Articles

The therapeutic nature of baking is well known - we all know that it’s a cosy and all-consuming activity that demands concentration, involves all the senses and rewards you with much more than delicious things to eat, as, above all, it gives a wonderful sense of satisfaction in a job well done.
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Happy the food lover visiting Ireland’s western capital who happens on Aoibheann MacNamara’s trio of restaurants at Spanish Arch. A wonderful stone-built medieval customs house overlooking the Claddagh Basin is home to Ard Bia (literally ‘High Food’) and its sister restaurants, Ard Bia Café and Nimmo’s, plus a constantly changing exhibition of modern art.
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Artisan producers are the unsung heroes of the food industry in Ireland, but need support from the commercial sector to ensure their survival. This was the view of Myrtle Allen, one of the pioneers of the movement to promote locally produced Irish food, who addressed guests at the Irish Food Writer’s Guild Food annual awards last month (March 2012).
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The best things in life are free – this is certainly true for wild garlic, which is growing like a carpet under the trees in Glenshelane woods near Cappoquin –where its pungent garlicky whiff fills the air.
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In New York, I lost track of the number of people who told me that the most exciting and diverse food scene was out in Brooklyn, so needless to say I sped over the bridge in search of the super cool foodie set. Brooklyn is all about graffiti, galvanise, peeling paint, iron grills and salvaged furnishings. Everyone seems to be 150% into food in that brilliant intense American way.
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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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