Food file

Compiled by MARIE-CLAIRE DIGBY

Top food tweets

Elizabeth Hurley @ElizabethHurley: Am making a strawberry, heart shaped tart for pudding tonight. Will post pic when I’ve finished slaving over the creme patissiere.

April Bloomfield @AprilBloomfield: How excited am I to start my residency @stjohnhotel oct 30th, 31st. Cooking up @spottedpignyc classics with my friend@Mr_St_JOHN

Paul Flynn @paulflynnchef: Delighted to be working with @lidl_ireland. A great opportunity to promote Irish food from their range. Simple family recipes all the way.

Cliff House Hotel @CliffHouseHotel: No grumbles here. RT @Nash19Cork: @CliffHouseHotel any grouse in your part of the world? #GloriousTwelfth

Web watch: Ireland, Beijing and Sydney 

Julie O'Neill's son Shane lives in Beijing and her daughter Claire lives in Sydney, but rather than letting distance come between them, the three have engaged in a online interactive course in Chinese cookery, which forms part of Julie's excellent new blog, shananigansblog.com, under the tutelage of Shane's Chinese fiancee, Shan.

O’Neill, who retired as secretary general at the Department of Transport three years ago and now works as a freelance consultant, has been writing vivid, engaging blog posts about her quest to learn as much as she can about Chinese regional cooking. During a recent three-week visit to the country, she ate lots of very authentic home cooked meals with her prospective daugher-in-law’s family in Xinjiang province, as well as exploring Beijing’s culinary landscape. She is continuing her explorations now she’s back home by cooking from Chinese cookbooks, and following Shan’s instructions online. And this week she spent an afternoon in the kitchen at China Sichuan in Sandyford.

A recent Shananigans blog post detailed Julie’s very successful, but labour intensive attempt at cooking an authentic dim sum selection of nine dishes from recipes in Gok Wan’s new book. “It is possible, provided you don’t mind being on your feet from 11am to 6pm and enjoy the pleasure of playing around with endless small quantities of ingredients, making up tiny, delicious parcels of delights and have very patient friends who can tolerate their Sunday dinner coming at them in a haphazard way,” she says.

For the online cook-ins, Shane has the advantage of having the teacher right beside him in Beijing, but it’s fascinating to see the difference in the finished dishes the three plate up after following the same recipe – such as the beef with black bean pictured here, with the Beijing and Dublin results left to right (the Sydney image was too low resolution to print here).

Love food . . . lovely book

Ard Bia Cookbook, by Aoibheann Mac Namara and Aoife Carrigy, is published by Atrium (€35) Collaborative effort is at the heart of this beautiful collection of recipes, photographs, illustrations and musings on the art of eating, as celebrated at Galway restaurant, Ard Bia at Nimmos. Marking Ard Bia’s first 10 years, the structure of the book follows a day in the waterside restaurant, from breakfast, through lunch and afternoon tea to dinner and dessert, using recipes that have appeared on the menu at some stage, many of them contributed by the people who have worked there through the years. In addition, there’s a Pantry section with recipes for Mac Namara and her staff’s building blocks of flavoured oils, sugars, salts and butters (smoked paprika and orange oil, and rose salt for example), pestos and pastes, syrups and jellies – many of them with intriguing Middle Eastern leanings.