Articles

DINNER The Irish Times Selection, by Domini Kemp (Gill & Macmillan hardback, €22.99)
Fans of Domini Kemp’s brilliant weekly column in the Irish Times Weekend Magazine will be delighted to have so many of her best recipes brought together in a book, where they won’t be getting lost any more.
Sláinte, The Complete Guide to Irish Craft Beer and Cider, by Caroline Hennessy and Kristin Jensen (New Island, hardback 232pp, €19.99)
This is a book that couldn’t have been written ten, five or maybe even a couple of years ago. The resurgence of craft beers and ciders in Ireland has been one of the most exciting aspects of the ‘real food revolution’ that is currently taking the country by storm.
The Nation's Favourite Food Fast! by Neven Maguire, with photography by Joanne Murphy (Gill & Macmillan hardback 256pp, €22.99)
A new book from the nation’s favourite chef is always welcome and this one is bound to be snapped up by the many people who feel challenged by the clock when it comes to getting a nutritious meal on the table.
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Very much with the zeitgeist for wild and foraged foods, Lucy Deegan and Mark Cribbin's enterprising north Cork company grows a unique range of speciality mushrooms - comprising everything from shiitake and oyster mushrooms to velvet pipionni and nameko. Spores are inoculated into local wood including oak, birch and elder; and, harnessing the light and pure air of their location, the mushrooms thrive.
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Everywhere we've travelled in recent weeks the cooks of Ireland have been hard at working preserving this year's heavy crops of fruit and, especially, plums and damsons, or prunus domestica
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The goat is the most widely used farm animal in the world for its milk, the cheese and its meat - yet, astonishingly, we hardly use it at all here, except for cheese.
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Toby Simmonds is a legend of alternative thinking in the Irish food world - in 1993 he started a venture that many said would never work, The Real Olive Company, at a stall in Cork’s English Market. It was a huge success.
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Ireland's answer to the famed Jersey Royal early potato from the Channel Islands, Comber Earlies are this island's flagship potato and one of only a small handful of products here to have the right to use the blue and yellow EU PGI ('Protected Geographical Indication') logo
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Given Ireland’s lush grass and strong dairy tradition, it is not surprising that a lot of dairy farmers have diversified into ice cream production in recent years, and we are now fortunate to have quite a wide choice of high quality, small production ice creams - although distribution tends to be limited to their local area.
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Time was, before the advent of year-round everything in the food world, that eggs were associated with spring - and especially Easter, of course. Maybe something of that instinctive seasonality remains, as it still seems an ideal time to think about eggs.
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If you haven’t come across a ‘Stitchelton’ before, the Northern Irish cheesemaker Mike Thomson of Newtownards, Co Down, would be happy to perform the introduction.
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Why not push out the boat this year and indulge in some Irish spring lamb for a special Easter meal? Although I generally prefer to wait until the roasting joints are bigger, more flavoursome (and better value) later in the year, a very late Easter brings more choice of local foods as the season is more advanced - and, while very wet, the mild winter and early spring has allowed good growth recently and there may also be more early vegetables than usual to enjoy.
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