Articles

Harry's Restaurant has been getting rave reviews and much-deserved plaudits of late. Run by Donal Doherty, the restaurant is bucking the recessionary trend by attracting people in their droves to the remote Inishowen peninsula in Donegal. How are they doing it? By serving only the freshest, local and seasonal produce, and by growing their own grub.
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Castlefarm is thriving. In our pastures, the organic grass is growing a little slower than we would like but clover is plentiful. This is good news for our cows, as well as the bees that are busy feeding on the flowers. Our oats are nearly ready for harvesting, as is our arable silage.
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'Sarah's Wonderful Honey' is the brainchild of Sarah Gough, who is General Manager of her family’s business, Mileeven Fine Foods, in Kilkenny. Founded in 1988 by her mother, Eilis Gough, the company is renowned for its quality produce - honey, organic preserves and other fine foods - and is one of the few mother-daughter run businesses in Ireland.
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Now widely recognised as a ‘superfood’, blueberries are bigger cousins of the native Irish bilberry or fraughan and thrive in similar peaty habitats. Grown on cutaway bogland in Co Offaly, Irish blueberries are in season in August and September, when they are available in shops. Along with many other Irish fruit and vegetables, including strawberries and rasberries, they’re distributed by...
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For anyone suffering from allergies or intolerances to dairy, wheat and gluten, the main problem is that they are the most commonly used ingredients in food manufacture, so most ready-made foods contain at least one of these products. This means you will have to cook for yourself – and you could not ask for a better, or more experienced guide than Michelle Berriedale-Johnson.
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When everyone heads off on the annual pilgrimage to West Cork in July, many of those in the know will make a point of dropping into this relaxed and atmospheric family-friendly restaurant in Clonakilty.
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New season vegetables make healthy eating a pleasure, and they’re quick and easy to cook too, in simple dishes that allow their fresh flavours to take centre stage. The food that Ireland is associated with throughout the world is of course the potato and the varieties grown commercially range from...
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A supermarket is a place where there are no seasons. You can buy any vegetable you want at any time of the year. Want a butternut squash in May? Your local supermarket probably has one for sale, though it was most probably grown in Ghana and spent weeks in the back of a container lorry.
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With summer well underway Castlefarm is a hive of activity. We have a blooming garden of vegetables and of course too many weeds. We are harvesting silage and oats, and our young pullets - that I reared from day old chicks since May - have just started laying eggs.
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I’m sitting with my back to a stone wall on Inis Meáin – on Ireland’s western seaboard – watching islander Padraic McDonagh hand threshing rye in the time honoured way. He chooses a flat lime stone area and then he makes a little circle of sheaves to catch the seed.
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