Articles

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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A friend has presented me with a packet of recycled plastic clothes-pegs. Not a gift to set the pulses racing, you will agree, but one for which I am very grateful. These pegs, unlike their competitors that snap in the first breeze and gather on the floor of the yard, are capable of keeping a wet carpet on the washing line while the weather does its worst.
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Turbot is a flat fish with pure white flesh that is highly prized for its texture and flavour – a delicacy since Roman times, it is a favourite of that great seafood chef Rick Stein. A large left-eyed flatfish, wild turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) is mainly found in sandy shallow waters throughout the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the North Atlantic, where it lives quietly on the ocean floor.
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A domesticated form of the wild carrot Daucus carota, an umbelliferous plant which is native to Europe and southwestern Asia, this everyday root vegetable is usually orange - although purple, red, white, and yellow varieties exist and are currently more widely grown, due to demand from chefs.
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