Kitchen Life Skills

Extreme Greens

2013-05-16T10:32:00.001-07:00

Thanks to all those who use this blog as a resource. I love to look at all the countries and communities of those who have visited these pages.

We've not posted anything recently and I'm missing it. The winter and spring plants are going to flower and the new summer growth is pushing through and I'm looking forward to getting back to investigating what's out there.

But a writer can't serve two masters, and we're busy finishing Extreme Greens. This is a book about understanding seaweed: how to find it, knowing the marine and stellar environments in which it grows, and then the joyful bit – how to cook with it and use it to make cosmetics and medicines.

Coming this autumn!

Cacciatore!

2013-03-24T09:51:00.001-07:00

Here is a picture of wild rabbit cacciatore (hunter's rabbit) which John cooked for me last night. Here also is a picture of John with a hunter's bow and arrow in his hands. Are they in any way related?

Not really. The rabbit came out of the deep freeze shot, skinned and prepared for cooking by the brilliant Wild Irish Game company run by Mick Healy. The archery lesson was an outing of our Tai Chi class.

One of the movements in Tai Chi is The Archer a lovely echo of the way the body moves when drawing back the bow. Like so many activities, at this point it's all about breathing, stance, keeping the head still, core muscle movement rather than arm movement, and a lot to do with stillness. Stillness of the soul and nature. After that, the arrow does the work.

It has been observed that the hunter gatherer diet is the healthiest the human race has ever known. Part of this is because wild foods are so vital in themselves. But another part must come from the physical act of picking, chasing, focusing, breathing. It is said that if your bow reaches its target (in our case, an apple) that night you will dream about it, so deep-rooted and elemental is the act.

The Archer in Tai Chi is a movement that nurtures the lung meridian. By the end of a session of archery, your arms have pulled a considerable rate - going quickly into tons if you stick at it. But if you do it right, you shouldn't feel it. You just feel your full free breaths against the stinging cold, feel your shoulders opening and your mind relaxing. You end up with an appetite and enjoy the companionship of your fellow hunters.

With practice you might even end up with dinner.

Note: Our archery tutor, Fiona Clark, has sensibility advised us to say that it is actually illegal to hunt with a bow and arrow in Ireland.

Wild Rabbit Cacciatore

1 wild rabbit
seasoned flour
1 onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, sliced
a handful of black olives
sprigs of rosemary and thyme
a 400g can of tomatoes
a glass of white wine
Olive oil

Heat the oven to 170ºC. Portion the rabbit: you should have two hind legs, two forelegs, and three or four pieces from the saddle, depending on the size of the rabbit. Dust them in seasoned flour, then fry until browned in a good splash of olive oil in a large pan which will hold everything in the oven. Brown the pieces on both sides, then remove. Toss in the chopped onion, carrot, garlic and fry until softened – it helps to cover the pan to achieve the softening. Put the rabbit pieces back in, add a glass of white wine and scrape up all the tasty brown bits on the bottom, then add the tin of chopped tomatoes, the olives, and the rosemary and thyme sprigs. Bring to the boil, then place in the oven for two hours – wild rabbit takes longer to cook than the hutch variety. Check after an hour that all is well, when you might find you need to add a good splash of water. Taste after two hours that the meat is tender as butter, then serve.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/West-Cork-Archery-Club/158051954271331?ref=ts&fref=ts
westcorkarchery@gmail.com

Sweet dreams....

Confit

2013-03-22T06:04:00.000-07:00

Of course, our modern love affair with gathering, foraging and preserving owes a debt to New Nordic cuisine but, to be fair – as the kids around here all say – the more southerly parts of Europe have a profound, and indeed much longer legacy when it comes to harvesting and cooking at the culinary edge.

Hollandaise and mayonnaise must have seemed like molecular gastronomy in their time, and confit – the art of preserving meat or fowl in its own fat – is the original low temperature cooking.

The word confit is, in fact the past participle of confire, meaning to preserve. In France it is strictly applied to the cooking of duck, goose or pork – all fatty animals, and is a process of cooking, slowly immersed in fat, with the idea that the meat will then be stored in jars or crocks in the fat just like any other preserve.

The concept that you can preserve a lemon in salt and call it a confit is not correct by any stretch of the imagination. Unless you count the word as a verb, rather than an adjective. Confit tomato? Sorry that's an oxymoron: it just can't exist.

So let us salute the French, the Spanish and the Italians for their glorious history in giving us the foundation of so many of the things we cook today. Respect!

Confit of Duck
(Based on a recipe by Anne Willan in French Regional Cooking)

2 duck legs
3 tablespoons coarse ground sea salt
enough duck fat to cover the two legs whilst cooking (you can buy duck fat separately)
ground pepper
2 bay leaves broken into bits
3 star anise
1 sprig of thyme, leaves shredded

First salt the duck with the spices. Leave overnight in the mixture.

The next day, wipe off the salt and lay the two legs, skin side down on a casserole that can go both on and in the stove. Cook the duck for about 15 minutes over a low flame, or until the fat runs and the skin browns slightly. Add enough duck fat to completely cover the meat and place in a low oven (150C) for 2 hours, until very tender. Put the duck in a crock or jar, and cover with the fat. Leave in the fridge for a week. (I didn't manage to cover the top bit of the leg. If you want to store the duck longer, then everything needs to be covered in the fat). You can also use lard, if you don't have enough duck fat.

To serve, bring it to room temperature, scrape off the fat and then fry it in the residue of fat that clings to the skin until hot and crispy.

Equinoctial Feasts

2013-03-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

The end of March is a significant time for growers and foragers and nowhere is its significance more clearly observed than on the seashore. It is here that we can see with our own eyes how our universe works and it is now that we can taste the result.

When we first came to live on the Sheep's Head we were struck by the Easter sight of wellie-booted locals, with bucket and pike, silhouetted against the light, digging and combing in the silty sandy bays that are carved into our West Cork seascape. We learned that it was a Good Friday tradition to head to the shore. This harked back to times where any Friday saw a meal of fish and Good Friday was a day to revel in it.

Easter and its associated holy days - unlike Christmas - are not fixed to a calendar day, but rather to an event in nature. The festival occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.

Those shoreline silhouettes, digging at the lower edges of the tide, dig in March (and September) because of a twice-yearly co-operative pull from both the moon and the sun, that draws our tidal lows low and the highs high. These are the Equinoctial tides, when the sun and the moon pull from a position of zero declination, neither north nor south of the celestial equator. What this means in practical terms is that some sea vegetables and shellfish of the subtidal zone become available to any hunter gatherer in an all-too-brief window of low tidal opportunity. It also means the sun is heading back into the Northern Hemisphere, the days will get lighter and the grass will need cutting more often.

The McKennas too have our equinoctial tradition. That is the tradition of going out and searching for razor clams, only not to find them. Not yet anyway, despite much consultation with all our books. We live in hope that this year will be different.

Meanwhile we are anticipating the longer days of sunshine and immersing ourselves in startling space statistics as we ready our kitchen by experimenting with those clams we CAN catch, which this week was the scary-looking common otter clam.

SUN AND MOON FACTS

The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun and exactly 400 times closer to earth. How did that happen? That’s what gives us complete solar and lunar eclipses.

Sunrise time changes by 22 minutes in December and 67 minutes in March. (Source: The Natural Navigator)

The earth is tilted away from the sun by 23.4º This gives us our seasons as the sun appears to travel an orbital plane known as the ecliptic. The point in the imagined celestial sphere where the celestial equator meets the ecliptic is the date of the vernal equinox.

This year the vernal, spring equinox happens on 20 March. Easter Sunday falls on March 31.

A tangential line crossing the light and dark side of the moon will point South - this is simply because the bright side of the moon is lit by the sun to the West, the dark side to the east, and the line in the middle a North South line. (Learned, once again, from The Natural Navigator)

OTTER CLAM FRITTERS

Steam the clams, just until they open. Pull off the leathery trunk that coats the clam’s “foot” to reveal tender clam meat. Remove all the grit and anything you don’t fancy eating. Dip the clam meat first in flour, then beaten egg and finally in breadcrumbs. Shallow fry briefly until the breadcrumb mix toasts and coats.

Serve with lemon juice and soy for a simple treat.

The Hungry Gap

2013-02-23T05:25:00.001-08:00

Funny that the much anticipated warmer, longer days of Spring bring with them a seasonal deprivation.

Stretching keenly towards the welcome sun, our winter-growing brassicas begin to sprout and spoil and the flowering that follows is the beginning of a period of paucity in the garden, while we wait for the later harvest of the broad beans.

Traditionally this “hungry gap” falls between April and May, but here in West Cork, it’s happening already. Those plants that have kept us going during the cold new year, kale, cabbage, cauliflower, purple sprouting broccoli have already begun to bolt skywards. A few more days and we won’t be able to use any of them.

In these meagre times it pays to look beyond our own cultivated gardens and out into nature’s backyard of roadsides, woods and coasts. A little weeding at this time throws up masses of wild cress, and the culinary world will soon get hot and excited at the sight of the first shoots of wild garlic. For there is nothing more healthful than to eat nature’s bitter greens when coughs and colds do their winter stalking.

There is a lot of discussion between gardener's and growers about how to bridge that hungry gap. And of course the answer is to behave like the squirrels and bury our harvest? LOL, not these days. In these times the answer is to air mile the bounty of those countries lucky enough to have the sun all year round. Hello green bean from Israel, potato from Cyprus, baby corn from Africa.

The result of this year-round bounty beamed in to a supermarket nearby is that our houses are no longer equipped to the task of thrifty hoarding that was the job in old times of the cellar, the cold room, or the barn.

When, for the last few years, we have been presented with the treasure that is our eight or so bags of CSA potatoes, we've struggled to find a place for them in our architect-designed, ultra-glazed, super-modern domicile.

This year, we’re putting that to right by repurposing a electrically-redundant deep freeze. According to the instructions of our CSA potato provider, John Dolan - a man who has made himself an expert on the issues of food security - we are housing the deep freeze now in our shed to keep it dry. In the unlikely event of a bumper crop of carrots from our garden (that has never happened yet, but we live in hope), we’ll fill fish boxes with sand and bury the carrots and other root crops, then make use of them next year as our garden prepares itself for summer season.

John Dolan advises that we make a wire mesh cover for the old chest freezer, and regularly open the door to let the air in. It will be a great store for the 2013 potatoes, when they come.

In the meantime, we’ve picked all the kale and we’re making a huge bag of kale crisps. And, casting an eye around to see what’s growing, nature itself suggests a great embellishment – seaweed.

Truthfully the Hungry Gap is just man-made angst, created in the mind of gardeners. Nature itself fills the gap. The sprouting of the brassicas, of course, is just the beginning of next year's harvest, and at the same time as the wild garlic begins to sprout in the woodland, we are also heading into a fabulous bounteous time on the seashore as the cold-loving kelps reach their full potential, and the sea kale begins to grow again.

Kale and Dilisk Crisps

Wash the kale and dry, first in a salad spinner, and then between kitchen paper. The leaves must be totally free of any water. Pull away the stalks, and place on a single layer on an oven tray. Cook one tray at a time. Drizzle over a couple of tablespoons of olive oil per tray, and about a teaspoon of salt. Add some dilisk that you have teased apart into single strands. Stop, to admire the colours, before massaging the oil and salt into the leaves, with your hands, so that everything is coated.

Cook for about 10 minutes in an oven set to 150ºC. Take the kale out when they still have the tiniest modicum of limpness. They'll finish crisping on the warm tray. Eat like crisps.

Hare

2012-11-20T07:53:00.000-08:00

Mick Healy of Wild Irish Game displaying furred and feathered game at Wild & Slow

Enjoying food that has been hunted rather than farmed is an experience that is less and less familiar and something which people are less and less comfortable with.

Our discomfort with game is as much a fear that it will be difficult to cook as it is that it might taste, well, a bit yucky.

And who can blame us? A food whose description often puts the words high, innards, green and - God forbid - maggots in the same sentence. This is mixed with a macho, male gunslinging posturing, augmented with toffee-nosed-brandy-and-cigar snobbery. The sport of redneck machismos and fatneck bankers, game hunting, in our modern world, has a bad image.

And another thing: killing game just has to mean a personal acceptance that something that was born to be free has had its life extinguished simply so you can have it for your table. There's no denying it, no wrapping it up in anonymous supermarket packaging. No escaping the fact that this was, very recently, a living, breathing beautiful wild animal. That counts as a guilt trip in our post-Disney world of nature.

You've got this far and you're still interested? Well here's the other side of the story. Game is easy to cook, if you give a bit of thought to its structure. It's as pleasurable to eat as a piece of steak or chicken. If you're going to eat meat you need to be conscious of both its life and its death and game is very good for you. The hunter gatherer diet of our ancestors has never been matched in terms of nutrition.

There are also lots of good books giving simple recipes for game. Chefs cottoned on to its goodness long ago, and many have written about it.

John cooked our hare by adapting a recipe from Sean Hill, who noted that one should stay clear of hanging the animals for an excessive time, and be wary of using the organs as these can give flavours that peoople find too intense.

He then made the leftovers into a hare pie,with a buttermilk pastry. Here are the recipes:

Roast Saddle and Braised Leg of Hare

Serves 4
1 young hare
sunflower oil, for frying
500ml chicken stock
1 tablespoon plain flour
a little grated nutmeg
1 onion, chopped
1 stick celery, chopped
1 medium carrot, chopped
150ml red wine
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Joint the hare. First remove the back legs by cutting them away with a sharp knife, then divide the legs down the centre. Similarly, remove the front shoulders and divide. You now have two legs, two shoulders and a saddle.

Dust the hare legs with flour and season with nutmeg, salt and pepper. Brown them in a hot frying pan, then transfer to a heavy lidded pot or casserole. Do the same with the shoulders.

Heat the oven to 180ºC. Fry the onion, celery and carrot and put these in the pot with the hare legs and shoulders. Pour on the chicken stock and red wine, then cover and cook in the oven for two hours or until the meat is completely tender.

Raise the oven temperature to 220ºC. Brush the saddle with oil season with salt and pepper and roast for 15 minutes. The meat cooks quickly and should be rare. Take the saddle out, cover and let it rest.

Strain the cooking stock from the casserole into a saucepan and bring it to the boil, skimming the surface.

Carve the fillets from the saddle, slice them handsomely and lay alongside the braised legs and shoulders. Serve with the sauce.

Hare Pie with Buttermilk Pastry

227g butter
227g plain flour
4 tablespoons buttermilk

1 egg, beaten

Crumble the butter into the flour to make a breadcrumb consistency, then add the buttermilk. Bring the mixture together and chill for an hour in the fridge before rolling out.

Take what hare remains from your braised and roasted animal and cut into bite-sized pieces. Sauté some leeks and carrots – you can also add mushrooms – until tender, then mix with the hare and some of the leftover gravy, so you have a nice, moist filling. Add lots of chopped parsley.
Lay the hare and vegetable mixture in your dish. Plonk your singing blackbird in the centre to let the steam escape. Roll out the buttermilk pastry. Line the edge of the dish with a strip of pastry, sealed on both sides with a beaten egg, and place the remaining rolled out pastry on top. Brush again with some beaten egg. Cook for approximately 30 minutes in a 180ºC oven.

www.wildirishgame.ie

Nasturtium Vinegar

2012-10-23T02:41:00.002-07:00

I spotted a reference to this in an old cookery book – Nasturtium Vinegar. It's spectacular! The old recipe book suggested it would be good for a mutton sauce. We'll bear that in mind, but I think we'll more likely use it for garnishing herbed ricotta, for hard-boiled egg salad, for salads and, honestly, it's so good you could eat it from the spoon.

Nasturtium Vinegar

A large bowl of freshly picked nasturtium flowers
500ml distilled white malt vinegar
handful cloves
handful peppercorns
1 clove garlic, sliced

I also opened a sachet of mulled wine spices and added a pinch of that. I think it contained cinnamon, dried orange, allspice.

Push the flowers into a sterilised bottle, adding the spices and garlic as you go. Cover and leave for a few days after which it becomes a lovely lurid pink, and tastes of nasturtium. I think I'll strain it, but right now, I'm enjoying the petal effect.

Winterage

2012-10-18T05:57:00.000-07:00

“I keep thinking that I feel a bit as though I hadn’t finished with summer yet, that winter came too early. There were a few things with green vegetables that I hadn’t had enough time to figure out, and now it was going to be at least six months before I would be able to work with them again.”

Magnus Nilsson Fäviken

The bright harvest moon has waned and given way to a darker sky, and those of us who prepare a winter store cupboard do so with a measurement of regret as much as one of satisfaction. We too haven’t finished with summer. All we can do now is bottle what’s left of it.

But, perhaps we should refigure our emotions about the end of summer. Next weekend an unusual celebration of the onset of winter takes place in The Burren. It’s the celebration of a “transhumance” - a seasonal movement of livestock between summer and winter pastures. Normally this is celebrated in the spring, with the movement of cattle to summer pastures. But in the Burren, it is a Winterage movement that has been practiced for thousands of years. This year they are turning it into a Festival.

“It is thought that Burren farmers initially adopted this practice in response to the shortage of water in summertime, only to find that the warmth of the limestone and the ample grazing on the rocky winter pastures made the Burren an ideal, low-cost ‘outwintering’ environment for their stock. Winter grazing by cattle, at a time when most flowers are dormant, enables the Burren’s renowned complement of flowers and insects to flourish unhindered in summer. Winter grazing is also critically important to the conservation of the extraordinary array of monuments built by farmers in the past, as it slows down the encroachment of damaging scrub.”

Meanwhile I have discovered a market garden in our local village. Mount Corrin Market Garden is now operated by renaissance man Walter Ryan-Purcell, who is on a mission to provide fabulous vegetables at a reasonable cost to the local community. In the couple of weeks since we heard about it we have bought aubergines, cucumbers, the last of the tomatoes, fennel, squash, white turnip, carrots, rocket and peppers. And quite a few herbs, from which we’ve made pestos, pickles and chutneys. Two that really worked for us were a simple cucumber pickle recipe from the new Fäviken book, and an aubergine pickle that we can hardly wait to try in a month.

The two events have diminished any sense of regret I have over the passing of the season. It is time to celebrate the harvest and store and renew. Before we know it the little green leaves of wild garlic will be popping up and the whole shebang will start again.

Mount Corrin Market Garden produce is available in Centra Supermarket in Schull.

Pickled Aubergine

1kg aubergines, peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons sea salt
500ml white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
50ml olive oil
2 chillies, sliced
1 tablespoon dried oregano
4 cloves of garlic

Place the sliced aubergines in a colander and sprinkle with the salt. Leave for 30 minutes, then pat dry with a paper towel, and discard the juices.

Bring the vinegar and sugar to a boil in a large saucepan. Add the aubergines and simmer for about 5 minutes. Spoon out the aubergines into a bowl, reserving the liquid. Toss the aubergines with the garlic, chillies, oregano and olive oil. Pack into sterilized jars. Tap the jars onto the worktop to release air, and then fill the jars with the reserved cooking liquid, adding as much as you need to fill.

Pickled Cucumber

I've been using white malt vinegar recently for Japanese sauces. That's right - the stuff you normally use for cleaning. It's has a fresh taste and is suitable for things that cider vinegar or wine vinegar would be too rich. I was interested to read Magnus Nilsson saying that the vinegar he uses is a white alcohol vinegar, that is unique to Scandinavia. Our white malt will just have to do here.

This is Nilsson's simple recipe for pressgurka – quick-pickled cucumber.

"Sprinkle 40g salt over 1kg of sliced cucumber and mix carefully with your hands, taking care not to damage the slices. Place the salted slices in a sieve and allow the salt to draw the water out of the cucumber by osmosis. Allow the water to drain away.

"After an hour or so the cucumbers will look almost as if they have been cooked and they will have lost a considerable amount of water. Now rinse away any salt that hasn't yet dissolved and place the cucumber in a ceramic bowl. Cover with 1 litre of pickling syrup [made from 1 part white vinegar; 2 parts sugar; 3 parts water]. The osmotic pressure will now work in the other direction, since the water content is lower inside the cucumber than in the syrup. This will allow the syrup to quickly soak into the cucumber, preserving it effectively. You will see after about one hour how the cucumber will have already recovered its volume.

"Soft vegetables like cucumbers can be eaten the same day but will not keep as long as harder vegetables such as beetroots and carrots: these will take longer to process but will keep for years."

http://www.burrenwinterage.com
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Faviken-Magnus-Nilsson/dp/0714864706/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350564715&sr=1-1

Autumn Hedgerow Fruit

2012-10-08T06:05:00.005-07:00

I’ve spent the weekend trying to bottle up what remains of summer.

First port of call was the roadside. The lanes around here are teeming hedgerows that, throughout the year give us nettles, wild garlic, meadowsweet, verbena, honeysuckle, water mint, hazelnuts, elderflower, mushrooms, on and on it goes. Each year we discover more. Right now there are very few elderberries, and diminishing rowans, but plenty enough hips, haws and sloes.

A hedgerow is more than just food for us, it provides song posts for our birds, and the dense base and tall trees support butterflies, insects, badgers, foxes and quite a few feral cats. John and I often cycle through them and inevitably dismount when something catches our eye, or when a song call needs identifying.

Our hedgerows run beside a river, known as Four-Mile-Water, and beside it, we find plants that tolerate the dry soil under overhanging trees, others that prefer the wet marshes that are never too far away. We pick flowers here throughout the year, pink ragged Robin, white oxalis and yellow dandelions, which in themselves provide food.

On an autumn day the light is dappled, and it feels good to be alive.

We picked our sloes, haws, hips and a few rowans. The hips were the easiest to collect, we got enough to make rosehip syrup, and enough to put in the sweet hedgefruit ketchup, where we paired them with the other berries. Sloes were plentiful too, so we also made sloe gin.

Then to the garden, which is slightly sadder than the land around us. We never seem to get a great crop of anything, unless you count unripened tomatoes. On the advice of our friend Caitlin Ruth, I set to make green tomato chilli ketchup – and honestly, I’ll never complain about green tomatoes again. This sauce is addictive: part ketchup, part cooked salsa, part sludgy Tabasco, it would go with anything and our larder is full again.

Hedgefruit Ketchup

The colours of this mixture make your heart sing, especially the London bus red of the rowans. When made, the ketchup tastes a bit like a spicy cranberry sauce. If there’s any left, we’ll certainly use it for Christmas dinner. But I suspect it might all be gone by then.

1kg hedgerow fruit (haws, hips, rowans, elderberries, sloes, or any combination)
600ml white wine or cider vinegar
250g sugar
salt and black pepper

Remove most of the stalks from the fruit and rinse in cold water. Place them in a large pan with the vinegar and add 600ml water. Cook for about an hour, until the fruit softens and separates from its pips and seeds. Pass through a food mill, or rub through a medium sieve.

Discard the seeds and bits, and put the fruity mixture back into the clean pan. Add the sugar and season well. Bring to the boil and cook for about ten minutes. Pour into sterilised jars. This amount makes three large ones.

Rosehip Syrup

This syrup is loved by my family, who dilute it in water, and swear it tastes like their favourite goji berry juice. We like to have it with yogurt or porridge.

1kg rosehips
1.2kg sugar

Destalk the hips, and chop them in a food processor. Put 3l of water on the heat and add the hips to the water as it comes to the boil. Bring back to the boil and then take off the heat. Leave the fruit sitting overnight in the water.

The next day, strain the fruit through a muslin bag, as if you were making jelly. Let it sit until all the liquid has dripped out, and then discard the fruit. Place the liquid back in the saucepan and add the sugar. Bring the mixture to the boil and boil for about five minutes, then bottle into sterilised bottles.

Green Tomato Chilli Ketchup

6kg green tomatoes
4 onions, skinned and roughly chopped
3 green peppers, seeded and roughly chopped
5 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
200g sugar
4 red chillis
400ml white wine vinegar or cider vinegar
2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon dry mustard
2 sticks cinnamon
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
5 whole allspice berries
1 tablespoon whole cloves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
the juice of 4 limes

Clean and chop all the ingredients and add everything to a large saucepan. Bring to a gentle boil and switch off the heat. Leave overnight. (You can skip this process if you like, but I think it adds to the flavour). The next morning simmer the mixture on a low boil for approximately 1.5 hours, until everything turns to pulp.

Sieve or pass through a food mill. The mixture will be pulpy, and contain chilli seeds. If you object to the seeds – and I don’t see why you should – then use a finer sieve. Bottle in sterilised kilner jars, and place the jars in a large pot of boiling water to cover. Boil the jars for approximately half an hour, which will seal them, and allow you to keep them on a shelf all winter.

Sloe Gin

This technique was given to us by Ally Raftery from Mount Vernon in County Clare.

Take 1 litre of gin and drink half of it. Cut or prick the sloes and drop into half empty bottle until they displace the remaining gin to near the top. Add 150g sugar. Turn or agitate the bottle daily for 1 week, then weekly for 1 or 2 months. At this point remove the sloes and it is ready to drink. Even better if kept till next winter.

Fermented Foods

2012-09-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

Primary School Milk. Everyone in these islands has a memory of it. My early South of England memory is of little glass bottles, probably holding a third of a pint, kept and served cold outside. And – in a misguided effort to make it more attractive – it came in two flavours, chocolate and strawberry. I liked both.

How different, that memory from the recollection of a lady, sitting beside me, who I would have judged to be just a little older than myself. This lady's memory was of a West Cork classroom. And here the churn of milk was never bottled or flavoured, never left outside to chill, but rather ceremonially brought inside to sit beside the lit fire. In this classroom everyone expected and enjoyed the milk to be drunk raw and blood-warm.

The lady beside me shared her milk memory at a discussion on fermenting food at the recent Taste of West Cork food festival in Skibbereen.

Fermented foods span the globe. From the Arctic to the Tropics, Africa to Northern Europe. Wherever there is food there is ferment: Cheese. Vinegar. Sauerkraut. Kefir. Kvass. Wine. Yogurt. Proper bread.

But what is Ireland’s gift to this global bacterial culture, surely we too must have a historical tradition of fermented food?

We do, of course, and that food has always been derived from milk: warm, unabashedly ripened, used as buttermilk, cheese and whey. Historically, milk is our great fermented ingredient.

Fermented food is good for you. It increases digestibility, enhances nutritional content, replaces your beneficial bacteria, oxygenates the blood and generally makes you feel better.

One of the great global recipes for fermented foods is Korean Kim Chee. This white version is adapted from a Momofuko recipe from David Chang. Kim Chee is like some sort of superannuated coleslaw and goes with everything. It makes a great lunch with a fried egg.

The Taste of West Cork demo was hosted by nutrionists Janice and Hayley.

Hayley and Janice's fermented foods are available in the Skibbereen Saturday market under the label The Nourishing Food Company.

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz has recently been published if you want to learn more about how to make the most of bacteria. It's available – along with balls of kefir, incidentally – from Amazon.

Kim Chee

1 head cabbage, shredded
half cup runner beans, very finely sliced
2 tablespoons salt
8 cloves peeled garlic
2" piece of ginger
quarter cup finely julienned ginger
three-quarters cup syrup made from water and two tablespoons sugar
quarter cup soy sauce
quarter cup rice or white malt vinegar
1 carrot, finely julienned
3 spring onions, cut into 1 inch pieces and halved lengthways.

Shred the cabbage, and place in a bowl overnight with the runner beans and the salt. The next morning, drain off the liquid and place the cabbage back in the bowl.

Puree the piece of ginger with the garlic and the syrup, then pour over the cabbage. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir everything together, using your hands.

Transfer to an airtight container, such as a large kilner jar and store in the fridge for a week. The kim chee is actually delicious straight away, but becomes slightly fizzy at the end of a fortnight, but which time it is probably wise to use it up. Though proper Korean cooks would probably keep it longer. Even the liquid can be used, delicious for noodles.

Seaweed at the Taste of West Cork Festival

2012-09-14T06:09:00.001-07:00

Japanese salad made from Bantry Bay Wakame & Baltimore Cucumber

There is much you can say about the benefits of seaweed, but Majella O’Neill of the Riverside Restaurant in Skibbereen sums it up quite succinctly by telling us that seaweed is immensely rich in chlorophyll, and that chlorophyll is only one mineral away from being identical to haemoglobin.

Haemaglobin, which contains iron, transports oxygen to our blood. Chlorophyll, which differs only in that it contains the mineral of magnesium – a mineral that is needed by every organ in the body – performs much the same function. In supplying us with magnesium, and pumping energy into the blood, eating seaweed protects us from getting sick.

Simple as that.

Photos: Jim Kennedy

Majella was speaking at a seaweed demo we hosted as part of Taste of West Cork. We were joined in the demo by my partners in seaweed, Jim and Maria Kennedy of Atlantic Sea Kayaking, and Mamiko Crowley.

Mamiko Crowley’s two names might give away that this is a young Japanese girl, married to an Irishman, living in West Cork. The plan of the demo was to find out what a nation with a highly-developed seaweed culture could teach a nation with an ancient but understated seaweed culture, in a county that has a rich coastline.

Majella, who owns the Riverside where the event took place, gave us the nutritional facts about seaweed – did you know for example that kelp can be ten times richer in calcium than cow’s milk, or dulse is 50 times higher in iron than spinach. Maria Kennedy showed us some of her glorious natural skin seaweed remedies, and Jim Kennedy informed us about how to find and gather seaweed safely. The Kennedys offer a seaweed foraging course as part of their kayaking package (www.atlanticseakayaking.com)

We were lucky that we had an informed audience, who included a diver who described snorkeling and diving amongst the local kelp forests. (www.baltimorediving.com)

Here are some of Mamiko Crowley’s recipes:

Sesame Dressing

1 tablespoon vinegar (Mamiko recommends rice vinegar or white malt vinegar)
1 tablespoon soy sauce (Mamiko recommends Kikkoman)
3 tablespoons Tahini (preferably a tahini with a thin consistency)
½ tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
½ tablespoon mayonnaise
1 tablespoon water (or more, if needed to thin the dressing)

Beat the ingredients together and use as a dressing or dip.

This makes a good salad dressing served with lettuce, seaweed (Mamiko used Atlantic Wakame, reconstituted in some water until soft and green) and walnuts.

Sea Spaghetti Salad

Sea Spaghetti (either buy dried and reconsistute in water, or pick fresh from the beach)

Dressing:
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Mirin
1 ½ tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons malt or rice vinegar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
½ tablespoon sesame oil
chilli flakes

Simmer the sea spaghetti in boiling water for about five minutes. Drain, and then toss in the dressing ingredients.

Cucumber and Wakame Salad

½ cucumber, sliced
salt
handful of Atlantic wakame, reconstituted in water

Dressing:
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice of malt vinegar
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Slice the cucumber and place in a bowl with salt for about ten minutes. When ready to use, squeeze the cucumber with your fingers to remove the juice. This gives the cucumber a crispy texture. Soak the wakame, and then squeeze out the water.
Mix together the dressing ingredients and toss everything together.

Sesame Dressing

Cockles

2012-09-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

Poring through various technical manuals, trying to identify shellfish, I was excited to come across the common cockle being described in technical terms as being: “robust, gregarious and free living”.

What!? Sounds like Electric Picnic happening at a beach near you.

A Japanese friend wrote to us recently, ending with the line “Autumn is here. Let’s make a fresh start”.

We don’t think of autumn as the start, but as the end of the season. Time to rethink, I guess. It’s certainly the start of the shellfish season, so get down to a free living beach near you and start the season by getting acquainted with these gregarious creatures.

You will need a spade or a rake. They commune in, now we know, free living arrangements, just below the surface of the sand in the middle shore.

More technical stuff: the cockle is a mollusc - a bivalve that feeds on zooplankton (sounds like a good name for a band). They feed when covered by water, siphoning off the water and filtering out the plankton. Make sure that that water is clean by only collecting on remote beaches.

Cockles live for around four to five years, and, like trees, add concentric annual growth rings to their shell, increasing in number with maturity.

When you get them home put them in a bucket of clean fresh water. You can put oatmeal in the water to encourage them to feed and eject all the sand that inevitably collects in the shell. Change the water a few times to help remove the sand.

Pasta with Cockles and Tomato Sauce

Serves 4

cockles - about 10 per person, or whatever you’ve managed to find
olive oil
2 cloves garlic
parsley
500g fresh ripe tomatoes (or 1 tin Italian tomatoes)
chilli flakes
pasta

Put the cockles in a shallow saucepan and put the saucepan on the heat. As they open, carefully remove the cockles and extract their meat, “washing” each mollusc in a little cooking liquid to remove any salt. Discard any that don’t open. Strain the cockle liquid through a fine sieve lined with muslin. This should remove the sand and leave you with cockle and cockle juice.

Saute the garlic in the olive oil, and add the tomatoes. Cook until the tomatoes make a sauce, and then add the cockle juice, the chilli and the parsley. Add the cockles, and then season to taste.

Meanwhile, cook your pasta and serve with the tomato seafood sauce, garnished with more parsley.

Blueberries and Thermodynamics

2012-08-28T05:59:00.000-07:00

“In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics”.

That has to be the best ever Homer Simpson quote, how many times do I reference it? Homer’s summation of entropy and irreversibility in nature.

Nature moves on, things undo, ever edging towards disorder. Think of a teenager’s bedroom. That’s thermodynamics.

Time’s arrow, thermodynamics, the wheel of time. Observed and celebrated, whether it is the Gaelic feast of harvest, Lughnasadh, or - around the same time - Fraughan Sunday, when fraocháns or wild bilberries were traditionally gathered.

We McKennas have a similar Sunday (or rather a whole weekend), where we celebrate both a wild harvest and nature’s descent into disorder and disobedience.

It’s known in our house as Electric Picnic Sunday. It’s the weekend at the end of August, beginning of September where our cultivated version of Fraughans are gathered. Fraughans, or wild bilberries are tricky to cultivate. The nearest we can get to growing them is to grow blueberries, which we have done for the last ten or so years.

Our blueberry harvest has got better and better, and they are always ready for picking around about this weekend. We know this to our cost (and this is the chaos and entropy bit). We know this weekend is good for blueberries because, for a number of years we lost them. Each year we would look at the ripening fruit closely. Our free-range chickens would cast a beady eye at the bushes as well, albeit from a slightly lower altitude.

Then… off we would go, at the end of August, as a family, to Electric Picnic, leaving the chickens in the care of our two dogs.

Result: we would come back and find that the lovely blueberries, having reached perfection, would have been all eaten by the chickens. Our only resort was to make blueberry muffins or soda bread with the eggs from these greedy, unruly creatures.

Nowadays, entropy and nature has taken one further twist, in the form of the fox and we have to buy eggs, but at last we have our blueberries - and what a crop this year!

Blueberry Sodabread

400g strong white flour
1 heaped teaspoon bread soda
100g blueberries
salt
400ml buttermilk
1 egg
1 tablespoon honey

Preheat your oven to 210ºC. Put the flour into a large bowl, and sift in the bread soda. Stir in the blueberries and the salt. Measure out the buttermilk in a jug, and then beat the egg and honey, using a fork.

Make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the buttermilk/egg mixture. Using a wooden spoon, stir everything together until you get a ball of dough in the middle of the bowl. Using a little more flour, bring the dough together lightly with your hands. Turn onto a baking tray and mark with a cross at the top, cutting about an inch down into the dough. Bake in the oven for approximately 30 minutes.

Fried Green Tomatoes

2012-08-21T01:49:00.000-07:00

“My aunt Mary Ellen told my father, Lord have mercy on him, when he was going up to the mountain to the forestry ‘Why are you bringing oil skins on such a fine day?’. He replied ‘Any fool would bring oil skins on a wet day’”. (Bernard Kelly, Ballycommane)

The rugged gentlemen who live on our hillside always have an ability to tell, even on a fine day, whether it will rain before the night is out. This year they haven't had to guess. It has rained every day on our hill, even when it isn't raining in nearby Bantry. Our elevation has attracted a bubble of nimbostratus that refuses to shift.

All our neighbours agree, this is the worst summer in living memory. None of our vegetables have ripened.

The only bright side of farming on this hillside is that the fields are ancient and unploughed. The furze – the gorse that is rampant – has steadied the soil, and the grazing cattle can do no harm to it. Unlike the dairy farmers surrounding us, whose animals are tearing up the fields in grass that is far more sodden even than grass in winter.

They always worry around here about bringing in the hay. Now they can't even bring in the silage.

It's not all doom and gloom. There is a positive resort to prayer, and a hope that all will recover. "Sure we may well be roashting at Christmas, it may be a good winter" said Bernard Kelly, our profoundly knowledgeable neighbour. It's hard, though, to keep cheerful when the weather seems to be throwing biblically-proportioned trouble on an already troubled community. A community that is once again facing mass emigration.

This is a peninsula that lives from tourism, farming and construction – all industries that have been decimated in the last 12 months due to man's folly and nature's stubborn dominion.

But this is a resilient hillside that has seen more lean times than fat. We rally. Even amidst the gloomy greyness the people around here find it easy to smile. The feral beauty of our hillside instills us all with a perpetual holiday mood, no matter how long we have lived here.

And so, smiling alongside them, we wonder what, especially, to do with all our unripened, blight-threatened, green tomatoes.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Green tomatoes
Flour, seasoned with salt and pepper
Egg, beaten
Polenta
Oil

Slice the tomatoes. Dip into flour, then egg, then polenta. Fry in oil. Drain on kitchen paper and serve with chilli sauce.

Nettle Seed Heads

2012-08-12T02:06:00.001-07:00

Looking out our bedroom window we can see a distant Rowan tree covered in little red baubles heralding the beginning of autumn and the hedgerow harvest.

Autumn. The end of a strange summer season that has brought mists of low level stratus that have shielded our sun here in West Cork. We are reluctantly glad to see the shift in the season, hoping it might bring back some order to our climate and our routine.

But despite our grumpiness about the weather we know we are divinely lucky to have our seasons. Imagine a world without being able to look forward to snowdrops, without being able to anticipate bouquets of elderflower and the first pink shoots of rhubarb, followed later by sun-washed tomatoes and strawberries, then later again by haws and sloes and apples.

It's funny to think that our seasons come about only because of a slight – 23.5º tilt in our axis. If our planet wasn't tilted away and towards our sun, things would be considerably less interesting in terms of what food we could grow.

If the axis our planet travelled around the sun was set at a north south line, then the Ecliptic – the apparent path of the sun in our skies (apparent, because we are moving a path around the sun, not the other way around) would have the sun travel directly over the equator and the seasons would never change.

As it is, however, our world is tilted. This directs the sun's path to the north during our summer, and south in our winter.

The northern visit of the sun still warms us, despite these beastly weather lows, and where earlier we gathered leaves and flowers, now we are looking to harvest seeds and berries.

We shall have to investigate bringing a ladder up to the Rowan, but in closer reach the nettle heads – once we have brushed away the insects that love them too – give one of the healthiest late summer treats. Pick them and rub lightly between your fingers and use the tiny green berries to season your dishes. As well as tasting good, they bring a pack of nutrients to your plate, blessing you with extra energy and vitality.

Albacore Tuna

2012-08-08T01:31:00.002-07:00

A World Without Fish, a beautifully illustrated book published last year, is technically described as a graphic novel for children (or perhaps teenagers). Written by Mark Kurlansky, author of the seminal titles Cod and Salt, AWWF may simplify the confusing story of our world fishing industry. But it is written with such clarity and knowledge that it would assist any adult consumer who wants to understand how to navigate what is and isn't sustainable when it comes to buying fish. It also explains how we got the oceans into this mess in the first place.

Despite its title and subject matter AWWF is ultimately a positive read, taking the stance that if you simply refuse to eat fish, not only do communities suffer but there is then no reward for those who fish in a sustainable way.

One fish that is being sustainably landed in numbers in Ireland this August, is Albacore Tuna. A number of albacore fisheries hold the meaningful MSC label, and this is a fish that you can eat with a clear conscience. A white-fleshed tuna, it is the ultimate BBQ fish, because it holds together and suits all sorts of marinades and flame grilling. It's the fish used in Sally Barnes' exceptional smoked tuna, and I love this recipe from John for a tuna carbonara.

Albacore Tuna Carbonara

You can make this dish with canned tuna, but freshly poached and flaked albacore tuna sends the flavours sky-high.

For 4

1 thickly-cut tuna steak, on the bone

200g broccoli

1 tsp finely chopped garlic
1 egg, beaten
1 handful fresh flat-leaf parsley
100g butter, soft
200mls cream
50g grated parmesan, plus cheese for the table
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
200g broccoli

500g penne

Poach the tuna steak gently in a mix of water, lemon juice olive oil, until it is just cooked, and still moist – it is important that the tuna is not dry, so don't overcook. It should still be pink in the centre. Remove from the poaching liquid and let cool. Pull away from the bone and flake roughly.

In a large bowl, toss in the chopped parsley, chopped garlic, beaten egg, grated Parmesan, cream, soft butter, flaked tuna and a generous sprinkling of sea salt and black pepper.

In a separate pan, cook the broccoli in heavily-salted boiling water.

Cook the penne until al dente.

Drain the hot pasta and add it immediately to the ingredients in the bowl. Toss gently until everything is mixed, then add in the hot cooked broccoli and toss together.

Bring the bowl to the table and serve into warmed dishes, with more Parmesan and some good olive oil. This is a rich, unctuous dish of pasta, so a light red, such as a Barbera, will have everyone smiling.

Blackcurrant Leaves

2012-07-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

I have too much respect for wine makers and craft brewers to take up home-brewing. But the idea of a fruity herby beer from foraged leaves was too tempting. And when Fiona Falconer, from Wild About Food Ltd, mentioned a nettle beer we decided to have a go.

Blackcurrants are famous for packing a load of vitamin C, and they are just coming into season. Blackcurrant leaves are also edible, making a nourishing and delicious tea. Our nettles were mostly gone to seed – apart from one patch where we have been continuously picking – so it seemed like a good idea to mix the two, and make what turned out to be scrumptious brew.

To call itself a real beer, the drink should be malted. This one isn't, but then our version isn't really a real beer. This is fruity, fizzy herb drink that should be quaffed before the bottles begin to explode.

Another way to enjoy the taste of blackcurrant leaves, is to simply infuse them in boiling water to make a tea.

Blackcurrant Leaf and Nettle Beer

1 plastic shopping bag stuffed full of nettle tops. (At this stage you will need to be picking from a patch consistently to stop them going to seed. Once gone to seed it's too late to use them for this purpose. Cut them down and use the new shoots when they arrive again.)
½ a bag of blackcurrant leaves
8 L water
1kg sugar
the rind of 2 lemons
1 large piece of ginger
40g cream of tartar
1 teaspoons active yeast (for use in winemaking and brewing)

Place the washed nettles, blackcurrant leaves, ginger and the grated rind of the lemons into a large stockpot and add the water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about half an hour. Strain into a large clean food grade bucket, then pour back into the saucepan and add the sugar and cream of tartar. Heat again, stirring all the time until the sugar is dissolved. Pour back into the bucket and add the yeast. Leave the bucket in the kitchen for about four days and then pour the contents into bottles. The beer will be fizzy and ready to drink after another week. Make sure to use either plastic bottles, or special wire topped beer bottles, and don't wait forever until you drink it, because the mixture gets more volatile and explosive as the weeks go on. Serve chilled.

Meadowsweet

2012-07-08T04:31:00.000-07:00

"It helpeth speedily those that are troubled with the cholic being boiled in wine; and stayeth the flux on the belly".

It's funny that this arcane language, the language of the original herbalist Nicholas Culpeper, somehow aptly suits meadowsweet. To taste it is to taste history. Rather like looking at the faces painted by Rembrandt – faces that you never see looking out at you from the glossy pages of Hello – this flavour seems to come from an ancient species, one from which modern flavours have developed.

Meadowsweet, along with water mint and vervain, were three sacred Druidic herbs. This is the plant of Chaucer, of Culpeper, a plant of the 14th-16th century. Mead and marzipan are the only modern foods that taste any way similar, and mead and marzipan are not especially modern! Meadowsweet is certainly sweet, and has a heady scent that attracts bees. Walking along a country road and identifying the smell of meadowsweet is one of life's pleasures.

In more recent history, meadowsweet has been a useful and productive plant. It is the plant that gave its name to asprin, and was the original painkiller.

Making a cordial is a good way to express its flavour. You can dry the flowers and use to flavour a mayonnaise, or sprinkle over yogurt. The flavour compliments gooseberries and a breakfast of gooseberries stewed with meadowsweet, with yogurt sprinkled with meadowsweet flowers makes a beautiful summer breakfast.

Meadowsweet cordial/syrup

1 litre water
1k sugar
about 12 meadowsweet flowerheads
2 lemons & 1 lime

Shake the meadowsweet to remove any insects. Pour the water and sugar into a saucepan. Grate in the zest from the lemons and limes and heat, stirring as it comes to a boil and the sugar dissolves. Pour the hot syrup over the meadowsweet and leave overnight.

The next morning, strain the syrup and add the citrus juice. Bottle into clean sterile bottles, and store in the fridge once opened.

Gooseberries with Meadowsweet

2 punnets (about 450g) gooseberries
¾ cup meadowsweet syrup
½ cup water

Top and tail the gooseberries and place in a saucepan with the syrup and water. Bring to the boil and then turn off the heat.

Meadowsweet Mayonnaise

½ cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon rapeseed oil
1 tablespoon dried meadowsweet flowers

Beat the oil into the mayonnaise, and then stir in the flowers. Leave for an hour for the flavours to infuse.

Flavoured Salt

2012-07-02T03:36:00.000-07:00

“Historically, the salt trade has often been controlled by kings on the grounds that minerals are a product of the earth, not of men.” (Harold McGee)

There used to be a time when chefs also behaved like kings when it came to using salt. Nico Ladenis and Marco Pierre White led the way in the Eighties, banning salt from the table, believing that they knew better than their customers at judging how a dish should be seasoned.

Nico “softened” in this attitude, according to his then Head Chef, Paul Flynn, and Marco, well, Marco now advertises Knorr stock cubes. Enough said.

The chef who has probably best described our use of salt in cooking and at the table is Thomas Keller. In the LA Times: “In the kitchen it’s helpful to separate the concept of ‘seasoning’ from that of ‘enhancing flavour’”.

Salt should do both, but they are separate objectives.

Keller expands his thoughts on seasoning in The French Laundry Cookbook: "The ability to salt food properly is the single most important skill in cooking." (Phew!) "But if you taste salt in a dish, it's too salty".

We’ve started making flavoured salts. We use them to season, rather than intensify flavour. We started making them because we wanted to put more seaweed in our diet. Seaweed, nettles, chillies and seeds are all full of nutrients, as well as flavour. They season like salt, and reduce our reliance on pure sodium. Funnily enough though, it is pepper that has suffered, almost vanishing from this household. Again, Keller writes: "Pepper should only be used in certain cases for specific tastes. Pepper on meat is a constant, but pepper on fish can be overwhelming (I'll use white, if any)."

The flavoured salts pictured above are intended more as a garnish, a condiment. Pictured from left to right are pepper dulse and garden fennel seed salt - good for fish, egg and potato dishes; nettle and kelp salt - for casseroles and soups; evaporated sea salt - pure from seawater, full of goodness and mineral flavour; red salt with chilli, red seaweed and sesame seeds - great for rubs and barbecues.

Cured Mackerel

2012-06-25T04:50:00.000-07:00

When you get mackerel this fresh your best option is to not cook it. And there are plenty of ways not to cook mackerel. You could go the Japanese route and make Sashimi. Sashimi means “pierced body” and dates back to a time when it was inauspicious for anyone other than a Samurai to portion your fish.

Sashimi is usually served with soy sauce and wasabi paste, along with some pickled ginger. When we're out fishing, we usually take along a tube of wasabi and a bottle of soy sauce, in hope. And there’s often a potential Samurai warrior in the party who will gut and slice.

Ceviche is another way of not cooking fish. This time the fish is cured in citrus juice. This method spans a large part of the southern hemisphere, often adding a hot chile base to the juice.

Cold smoking is another way of preparing fish without heat, but for this particular batch of mackerel we opted for a northern hemisphere recipe, and prepared the fish the Swedish way, marinating it in salt and sugar. We made two versions of this Gravad Mackerel - one with elderflower and the other with bog myrtle.

Preparing the Mackerel:
Gut and fillet the mackerel, but leave the skin on. Slice away the fine bones at the belly of the fish, then cut either side of the central pin bones, and remove the central bones in one piece.

Mackerel marinated with Elderflower


Bog myrtle cured Mackerel with scrambled egg, herb robert flowers

Curing the Fish:

Place six fillets of mackerel, skin side down, into a container that will fit all six comfortably. Sprinkle over the salt, pepper and sugar and then pack with the herbs. Top with the remaining six fillets, this time skin-side-up, and essentially reforming the fish with a herb stuffing. Place a small chopping board on the fish and weigh down with a bag of flour. Marinate for two to three days, turning each re-formed fish, morning and evening. To serve, remove the herbs, scrape off the seasonings and cut into very thin slices.

Elderflower Cured Mackerel

6 fillets of ultra fresh mackerel
4 tablespoons sea salt
2 tablespoons caster sugar
6 sprigs of elderflower in full bloom
liberal grinding of white pepper

Bog Myrtle and Fennel, Brown Sugar Cured Mackerel

6 fillets of ultra fresh mackerel
4 tablespoons sea salt
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
liberal grinding of black pepper
6 sprigs of bog myrtle
6 sprigs of fennel

Note: you can find bog myrtle in most boggy places in Ireland. It is the only thing that grows to any sort of height in a bog, and has a very distinctive fresh pine-like smell which repels insects.

I found the idea for the Bog Myrtle Cured Mackerel in Alan Davidson’s scholarly North Atlantic Seafood, from which this classic dill sauce also derives. I shall quote the passage from the book, it was just a footnote, but it gave us a good laugh:

“I found this recipe in the Skibereen [sic] area of Ireland; a region which has absorbed a number of alien ideas on cookery, and which used to have the only shop in the world for second-hand coffins (a result of the sinking of the Lusitania, the American relations of whose victims sent over American-style coffins to replace the hundreds which had been made locally). The herbs used for cured Carrigillihy mackerel are bog myrtle and fennel. Brown sugar and black pepper are employed instead of white. And the fish are ‘pressed between two congruent pieces of driftwood’”.

Alan Davidson’s Dill Sauce

4 tablespoons mustard
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1 tablespoon caster sugar
2 tablespoons white vinegar

Oil (see below)
Chopped Dill

Mix the first four ingredients together in a bowl, then – using a wire whisk – beat in, little by little, 6 tablespoons vegetable oil until you have a sauce of the consistency of mayonnaise. Into this stir 3 or 4 tablespoons chipped dill. This sauce can be prepared in advance and refrigerated, but should be rewhisked before being served.
If you are using fennel, substitute this in the sauce instead of dill.

Wild Rose Jelly and Wild Honeysuckle Icecream

2012-06-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Caitlin Ruth, chef of Deasy's in Ring, for the idea of making honeysuckle ice cream. Rose Jelly and Honeysuckle ice cream must surely represent the culinary equivalent of the Boden Catalogue.

Wild Honeysuckle Ice Cream

500g milk

250g cream

large handfuls of wild honeysuckle flowers

half a vanilla pod or 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

6 large egg yolks

100g caster sugar

The night before you make the ice cream, soak the wild honeysuckle in the milk, and also soak some in the cream. The next morning, strain but keep the milk and cream separate.

Heat the milk with the vanilla pod until just below boiling. Beat the egg yolks until creamy. Whisk a little of the hot milk into the egg and then beat in the remaining milk, little by little. Stir in the sugar and then pour into a saucepan and cook on a very low heat, or double boiler, stirring constantly, until the mixture coats the back of a wooden spoon. Don't overheat. When the mixture thickens, stir in the cream and then chill. Churn in an ice cream maker or freeze in a shallow box, stirring every couple of hours as it freezes.

Note: the honeysuckle flavour is subtle, add some pounded honeycomb crumbs if you want to emphasise it.

Wild Rose Jelly

250g pink or red or white rose petals
2 cups sugar
2 lemons
agar seaweed

Make sure you are collecting roses that haven't been sprayed. Carefully remove the petals from the plant and blow off any insects. Place in a large bowl. Add the sugar to the bowl and toss the petals in the sugar, bruising them as you do. When each petal is bruised and covered with sugar, cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave overnight.

The next day, add the lemon juice and 4 cups of water. Dissolve the sugar over a low heat, stirring. Bring to the boil, and simmer for about 15 minutes. Sieve the petals, leaving you with a pink liquid.

Measure the liquid and pour into a saucepan. For each cup of liquid, add one full tablespoon of agar flakes. Bring the mixture to a boil without stirring, then simmer for five minutes, stirring occasionally, until the flakes dissolve. Pour into a jug and set overnight in the fridge.

Sourdough Starter

2012-06-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

During the last week I have been absorbed by one of the most ancient and primitive forms of foraging – namely the capturing of minute fungal, single-celled, micro-organisms that are otherwise known as wild yeast.

Joe Ortiz in The Village Baker puts it like this: “Yeast, as a separate ingredient, is extremely new in the history of food. The first bread baker had, in effect, to capture what the French boulanger calls levure sauvage, wild yeast. That primitive ferment of flour and water was the only starter used for bread in antiquity and it is what we know today as sourdough starter, or leaven.”

Last month, in Inishfood, we had the joy of watching baker Thibault Peigne at work in a remarkable pop-up bakery staged in the centre of Harry’s Restaurant in Donegal. The taste of Tibo’s bread, and the words he spoke about bakeries in Ireland, rekindled a desire to make bread, which is something I haven’t done properly, since before my children were born. You can’t mother a child and mother a sourdough starter in my experience, but now my children have grown up, and they enjoy good bread too.

Thankfully none of our family have exhibited the gluten intolerance that is so rampant in Ireland. We noted it down when Tibo said the Chorleywood system, so endemic in Irish breadmaking, needs flour with the maximum amount of gluten, and 95% of bread in Ireland is supplied by the plant bakeries who use this system.

Could this be the reason why we have become so intolerant of this basic food? Tibot, who trained in Germany, answered No. This was not the full story. In order to make bread digestible we need worry not so much about the gluten, but more about the fermentation. Fermentation is necessary in order for our own digestive systems to be able to break it down.

Modern bread uses fast fermentation. “In factory bread, time is your enemy” explains Tibo.

So, back home in Cork, I set about trying to understand what happens as flour ferments and make a sourdough starter from which to ferment bread that would give us a healthy, delicious loaf.

I was extremely lucky here to receive the help and on-line guidance of David Semple. David is the bakery teacher at the Belfast Cookery School. He kindly sent me his course notes, and he was there, all week, at the other end of a twitter DM, when things looked shaky or confusing.

To make the classic sourdough bread, two things need to be present to kick-start the dough. These are wild yeast and lactobacilli. The pair have a symbiotic relationship that provide structure and taste to the finished loaf. The two cultures feed on the sugars in the flour, and convert the carbohydrates through the action of naturally occurring enzymes. Baker Andrew Whitley puts it like this: “Sourdough is an object lesson in co-operation, with its various constituents depending on, and not competing with, each other.”

This mixture of wild yeast and bacteria feast away on the sugars in the flour, breaking down the starches and producing, in the process, carbon dioxide. This gas becomes trapped in the strands of gluten and causes the dough to rise. The acid-producing, acid-tolerant bacteria, meanwhile, gives the dough flavour. And flavour also comes from alcohol, another byproduct of the chemical process. Meanwhile, the time it takes is what gives the bread texture. Joe Ortiz: “A piece of crusty pan ordinaire may be a spoon for your soup, but a slice of pain de campagne is like a plate.”

Here is David Semple’s recipe for a Sourdough Starter

1 cup strong white bread flour or rye flour
2 ½ cups Irish farm Apple Juice

Day 1- Whisk together to form a smooth thick batter; pour into a large plastic container or a ceramic pot with lid. Leave in a warm place away from direct heat for a day. (Do not put in a glass container that has fitted lid, as it has been known to explode)

Day 2 – The mix should have bubbles formed on top and have a slightly sour home brew sort of smell, give it a quick whisk and feed it with 1 cup of flour and 2 cups of water. Give it a whisk and leave aside again.

Day 3- Pour away ½ the mix and feed again, as above: the only reason to bin half the mix is that you will not have the space to grow such a big beast.

Day 4- Feed again as for day two and then leave for two days.

Day 6- by now your mix should be very active and have a slight fizzy taste to the tongue. It's time to start to make a loaf but I hope you’re not hungry because it takes a while, but it will all be worth it. You will need to continue to feed it about once a week, or less if you keep it in the fridge.

I followed this to the letter, and had a wonderful bubbling starter after five days. At one stage, I thought it wasn’t happening, and I put the starter in the car, which this week was the warmest place I could find. The little bit of gentle warmth did the trick, and the bubbles came.

Note: use a large container, and be prepared to dispose of extra starter. There will always be friends to take this from you, however, and this community spirit is very much in accordance with making sourdough. David, who is battling a brain tumour right now, suggests that with every bit of sourdough starter you hand out to your community, a donation could be made to a cancer organisation such as Brainwave, which seems more than appropriate.

Hawthorn

2012-06-02T03:15:00.000-07:00

"The Oak, the Ash and the Thorn", three enchanted trees in ancient folklore. And the Thorn, the smallest of the three is rich in legend.

The Thorn - Hawthorn is just one of its names - is a gnarled, stubbly tree that, whatever its age, never seems to reach its full growth potential. Wherever you choose to grow it, it's a tree you cannot tame. It always retains the spirit of the wild, bending with the prevailing wind, curling up around itself, protecting its centre. It is this defensive characteristic that has given it the herbalist signature of the Heart, and its leaves, flowers and berries have historically been used as a medicine to treat cardiac conditions.

The Hawthorn – also called Whitethorn and May Tree – has many stories to tell. In ancient times this was a tree of revelry and potency. A sacred tree that symbolised renewed life, fertility and union. It became our faerie tree, the shrub that we adorned with ribbons and rags and fragments of our clothing, a gift for the fairy folk that dwelled in the tree.

But then things changed for the Hawthorn. As puritanical religion took a stronger hold, the May Tree was no longer a symbol of joy and beginning. Instead it came to represent abandonment, misfortune and bad luck. No longer a symbol of revelry, it was used to promote abstinence and chastity. Marriages were forbidden during the hawthorn month of May.

The characteristics of Hawthorn are so different from that of the Birch. Where Birch is ever youthful, Hawthorn seems to have been born old and wise. Perhaps that’s why so many legends remain: Ne’er cast a clout till May be out … Hang May flowers in your barn to increase milk yield from your cows ... Carry one of its thorns in your pocket and you will catch more fish ... Don't use it to decorate your house, or death awaits ... Maybe it's this last prophecy that means we've never traditionally exploited Hawthorn in a culinary sense, despite the fact that it has a delightful nutty flavour. The berries, or Haws as they are called, have been used in jellies, but that's as far as it goes.

Time to change all that: at the recent Inishfood Donegal chefs' dinner Derek Creagh used a hawthorn essence and hawthorn flowers with a meaty terrine. Here is a way of capturing this vanilla almond flavour, but in a dessert.

You can eat this recipe at any stage - use the nutty milk on cereal, or drink it cold. Eat the yoghurt, have the yoghurt cheese with fruit, or go the full way and proceed to the cheesecake.

Hawthorn Yoghurt Cheesecake

Hawthorn Milk:

Macerate 2L of milk with some hawthorn blossoms over night. The next morning strain through muslin.

Hawthorn Yoghurt:

Place sieved the milk in a saucepan and heat until almost boiling. Add 2 tablespoons Marvel milk powder and stir well. Turn off the heat and let the milk cool, until it reaches about 45º, or until you can hold your hand in it for ten seconds without feeling uncomfortable. Keep stirring while you do this so the milk doesn’t form a skin. Finally, beat in a few drops of vanilla essence and 2 tablespoons fresh plain, unsweetened yoghurt. Wrap the bowl in a towel and keep overnight in a warm place.

Yoghurt Cheese:

Pour the yoghurt into a colander that has been double lined with muslin. Tie the edges of the muslin to make a bag and hang this bag over a bowl for about 4 hours. Use the whey that comes out to make bread.

Yoghurt Cheesecake:

Heat the oven to 140º C

150g digestive biscuits
100g butter
20g flaked almonds
2 eggs
2 tablespoons Amaretto
2 tablespoons honey
600g yoghurt cheese

Crush the biscuits and almonds with the softened butter and spread onto the base of an oiled, springform baking tin. Bake for 10 minutes in the oven to crisp.

Whisk the yoghurt with the Amaretto and honey. Then beat in the eggs. Pour the yoghurt mixture over the biscuit mix. Cover with foil and cook for 1 hour in the oven.

Cool, covered in the fridge, and then decorate with May flowers and almonds.

Quick Recipe:

Drain some bought yoghurt in muslin for 4 hours to make yoghurt cheese. Stir in amaretto, vanilla and honey to taste. Crush digestive biscuits with some softened butter. Press the biscuits into the bottom of a glass and layer with the yoghurt cheese and some good quality fruity jam – here we have used wild blueberry jam from the Clare Jam Co, which you can buy in Avoca. Decorate with hawthorn blossoms and flaked almonds.

Rose Vinegar

2012-05-29T02:08:00.000-07:00

Rosa Ragosa is in bloom again and we've been experimenting.

Rose buds in the dehydrator: the blooms faded to a Miss Haversham tatter. They kept their flavour but looked rather melancholy. Like a tossed wedding bouquet, or a shelved corsage. Drying them seemed to give them a lost past. I've put them in a jar, wondering what to do with them.

It’s funny how we talk about the smell of garlic, the smell of herbs, but it's always the scent of a rose. The scent of a rose is so compelling: warm, lavish, satisfying, engaging, delighting.

We don’t understand how to take advantage of the rose in a culinary sense here in Europe. In Middle Eastern cooking it is much more prevalent. All roses are edible.

Rose Vinegar

I came across this recipe by accident – no worry, that’s how the best recipes are found. I was trying out a recipe from the NOMA Cookbook for pickled roses. I left the jar overnight in the kitchen, but next morning found it was too big to go in the fridge. So I decanted the contents to a smaller jar, and found I had some vinegar left over.

After only twelve or so hours, the vinegar in which the roses were steeping had changed completely. The colour had gone from white to a pale pink, and the vinegar had absorbed so much of the rose scent. It was wonderful.

We’ll see if the pickling of rose petals works, but never mind if it doesn’t. I'm happy enough to have discovered rose vinegar. Use it in salads and you’ll be astonished.

Barley Salad with Rose Vinaigrette

200g pearl barley
3 tablespoons rose vinegar
60mls olive oil
pinch of allspice
½ clove of garlic, finely chopped
salt and pepper
handfuls of fresh dill, parsley, chives, all finely chopped
chive flowers
2 carrots, peeled and grated

Rinse the barley and simmer in water for approximately 30 minutes, when it will have softened and puffed up.

In the bottom of a large bowl, mix together the rose vinegar, the olive oil, allspice and finely chopped garlic, salt and pepper. Drain the barley (keep the barley water to drink) and toss in the bowl with the vinegar mixture. When thoroughly mixed add the herbs and grated carrots.

Sea Grass and Lemon Butter

2012-05-24T07:08:00.003-07:00

These photos were taken at the Inishfood Coastal Forage session as part of the Donegal Festival.

Long after our audience had gone, Enda McEvoy, Mickey McCoy, John, myself and a few equally dedicated stragglers were still on the beach cooking limpets over the Kelly Kettle, opening rock oysters and showing a marked reluctance to leave the lovely coastal environment of Inishowen and beautiful Linsfort beach.

Here is the recipe for the butter we tasted along with Thibault Peigne's profound loaf of sourdough bread. The butter was also good on the grilled limpets. (The photo above was taken by Thibault).

Seagrass is flourishing on Irish beaches right now. It's easy to spot, at the top of the tidal zone, it's bright green, looks like grass and has a long-lasting flavour.

Seagrass and Lemon Butter

250g butter
handful sea grass
tablespoon very finely diced red seaweed (dilisk, nori or Atlantic wakame)
zest of 1 lemon
juice of half a lemon

Blend.

Thanks to Alan and Brid Rooks from Linsfort Castle, and Darren Bradley for welcoming us to their beach.