Food File

The big cheese

Sheridans Cheesemongers has opened a new shop right beside its head office and warehouse in Carnaross, Co Meath.

Everything in the new outlet, which is in the former Virginia Road Station, part of the old Great Northern Railway, is sold at a 10 per cent discount. “The warehouse is right next door, so there are no delivery costs,” says shop manager Franck Le Moënner. The deal applies to the shop’s range of French, Italian and Spanish wines, delicatessen products and charcuterie, as well as Irish and European cheeses. There’s even a maturing room you can visit to see the wheels of Parmesan, Comté and Gruyère waiting for their peak moment. The shop is on the Cavan-Meath border, 4km beyond Carnaross, at Whitegate Cross, beside The Forge restaurant.

Fashionable food

Do fashion designers actually eat like normal mortals? It would seem so, if the Council of Fashion Designers of America's American Fashion Cookbook, recently published by Assouline, is to be believed. The fashion community's favourite foods include Michael Kors's Bea's pot roast, Zac Posen's Great Grandma Jennie's butterscotch wafers, Isaac Mizrahi's mushroom truffle spaghetti and Carolina Herrera's Pommes Toupinel. There's a foreword by Martha Stewart, and more than 100 recipes in total. The book is available from Harvey Nichols, Dundrum Town Centre, Dublin 14 (€35), and you can sample Zac Posen's Great Grandma Jennie's cakes in the Harvey Nichols cafe this week.

Coffee for connoisseurs

Brema Drohan, the Waterford-born, Ursuline convent-educated managing director of Nespresso in the UK and Ireland, was in Dublin recently to launch the company's latest limited release grand cru coffee – Singatoba, from Sumatra in Indonesia. This single-bean coffee is made with the rare Blue Batak Arabica, and it delivers on its promised notes of liquorice, sweet wood, blackcurrant and grapefruit. This is one for sipping, not drowning in milk.

A tasting session with Drohan of the 16 grands crus in the Nespresso range demonstrated just how different they all are, with one exception: they all arrived with a thick layer of crema, something that's not easy to achieve consistently in machines that don't use the coffee-pod system. Singatoba coffee (€4.10 for 10 capsules) is available from the Nespresso boutique in Brown Thomas, Dublin, and from nespresso.com. The lovely porcelain espresso cups and saucers with Indonesian-inspired designs, which are part of the limited edition, cost €21 for a set of two.

Naturally sweet

School mightn't approve, but how popular would your young scholar be arriving in to class with a satchel full of these goodies? Nicole Dunphy's new company, Pandora Bell, uses original recipes to produce traditional, old-fashioned confectionary, using honey, eggs, butter and nuts. Dunphy, who works in Lyric FM, took a career break last year and trained at the French Grand École du Chocolat in Valrhona, and at the Italian Culinary Institute. Pandora Bell salted butter caramels with fleur de sel, handmade lollipops, and honey nougat bars are on sale in Sequoia Lane and Ivan's Country Basket in Limerick; Blarney Woollen Mills in Cork; Fallon Byrne and the Gourmet Store in Dublin; Chocolat in Ennis, Co Clare; and Morton's in Galway. Shop online at www.pandorabell.ie.

-Child psychologist and 'Irish Times' columnist David Coleman is involved in a new campaign to promote regular family mealtimes. His top 10 tips for encouraging families to sit down together to eat are available at www.knorr.ie