won over Irish fans at La Stampa before setting up shop in his native Dungarvan, a lovely little port town in West Waterford. The food Paul now cooks at The Tannery Restaurant and adjacent Cookery School is very like the man himself: disarmingly down-to-earth, deceptively straightforward while backed with a treasure-chest of knowledge and impossible not to like. He talked us through the mis-en-place (that’s ‘prep’ in chef-talk) for what was going to be that night’s tasting menu of ‘one-pot cooking’ – a typically understated description for what was a masterclass in producing refined versions of classic rustic cooking.

 
One of the most memorable for me was the bouillabaise of John Dory and mussels, with elegant flavours built up from the gently coaxed onion and fennel base to the orange and saffron middle to the top notes of cardamom, star anise and Pernod. The art of one-pot cooking is in knowing just how long to give each stage so that every element is spot on, so that the bite of a carrot can give as much pleasure as the juicy chew of a mussel, and so that the parts come together in an integrated whole. Other highlights included braised shoulder of lamb which had the most incredible texture, served with a saucy tomato-based ribollita with pockets of flavour-soaked bread; an elegant bowl of rabbit, turnip, wild garlic and barley stew which had a gastric base that played off the natural sweet-sour of the turnip; and a dessert of rich chocolate with Blackrock Stout textured with honeycomb and cut through with a goat’s cheese cream. All of this was served to us by staff who shared Paul’s sense that food should be enjoyable above all else, and that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously – just gotten effortlessly right.

 
What’s your idea of heaven? Maybe, like me, your idea of heaven is writing up these kinds of experiences while being driven in a mini-bus through some of Ireland’s secret beauty spots such as Inistioge – where I happen to have some of my happpiest memories. We spent childhood holidays in a converted forge owned by the proprietor of the town’s tearooms who we used to ‘help’ pick redcurrants and raspberries before washing off the sticky juices in the stream that ran into the tea-coloured River Nore.

 
As far as we’re concerned (‘we’ being me and the five Euro-toques Young Chefs I’m travelling with on the Irish Food Trip) we found a little piece of heaven yesterday: it is in the middle of nowhere and the heart of everywhere. We found ours in the sunny South East but the truth is that Ireland is full of places in which to get lost and find your own little piece of heaven. What’s stopping you?

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?

WHEN? Saturday 18 November 2011

WHERE? La Fougère restaurant, Knockranny House Hotel, Westport, Co Mayo

WHO? Head chef Seamus Commons hasn’t been picking up national awards (including FOOD&WINE Magazine Best Connaught Chef) in recent years for nothing. The Mayo man can cook. Having worked as head chef for some years in Dublin’s Michelin-starred l’Ecrivain, Seamus upped sticks and hightailed it home to his native county. The resulting cooking has a very real sense of pride of place, so you can expect something very special in this seasonal game menu. Seamus will be joined by Liam Cabot of Cabot Wines who will lead a tutored wine tasting, while the front of house team work their usual charm, lead by restaurant manager the lovely Deirdre Cullen and ever-enthusiastic sommelier Nick Faujour.

HOW MUCH? From €145 per person sharing, including a gorgeous breakfast the next day in La Fougere dining room with its views of Croagh Patrick – you may want to do a few laps of the pool in the in-house spa to work up an appetite for what’s always a great spread.

CONTACT? Tel: +353 (0)98 28600 or check out www.khh.ie for more details

Well, anyway we do. And I’m glad of it.

The thing about spuds is, unless I’m cooking a certain kind of meal involving meat/fish and two veg, which is rare enough, I don’t necessarily have spuds in the cupboard. But I always have rice of various colours, pasta of various shapes, and noodles of various sizes, plus numerous other grains including cous cous, bulghur and quinoa. What chance has the humble spud against such a battery of carbs?

But I like spuds. I like their variety of texture, from fluffy to creamy, and of subtle flavour and sometimes-not-so-subtle colour (blue potatoes anyone?). I like having a choice between steaming small new potatoes whose skin need nothing more than a rub or big, dirt-encrusted bakers all scrubbed up, scored with a cross and topped with a salty crown.

And I like their versatility. Besides all the usual sides of dreamy Dauphinoise, buttery champ, crunchy goose-golden roasties, crispy rostis, flavoured mash or maybe just plain, there’s seasonal squeaky Colcannon, traditional treats like shepherd’s pie. That’s before you consider all the unlikely ways spuds can turn up in various international cuisines, like those amazing potato and rosemary pizza slices from the Steps of Rome, or as the base for gnocchi dumplings (surprisingly easy to make from scratch). Or in Indian cooking, as in samosas or Bombay Pantry’s truly moorish batata vada (potato dumplings coated in mango powder). Or Thai jungle curry. Greek mousaka. Chilean empanadas. Kosher latkes. Spanish tortillas.

Then there’s all those wonderful things you can do with leftover spuds. One recent favourite involved steamed new potatoes cut into wedges and golden-fried in rapeseed oil with their skins still on together with some thickly sliced red onion and thinly sliced green chillies (the latter additions added towards the end), tossed with avocado cubes rolled in toasted seeds (I used Good4U Smart Seeds’ Sunflower mix but you could toast you own), topped with a fried egg and served for a home-style break-out brunch. Another was healthier but no less tasty: a smoked mackerel nicoise-style salad with chunks of chicory leaves, slices of caperberries, slivers of scallions, hunks of ripe tomato, halves of steamed spuds and a herbed yoghurt and olive oil dressing.

And I haven’t even mentioned potato cakes, fish cakes or crab cakes. Or chips, fries or wedges. Or potato salads, whether doused in a healthy vinaigrette, a devil-may-care mayonnaise, a compromise creme fraiche or even a tinned-tastic Russian salad-style dressing. Nor all the gorgeous things you can do with gratins of various persuasions. Nor crispy skins or hash browns. Nor boxty or bravas. Not even chowders, soups or stews.

I’m glad we have a National Potato Day, because we need reminding that spuds are worth encouraging back into our diet. If you’re still hungry for more ideas to get you going or for recipes to follow check out clever Aoife Cox’s clever blog www.thedailyspud.com. Or if you’d like reminding of why they’re as good for us as they taste, have a browse of Bord Bia’s www.potato.ie.

Recently I’ve gotten back into an abandoned habit of picking up some spuds in my weekly market shop, particularly if I happen to do it at Jenny McNally’s organic vegetable stall in Temple Bar’s Cow’s Lane on a Saturday or Dun Laoghaire’s People’s Park on a Sunday. (Jenny’s leaves are the best in town, and her eggs and yoghurt are pretty great too. Plus I got some great round courgettes from her recently which I stuffed and baked, but that’s another day’s posting.) Today I think I’ll make a trip to another of my favourite veg sellers, Evergreen on Wexford Street. I’ll be picking up some spuds, and thinking up something delicious to do with them. If you wanted to get adventurous, you could search out some particularly colourful specimens – Fallon & Byrne tend to have a great selection.

Whatever you do today, try to have a spud-happy August 25th.

What am I talking about? Gorse, of course.

And what if it was a food – what would gorse be?

Well, it might be a lollipop on a stick. Or a cool clean granita to cleanse a palate between courses. It could definitely be an ice-cream, maybe one made with coconut cream and textured with grated coconut flesh. And it would be the most perfect panna cotta, trembling fragrantly on a simple white plate with a garnish of some intense fruits – a blood orange and chilli syrup perhaps, or a little reduction of macerated peppered strawberries – and served at the end of an early summer’s meal or even a late Easter feast.

Though I’m plucking those garnishes out of my greedy imagination, I know that gorse makes the perfect panna cotta because I had the pleasure of making and devouring a gorse blossom panna cotta under the gentle guidance of the lovely Liz Moore up in Belle Isle Cookery School a couple of summers ago. I have of course long since mislaid the folderful of brilliantly usable recipes we left the blessed Co Fermanagh island armed with, but I’ve never forgotten the awe induced by the revelation that that most evocative smell of all my childhood summers could be encapsulated in one wobbly dessert – by simply infusing the bright blossom of gorse in some simmering cream which, once cooled and strained, can be magicked into a wobbly dream of a creamy sweet.

Now, I’ve been thinking about this panna cotta all week, having started blogging about my gorse and wild garlic scented ramblings on Howth Head last week (you can read Part I here and Part II here if you missed them). One reader mentioned that she had the pleasure of relishing some gorse ice-cream in Co Wexford’s Monart in recent weeks, and I know that the clever Jessica Murphy (ex-Bar Eight and Ard Bia, and recent FOOD&WINE Magazine Best Connaught Chef 2010) is planning on serving said gorse ice-cream on the menu at her soon-to-open Kai Cafe & Restaurant in Galway city.

But it was only when chatting to the inspiring not to mention thoroughly likeable couple behind Gleann Gabhra Farm in Tara, Co Meath that I thought of a goat’s yoghurt and gorse panna cotta. The goat’s yoghurt was their idea, the gorse addition was mine (by way of Belle Isle in Co Fermanagh). Now, because I’m still sort of making this all up out of my head, and because I don’t yet have a plastic bag full of wild gorse blossom to experiment on, this is mere supposition and conjecture at this point in time. But I’m thinking that the coming bank holiday and said late Easter feast might be just the time to experiment, so I’m gonna go forth and forage, and boil me some cream, and infuse it with the sunburst blossoms, and mix it with the tangy goat’s milk yoghurt waiting in my fridge, and then sweeten and cool and strain and set with gelatine. And I’m going to get back to you on the results.

If you get there before me, let me know how it works out for you?

In the meantime, for those of you who can’t bear to be left without a tangible recipe at your disposal, let me send you on your way with the following link to a delicious sounding gorse cordial that would make a lovely summer cooler mixed with iced mineral water (read the link here) and another one for gorse flower wine (read that link here). Now, the next challenge would be to dream up a high summer gorse-inspired cocktail. Having experienced the unlikely but considerable charms of Malibu and grapefruit on a hot summer’s day, there could be something in the combination of grapefruit, gorse syrup and white rum perhaps? But that’s another day’s thirsty work, as they say.

P.S. My sources (ie readers) have revealed the following hot spots for picking wild garlic:

1. MC says “The best wild garlic I found was in Powerscourt, go up to and beyond the house continue towards the back gate and the wooded area left and right is a pillow of wild herbs…”

2. Stef says “There is a TON of wild garlic outside the American ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park if you need to stock up.”

3. And my Ma says that the Mount Usher gardens are full of the stuff.

Go sniff it out!

Much head-scratching later, and resisting the urge to spit out the ugly truth – that for most of us, treating your friends to dinner on Paddy’s Day involves splashing out on King’s Pub Crisps and Bacon Fries during your round at the bar – I engaged in a spot of culinary cultural exchange.

I extolled the virtues of cooking with seaweed, which is enjoying a recent renaissance thanks to innovative companies such as Quality Sea Veg and with no small encouragement from the brilliant recent cookbook from Sligo-based Dr Prannie Rhatigan, Irish Seaweed Kitchen. I recapped on our recent love affair with cheap cuts of meat such as pork belly, head and toes, and recommended An Irish Butcher Shop from Pat Whelan as a route to discovering more of these. And I warned that bling is out and hairshirts are in – but that Lidl do a fine line in frozen lobster which could just about justify a retro fling of Dublin Lawyer Lobster.

I celebrated the timeless style of a well-made Irish coffee, and even shared a couple of tips on their construction (more anon). I tipped her off that microbreweries are finally muscling in on the lucrative beer market, and that hostelries such as the wonderful Mulligans L Grocers in Stoneybatter are helping to herald the new dawn of craft beer. And I recommended she have a peek at the menu of Dublin’s The Winding Stair, who are on a mission to embrace a much-denigrated Irish peasant food culture with dishes such as corned beef with crispy cabbage, horseradish mash and mustard sauce, or Sally Barnes’ smoked haddock poached in milk with onions and white cheddar mash, and who go to unusual efforts to source almost 95% of their produce from the island of Ireland.

Anyway, all this talk got me thinking aloud in the pub (a dangerous pastime we Irish are particularly prone to) and the result is that myself and a friend have decided to throw ourselves a Paddy’s Day Dinner Party, and to focus it on some of the great ingredients this country has to be proud of.

Tune in for future postings in the lead up to and recovery from said extravaganza.

Until then, a favour: If any of you have a favourite Irish recipe, or one which gives an interesting twist on a traditional Irish ingredient, you might like to leave a little comment with a lead I could follow. Go raibh míle maith agaibh…

…agus go n-éirí an bothar libh. (And if that particular road does always end up leading you to the pub remember, there’s a lot to said for King’s Pub Crisps.)