Articles

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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Lucy Madden contemplates the gentle pleasures of the ‘staycation’:“A day out in, say, the Glens of Antrim or even the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre can be more restorative than two trans Atlantic flights”
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This month Darina visits Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, where “a table is one of the hottest most sought after meal slots in the whole world”. Curious chefs and food lovers from all over the world fly into Copenhagen to eat at this simple restaurant which has defined the gastronomy of a whole nation and established a flow of food tourism that benefits not only Noma but a growing number of other restaurants in Copenhagen and the hinterland.
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