Yannick and Louise at the Mugshot Cafe

Restaurants and food play a big part in my life, working full time in a restaurant and spending quite a fair amount of time cooking and eating out in my spare time. This has meant that in my head, I have complied a Bucket List of restaurants in my head, mostly for simply hearing about how amazing there are. Having lived in Copenhagen for a year (living the Erasmus college dream by going to college very rarely and working full time in an Irish bar) Noma is one of such restaurants. In fact, it is possibly number one on the list. So naturally, when I found out that Yannick Van Aeken and Louise Bannon were hosted a pop up restaurant in Mugshot cafe in Kilkenny as part of Savour Kilkenny, I jumped at the opportunity to go, and it also meant bringing Dearly Old Dad out for a meal, a very new concept for both of us! 

On arriving we were greeted by Aoghan, Manger of the Mugshot cafe, and such a lovely man he was. Unfortunately, due to my direct booking with Louise herself, there was some confusion with the actually booking. It very almost looked like our night was over before it began, but thanks to some switching and changing, Aoghan and Paul managed to organise us sitting on a bit of a communal table, the perfect way to spend what was to be a bit of a long meal! We settled ourselves down and proceed to get to know the five course menu, with everything from trout to rib eye beef. Another small mention has to go to Elena Montes who designed the menus. Beautifully simple, and some fabulous drawings. (I managed to nab myself an Elderflower to take home!)

And so the food started to come out, beer champagne began to flow and the inner food critic came out in DOD. Beer champagne just wasn't for me, having a definite liquorice or fennel after tone, but the snacks I could definitely get on board with! The best Black Pudding I've ever eaten (blood sausage to the more discerning foodie!) and my first taste of foie gras on what tasted like fennel and ginger bread was absolutely fabulous. However, the best was yet to come. 

Goatsbridge Trout served with creme fraiche, trout caviar and fermented Icelandic kelp. Even now, thinking about this dish, I'm hungry. It was just so beautifully simple, and fresh. Even talking to the owners of Goatsbridge, we found out that the trout was caught that morning and brought straight down to Kilkenny for the meal. With this starting off the meal, my hopes ever certainly extremely high. The next course however, I knew would be a struggle! 

Bone Marrow pipe with oven baked beets. While this dish looked visually stunning, it just wasn't for me. While bone marrow is seen as a delicay in Belgium, Yannicks home, for me, it was just to much of a strange texture, oily and fatty all at once. However, the beets were lovely, with a slightly salted exterior and a beauitfully deep red center. 

After a long wait, the Rib eye came. Cooked extremely rare (just how I like it), covered in eldercapers, some lovely baby potatoes and salad, the main was very tasty. However, I found it a bit boring, as tasty as it was. This was something that you could very easily make at home for your own dinner and it definitely wasn't something I expected. However, if the only flaw that I could find that was the main course was a bit normal, that definitely says a lot about the skill that these two chefs have in the kitchen!

It was cheese next, and Knockdrinna O'Hara's beer cheese, a lovely example of two Irish producers coming together and making a really tasty product. However, at this stage it was half twelve, after arriving at Mugshot at eight, I was slightly flagging. We decided to wait for dessert and quickly skip town then, having to drive back to Portlaoise that night. Well let me tell you, I would wait for that dessert four times longer if I had to. Like the trout appatiser it was fresh and beautiful, thinly sliced apples on top of a buttermilk sobert with the tinest tang of liquroice and pine. Something that I genuinely was unsure about before I tasted it, but my god, I have been converted. 

All in all, it was a top class meal. Nothing over the top and thanks to the long waits between courses, I wasn't overly stuffed afterwards. However, it was the long waits that also killed it for me. However, coming from restaurant experience, trying to cooked for 55 people all at once, which two people in the kitchen, it can be seriously hard going and I have to hand it to them, it was a beautiful meal. I must say a quick thanks again to Aoghan and Paul for sorting us out with somewhere to sit when they had a waiting list of over one hundred and twenty people and to Sean O hArgain, who was brilliant company and got Dear Old Dad talking about some great characters from Trinity's past! From one meal, it was clear to see that Savour Kilkenny is coming on in leaps and bounds and I am most certainly looking forward to next year and exploring all it has to offer!

 Credit where credit is due! (Twitter Accounts)
Yannick and Louise
Mugshot Cafe
Paul O'Connor
Savour Kilkenny
Elena Mortes
Sean O'hArgain

Apple Crumble (not at all) like Mama used to make..

Apple crumble. The modern version of the apple tart, something that every Irish Mammy has a recipe for, or at least was made bake in Home Economics about twenty times! This is something that my Irish Mammy taught me how to bake from when I was quite small, about seven or eight. I even have pictures of it, how cute am I... However, time moves on and Spanish, who lives with me in Dublin, loves her crumble! Because of all the apples that I had after coming home from Portlaoise, I thought the only rational thng to do is make a quick crumble.

Ingredients

• Apples! (I like to use a good few, this time around I used some softer ones that had been picked from a neighbours tree, but cooking apples tend to give it that extra tartness!)
• 4oz Flour
• 1oz porriage oats
• 5oz of sugar, plus a bit more for the apples
• 6oz of cold butter, chopped up into small pieces

1. So I started off first by cleaning all the apples in some cold water and then chopping them into segments. Generally I would peel them and then segment them, but because of the beautiful colours of the skin, I chose to leave them on this time! (Plus, in a moment of "'I've been cooking all day madness", it wasn't until I had half of them chopped that I thought about the skins!) 
2. Pop these into your casserole dish and sprinkle very liberally with sugar. I didn't use too much as the apples I used were quite sweet, but when using cooking apples, they definitely need a fair amount of sugar.
3. The next thing is your crumble. Now what I like to do with this is bung the whole lot in a mixing bowl, which would be flour, butter, sugar and oats and just get my hands in there! I'm not sure the technical term for this is, but basically rub the dry ingredients into the butter til you get something with a consistency of breadcrumbs. This happens much easier with cold butter, cold hands, and a light touch, but of course, none of those things are at all required, so do go holding pieces of ice in order to cool the hands down!  
4. Then clean off your mucky hands and spread the crumble on top of the apples, and into the oven it goes at 180 degrees until the crumble is  golden brown and the fruit is bubbling! 

As you may have noticed, there is no finished product picture... This is because I took the dish out of the oven with a wet tea towel, which of course, got very hot very quickly, and I proceeded to drop the dish on top of the cooker, resulting in one broken casserole dish and an apple crumble that needed to be saved. So while this is not the most professional of pictures, at least you get an idea of all the many things that can go wrong when baking!

 

Pink Hummus

This is just about the girliest hummus you could ever make.. The beautiful pink colour that the beetroot gives it can range from a deep grown up burgundy to Telly Tubby pink, but regardless of colour, the taste off of this has been a firm favourite in our house. It comes out for every family dinner, from paella to baked cod and it seems to go with everything! However, a personal favourite to do with this is a big plate of chopped veg and a bag of Lidl's Roasted Vegetable crisps and curling up watching a DVD. Definitely a healthy option for Monday night nibbles!  (Plus it takes only minutes to make!)

Ingredients

• 4 beetroots, vacuum packed are perfect, but because of the availability of the fresh ones from Irish Mammy's garden, I went the long route!
• 1 tin of chickpeas
• 1 lemon
• Olive oil
• Garlic, I tend to use 3 cloves, but this is truely a personal option, add more or less as wanted!
• Tahini paste (100% optional, I only found this recently and while it does add a nice extra flavour, it is definitely not an essential for this)

So with this there are a few optional steps, namely getting the fresh beets ready for hummus-ing! So I'll go through these first and then get on with the rest of it! 

1. First step is finding those lovely fresh beetroots in the midst of all the flowers in the garden.. (Yes, you guessed it, this is just a step to post this picture.. )
   
2. Next wash off all the dirt and make sure they are really clean!
3. Get rid of all that extra stuff, roots and leaves namely, til you are left with some lovely beety balls! (yummy, now that's a description you won't find in Delia Smith!)
4. Preheat the oven to about 200 degrees and wrap up your beets in some tin foil. I found that if I twisted the top, not too tightly, that it was a really handy way of taking them out of the oven to check on them without burning my hands! 
5. Then into the oven with them for about an hour or so, but check after about 40 minutes. You know they are ready when a knife can cut through them really easily! This is also one of the ONLY times you'll want your food to look like shrunken heads. They seriously aren't pretty, but oh so tasty! 
6. Leave them to cool down and then its time to peel! I found that the skin peeled off quite easily, but if in trouble, a veg peeler can some in very handy! (Prepare yourself for some very serial killer looking hands!) 

And that's the prep of the beetroots done! Next onto the easy part, the hummus!

1. This is pretty much one step. Two steps if you wanna get crazy! So firstly, chop up the beetroot, and pop it into a bowl, grate some garlic (personally, I go for four cloves) into the bowl as well. Drain the chickpeas and pop those in too. Then cut your lemon in half and squeeze half in, keeping the other half for later. I put a half of a soup spoon of tahini into this, but that is always optional, and then three tablespoons of olive oil. DONE! 
2. All you do now is get your blender and wizz it all up to your desired consistency and there you have it, that is literally it! 

 Super easy to make, super delicious, and super healthy too! We tend to make this with big dinners and salad, but the best way to eat this is with a few beers, some crisps and good friends! (Side note, this was eaten while carving pumpkins, something none of us had done in years! Look at how cute they are!)

Outdoor lunch... in October?!

So this time last week, it was a beautiful October day, so far away from the awful weather that we've been having the last few days! So myself and Miss Awkward decided that as a treat we'd head down to the Mespil Food Market for some eats. I knew a bit about this, having used to work right around the corner, but since it was a restaurant, we would always be in the middle of service when the market was in full swing, and once three o clock would roll around, the market would be gone as quickly as it appeared, and I'd be left with the decision of going to Searsons or the Chinese for my lunch!



However, this Thursday, we got down in time to sample their wares. There is food from every part of the globe, from bratwurst to paella to curry's. There is even a cupcake stall, one of the only sweet foods available, who seemed to be making a killing with the office workers looking to soothe a sweet tooth! After a quick walk around, Miss Awkward went for a chicken and chorizo paella and I, being unable to pass by a falafel stand, went for a falafel wrap with chilli sauce. We ate sitting down on a park bench, watching the world go by. It being such a beautiful day, there was a great buzz around the place and plenty of people watching to be done!

But the food. There is always something different about food eaten outside, and most definitely eating outside in October, wrapped up in woolly jumpers! My wrap was perfect, lots of falafel, plenty of salad, but definitely not enough hot chilli for me. However, that's just a matter of asking for more next time! And for a fiver, it think it was brilliant value, it kept me full until dinner time, which in a waitressing world, is ten o clock that night! Awkward's paella was lovely, as I got to eat this as my dinner later on in work, reheated with a little bit of Tabasco, and it was just as good as eating it outside!






So the long and short of it, if you are around Mespil Food Market, try it out, leave your office desk for the 15 minutes, and grab some proper, cooked food rather than a limp readymade sandwich!

For more details

Mespil Road Gourmet Food Market - Thursdays 11am-3pm

Mespil Road (opposite Mespil Hotel) Dublin 4 Ireland


Contact: Des Vallely - 01 284 1197 www.irishvillagemarkets.com info@irishvillagemarkets.com

Back to the Home Land.

This week I took a much needed trip back to the family homestead, to see the Irish Mammy and a few of the assorted aunties and most importantly, the Great Aunt. It was a quick trip home, only getting home after blagging myself off early in work. (Budget Day and going out for dinner, not two things that generally go hand in hand) One of the best things that I find about going home to visit, especially the last few months, has been all of the beautiful food that has been growing in my parents garden. Everything from the biggest courgettes I've ever seen, to a massive chilli pepper plant in the green house, their garden has absolutely flourished this year.



Growing things is something that I loved as a young child. I had begging my parents for years to grow tomatoes, even to get chickens, as my cousins just across the road had a large green house and garden, with chickens, that was put into my care for two weeks of the summer every year. This was back when Irish summers were long, hot and balmy, and some of my fondest memories are of putting the chickens into the coop at dusk and that distinctive smell of tomato plant leaves as I was watering the green house. I think it was these good memories that gave me my love for natural produce, organic and home grown! However, it was a couple of years until my parents actually did go after and convert some of our garden into a kitchen garden. What started out as one box has steadily grown into three planter boxes, a green house, a hedge grow of pea's and bean's and a large row of raspberry bushes. They even had a sunflower that had forty blooms this year! If that's not a record, I'll be very surprised!

After a very severe rain all morning, the sun came out just in time for me to take some pictures! This particular trip home I got the largest courgette I've ever seen, which was used for pickling, some beautiful beetroot's, which will be used for hummus in a later recipe, some chilli peppers, which have gone into the freezer to be made into chilli oil later on, and some apples which actually came from a patient of Irish Mammy who couldn't pick them himself, which were made very successfully into a crumble.





As much as I would love my own garden in Dublin, it just isn't possible. Having very little space is a huge problem, as is not knowing if you will be living in the same house come June! However, for my birthday, the house mates bought me a little magic bean which I have since planted and is growing happily on my window sill. What it will be, I'm not really sure, but for now, I'm just happy to have a little bit of outdoor inside with me! 

Courgette Pickle

I know what you are thinking.. She's put up two recipes and both are based on courgettes. And you'd be dead right, they are one of my favourite vegtables, from soups to salads to pickles, they taste good no matter what. It also helps that Mam and Dad's garden seems to have the perfect soil for them as they grow so so big. Check out my blog later this week for my haul from their garden, leading to me coming back to Dublin and spending the entire evening in the kitchen!

Pickle is something I've always been on board with, its sweet with a tangy after taste.. I would eat pickles all day if I could. But in the spirit of somewhat saving money and trying something new, I found the biggest courgette that I could from the family garden and brought it back up to Dublin with me. I had gotten the idea from a Jamie Oliver cookbook and also from a forkful video and had decided to put it into play. While it is now a waiting game to see how it turns out, judging simply by what smells were floating around the house as I made it, this will be fucking delicious!

Ingrediants

4 small Courgettes or one really huge one!

500mls of any kind of nice vinegar, I used White Wine vinegar.

150gms Caster Sugar

Garlic

Ginger

Mustard Seeds

Dried Chillis

Salt 

Jug of Iced Water

1. So my first move was to cut up the courgette as thin as possible. Try your best not to slit your fingers open while doing it , I most certainly came close a few times! 
2. Lay the courgette into your tray or bowl, whatever suits and sprinkle with about two tablespoons of salt. Then pour over your iced water and let it sit for about an hour. Relax! Go to the shop, have a bitch with your house mate, plan a trip to London. Everything is possible! (Within the space of an hour, these are genuinely all things I did!)
3. One important thing to do during your hour, and takes five minutes, is to make the actually pickling juice itself! This is simply grating the garlic and ginger and adding the vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds, chillis and your grated items in a saucepan and bringing it up to simmer for about 5 minutes. Leave this to then cool.
4. Next pour out all the water and start to get a little bored. The Forkful recipe says to pat all the slices of courgette very dry with kitchen paper. The Ger method says to this to a few pieces, get distracted and then shove all the slices into the jars! 
5. Then the easiest part, pour the juice into each jar, pop a lid on and put it in the fridge! They will be ready to use within a few hours, but will only get better with time as the vinegar properly infuses into the courgette, making it soft and tangy.

And thats it! I'll post again once I've tried and tested, even with a recipe using them, but for now, I'm giving them their time for the vinegar and courgette to become best friends and soon, the best burger/hot dog topping will be mine! 

Introduction

So I've started a blog. Yet I've just completely thrown up a recipe without any introduction to myself. Rude, I dare say! I suppose I should begin at the start.

My name is Ger Kavanagh, and I am an addict.

Yes, you read that right, an addict. I have been cooking and baking since I was learning to walk around my very Irish Mammys kitchen. Irish Mammy had been taught by Irish Granny, whose, to this day, jam tarts recipe has been unable to be remade since she passed away. Luckily Irish Granny passed on her cold hands and warm heart to Irish Mammy which was then passed to me, beginning a line of fairly good pastry makers! Irish Mammy taught me everything, from her family famous Butterfly Buns to every different type of fruit crumble.

However, there is also a Dad to think about here, Mr Active. Mr Active spent his twenties travelling around the world, visiting everywhere from Israel to Italy and came home with a very good appreciation for food and drink of other cultures. While Irish Mammy inspired my baking, it was definitely Mr Active who taught me to always try something new, even if it looked hard or you didn't particularly like some of the ingredients. The odd time Mr Active would take to cooking, it would be picked out of whatever cook book had taken his eye and a recipe he had back in '94 in a restaurant in a small village in the back-arse of nowhere in Italy! Expensive ingredients would be bought, many times to only ever be used for this one recipe, and the process would being, myself and him pouring over the recipe. Long wait times could often end up in Mr Active becoming bored, and myself taking over the kitchen, something that from about the age of ten I relished!

Living at home, being in the kitchen was a big part of my life. Whether it was trying to escape study for the Leaving Cert by baking a cake to family Sunday dinners, there was always a reason to be in there.

Then college came. Lets just say that while in First Year, I was head chef in the house and the others were in charge of cleaning. However, it was definitely very basic college food, yet all vegetarian. Stir frys, chilli with Quorn mince, frozen pizzas, you name it, we had it.

In the last couple of years, it is definitely fair to say I grew up. I've graduated from college, I've lived in Copenhagen by myself for a year, I've held down two full time jobs and am now being taught the ropes of being a supervisor in a restaurant. However, I think I could tell from day one that the waitress world is not for me, more so as a stop gap. While I have never learnt so much in the last year to do with food or wine, I have definitely pushed my body to the limit. Being told if you don't slow down, you'll end up in hospital while in the middle of a manically busy Christmas period in a restaurant that has just opened  is one thing. Trying to complete Final Year exams at the same time is another!

But I got through it and working in restaurants has only helped in making me want to learn more and more. I use going out for lunch or dinner as "research", when really all I want to do is be part of that experience that I work in on a daily basis. Thanks to this new-found knowledge, I've had some amazing meals this year, top of the list being my graduation dinner in Chapter One, an absolute Bucket List restaurant for myself. Yet, the cooking still calls me back. I want to know more, I want to be able to put flavours together that make you think. And most of all, I want to be able to look at our sometimes very sparse fridge and go, cool, I can make a dinner out of that for five girls, one of those being unable to eat meat, dairy or gluten! (Yes, Miss Annie, I'm talking about you!)


So this will be my outlet for that. I'm still not 100% sure what it is going to be yet, but expect reviews, recipes and ramblings.

Ger

Soundtrack

The gas heating come on for the first time this year, the kettle boiling and my computer trying to keep itself warm. Winter is most certainly coming!