A little history of Irish food

I still have the January blues but I am perking up greatly at the thought of starting Regina Sexton’s short course in UCC tomorrow: A little history of Irish food. Regina, Ireland’s leading food historian, will take us through the eating habits of the Irish over the past 10,000 years. Food and social history all wrapped up together – it couldn’t be more up my alley. I’m looking forward to learning plenty and meeting a few kindred souls. Be sure and say Hi if you are going too.

A Lidl bit foolish…

Like a lot of people, I am busy engaging in a January economy drive. My economy drives don’t happen very often and never last very long. Still, now that I’m a freelancer, I have to conserve what little cash I have. So for the first time in two years, I headed off to Lidl a couple of days ago.

I’m not terribly sure why I bothered. Lidl is cheap, which is good because I’m skint. Lidl is cheap, which is bad because I have a heartfelt horror of cheap food. So I end up standing there gawping in entranced amazement at 19c tins of beans and then recoiling at the thought of all the awfulness that must be in 19c tins of beans.

In the end, I spent €47.52 on 22 items. Then I went to Tesco to buy the things that I just couldn’t bring myself to buy in Lidl, like wholemeal flour, free-range eggs, sugar, potatoes and so on. I realised as I trotted up and down the aisles that plenty of things I had bought in Lidl were the same price as in Tesco, including sunflower oil, Nutella (I know but eating it out of the jar is one of my vices) and salad cream (I know but the husband likes it).

The best way to eat cheaply, of course, is to make as much as possible from scratch but I don’t have the time or the inclination to make bread rolls on a daily basis.  Maybe compromising the best way I can is the most realistic approach to take.

PS: A friend of the husband’s always refers to salad cream as “mayonnaise for knackers”. Horribly politically incorrect, I know, but it always makes me laugh. I’m a bad person.

Tartare sauce: cheat’s version

While I wasn’t cooking sweet potatoes, I was cooking other stuff. I had some lovely plaice today (from Kay O’Connell’s, of course. I’m the third generation to buy fish there, which I like). Anyway, was leafing through cookbooks wondering what to serve with it and spotted Delia’s recipe for Tartare Sauce, which basically involved mayonnaise, 2 heaped tblsp gherkins, 2 heaped tblsp capers and 1 level tblsp parsley.

I do like making mayonnaise but I had no eggs so I dug out the Hellman’s, mixed in the various bits and bobs (half the amount she recommended – there are only two of us) and it was delicious.

Sweet potato update…sort of

Two recommendations (thanks Haydn and Lloyd) to roast them in the oven with the skins on and do you think I’ve gotten around to it yet? Of course not. It will happen in the next day or two…

I was also tempted by this recipe for Baked Garlic Sweet Potatoes, which I thought would be nice with lamb. Actually, I don’t know which I like more: the recipe or the fact that there is a North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission.

Learning to love sweet potatoes

I need to get back to this low-GI diet I’m supposed to be on so took a baby step yesterday by buying sweet potatoes instead of normal potatoes. Potatoes are high-GI and sweet potatoes are not, apparently.

It’s embarrassing to admit but I’ve never bought a sweet potato in my life before. “Do you know what it is?” I asked the husband, waving a raw, peeled sweet potato at him. “A carrot?” he responded hopefully. “No? Maybe a turnip?”

Anyway, I didn’t really know what to do with it so chopped it into chunks, drizzled those with olive oil and sprinkled over sea salt and black pepper and baked the lot for 45 mins at 200C. They were nice if unexciting. Soft and sweet and slightly caramelised around the edges.

There are five more sweet potatoes downstairs and I need to find something to do with them that will go with lamb chops tonight. Something that will render them a little more tasty, ideally. Time to hit Google…I will report back.

The Corkonian love of spiced beef

Yes, I know Christmas is over and the time to talk about spiced beef was really weeks ago but I’ll never remember to post this tale next December so here goes. A friend of mine was telling me on New Year’s Eve about the lengths she went to so she could have a taste of home in Australia on Christmas Day.

Like me, she’s from Cork and if you’re from Cork, you have spiced beef as part of your Christmas dinner. Sure, you have turkey and ham like everyone else but you also have to have spiced beef. It’s a Cork thing.

My abiding memory of Christmas Eve will always be standing in my mother’s kitchen, chatting with the family, all of us shivering because she had the windows open as the smell of spiced beef cooking is truly rank. I couldn’t even eat it for years because the sight of it reminded me of the cooking smell, which immediately made me feel sick.

If you can get past that, spiced beef is just lovely – tender, salty and aromatic. We normally buy ours from the lovely Cork butcher O’Donovan’s (which sells it online if you’re having a belated hankering).

But my friend’s family always prepared their own, leaving it to marinate in a pot outside the back door for a week. As she pointed out the other night, however, it’s too hot in Australia in December to do that so she had to leave it in the fridge, something that did not best please her vegetarian Australian husband.

Far more hassle was getting a prescription for the saltpetre, necessary for making proper spiced beef but also employed as an ingredient in explosives. Anyway, she managed it all and was very happy to have spiced beef as part of her Ozzie Christmas dins. She used Darina Allen’s recipe. You’ll find it here but you’ll have to scroll down quite a bit.