Articles

Sorrel is a rich green acidic-tasting salad herb or green vegetable that looks and behaves rather like a cross between a dock and a smallish pointed-leaved type of spinach. It grows abundantly in the wild in Ireland, and the tender young leaves are coming up everywhere in sun-dappled woodland and verges at this time of year (spring).
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At Castlefarm we now have 26 calves out on grass. We feed them with the mobile feeder once a day and are slowly weaning them off milk. Calving is dragging on at this stage and we are still waiting for 12 cows to calve. This month we are taking a few weekends off before AI begins in May.
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I’m not too far removed from the point where I was really, really daunted by the idea of growing my own food. I was the least green fingered person in the universe when I started growing my own vegetables about 6 years ago – up to that point my only experience of growing things was with bonsai trees.
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In a crepuscular gloom I am trying to plant onions while listening with (hard to conceal) irritation to a lecture, delivered in barely understandable Pidgin English, on – of all things – Pythagoras. It’s only necessary to show very intermittent interest as the speaker, a mathematics graduate from Chile, has enough enthusiasm about his subject for both of us.
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Recently singled out by the Irish Food Writers Guild, who honoured them with an Award for their notable contribution to Irish food, McCarthy’s of Kanturk in Co Cork is an institution that is very definitely ‘worth a detour’. Jack McCarthy and his son Tim come from a long line of butchers. In 1892 Callaghan McCarthy, in despair at the poor meat he had bought, decided to give up being a baker and learn how to become a butcher.
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Anyone who has six children and runs a business with her husband must have a pretty down to earth take on feeding family and friends, and countless mums all over Ireland will relate to the daily ‘what’s for dinner mum’ dilemma, and the challenge of family gatherings and having friends in for a bite described in Sheila Kiely’s Gimme the Recipe (Mercier Press, paperback €19.99).
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If good looks were the secret of a restaurant’s success then Tony and Bobbie Schwarz could just sit back and watch customers flocking to the door, as their cosily thatched White Sage Restaurant is probably the cutest of all the chocolate-box-pretty houses in Ireland’s prettiest village.
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Home baking has settled so comfortably back into our collective psyche that it’s hard to believe it ever went away - and also back, by popular demand, is our vintage cookbook, The Best of Irish Breads & Baking (Epicure Press paperback, €15) which has just been reprinted and is available once again, from bookshops and directly from us online.
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The is no surer sign that spring has arrived than seeing the beautiful pink rhubarb stalks ripen underneath their canopy of enormous leaves. Spring has arrived a little earlier than usual this year - this is due to the mild winter I suppose. Rhubarb features on my breakfast menu from now until it fades out of season. Did you know how easy it is to grow?
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Jenny Young is very busy at Castlefarm, with new calves and early growth in the gardens. At Castlefarm the majority of our dairy herd has calved down, resulting in up to 40 calves to feed twice a day. It also takes longer to milk with 71 cows now milking in the parlour.
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