megabites

• Ramsons, risotto and Rowley Leigh

  March 31, 2009 @ 2:31 pm | by Tom

  Just a reminder that the wild garlic - or ramsons - that flourishes all over the country is at its most gloriously pungent at this stage, just before flowering. I made one helluva risotto with it yesterday. Esentially, just make a risotto in the normal way but skip the veg. Throw in a glass of dry white wine and use good chicken stock. The wild garlic leaves cook down to nothing so you will need four great big fistfuls at least. Chop them coarsely and dump them in when the rice is just done, followed by industrial quantities of Parmesan and a very large knob of butter. You can justify the extravagance because the main ingredient is free. Take the pan off the heat, cover and leave for 3 minutes before dishing up. Bliss… I don’t know how I could reduce those simple guidelines to a Twitter message but that giant among chefs, Rowley Leigh, has done this for his seductive Parmesan custards which he likes to serve with anchovy toasts. 

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• Save your brassicas!

  @ 11:55 am | by Tom

  For the past two years my cabbages, sprouts and broccoli have flourished for a month or so only to wilt suddenly just as the cabbage root fly larvae get going. So depressing is this that I’ve been contemplating a new location for the vegetable garden. But there may be a solution! I don’t mean drenching the soil with Jeyes Fluid (which is neither “organic”, nor pleasant, nor, odd as it may seem, strictly legal), a tactic I’ve employed only in desperation. No, it seems that if you sow some clover with your brassicas (just a couple of seeds in each module), this companion planting will offer considerable protection against attack. This means that I can defer the back-breaking work of sowing all my brassica crops until I manage to get hold of some clover seeds. Whoopee! Download the research report here.

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• Random musings: pork and growing your own

  March 30, 2009 @ 9:49 pm | by Tom

  Marks and Spencer are selling outdoor-bred pork (the stuff I bought comes from Scotland) and I’m struck by the quality. Last time I cooked pork fillet with cream and grain mustard, a lazy but potentially lovely dish, I used the Irish version. The butcher from whom I bought the meat, a man who can tell you the field in which your piece of beef has been grown, explained “all I can tell you is that it’s Irish”. So much for the much vaunted traceability. Anyway, the Irish pork shrank to oblivion and produced a vast amount of liquid in the pan. The resulting dish was about as attractive as Brylcreem with bits. The Scottish version did not shrink, produced no liquid and was very tasty indeed. Well done, Marks & Sparks. They also do very pleasant belly pork for slow roasting. On a different note, Hackett’s in Dublin’s Capel Street tell me that they have never sold so many seed potatoes and vegetable seeds. This is great news and it’s reflected throughout the country. But anyone who worries about the problems of growing their own with severely limited space will be encouraged by a website run by a computer science graduate student called Ronan. He grows as much as he can on the balcony of his Dublin apartment. 

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• Beers to soothe the savage breast

  March 26, 2009 @ 11:46 pm | by Tom

  I think I would have become very cross indeed today had I not been distracted by the pleasant duty of helping to adjudicate the Irish Craft Brewing Awards. I started the day in a lather of fury at the idea that I live in a country in which the Garda Siochana are expected to crack down on an artist who has been responsible for at least 90% of the mirth experienced by citizens in the last week. As distinct from the fat cats who are responsible for an even greater proportion of the gloom.But enough of that. Messrs Maguire’s astonishing Bock beer, which won the Michael Jackson Memorial Award, was enough to drive away all evil thoughts. A dark, multilayered drink of utterly joyous complexity, this stuff would bring a smile to the face of poor Brian Lenihan and could turn George Lee into a brilliant exponent of stand-up comedy.Incidentally, the Michael Jackson mentioned above is the lesser known one of that name, a great English beer and whiskey writer who died far too young. I like to think that his spirit guided us judges today…  

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