Articles

It's May and things are relatively settled at Castlefarm. With calving over, breeding season begins. This means six weeks of intensive AI to ensure suitable calves for easy calving next year and a good blood line for our future dairy herd.
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Slow cooked Lamb Shanks in Rioja with pearl barley and wild garlic oil

This is a wonderful way to cook lamb, much better cooked the day before allowing the wonderful flavours to develop overnight. The wild garlic oil is a great early summer addition to any dish – except maybe pudding!!
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Each month, I try and think about my seed sowing in two categories. The first category is those veg that we must sow pretty much every month to guarantee a consistent supply (without gluts) – so for example: lettuce, spinach, oriental greens, calabrese etc. Between March and August, I sow a little of these at the start of every month.
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This series is all about Irish craft brews and, for May, our expert columnist and food blogger KRISTIN JENSEN introduces a Beer of the Month that’s made in north Cork by a couple of quality driven entrepreneurs from down under - and it’s going down a storm
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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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Euro-Toques chef Martin Dwyer, is much missed in Ireland since he and his wife Sile sold their eponymous restaurant in Waterford and moved to France. They now live in the Languedoc, where they take guests - and feed them very well. This month Martin, observing the ways of his adopted country with amused delight as ever, lets us in on his Twenty things which say you are in France.
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Rachel Gaffney, the famous foodie who's flying the flag for Ireland in Texas, asks why is Irish food and cooking still laughed at in America?
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A sort of Irish ‘Julie & Julia’, the aim of this new collection of recipes from the late Theodora FitzGibbon’s many books is to introduce the Irish grande dame of cookery writing in the 1970s and ‘80s to a new generation. And this it should achieve very well, thanks to the choice of one of Ireland’s most popular young TV cooks and writers, the charismatic Donal Skehan, to perform the introduction.
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One of the new the season's first crops, spring cabbage was a favourite vegetable before the days of all-year everything as it was such a welcome change after the heavy winter vegetables.
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This month Lucy Madden says it will be a sad day when Mother Nature is not enough, and a place must be theme-parked to attract visitors. A perfect day. They so rarely occur, but imagine sitting under a cloudless sky, sharing a picnic with loved ones, perched on a hillside and watching the little fishing boats as they chug around Strangford Lough and the lazy trawl of the ferry as it makes its way, to and fro
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