Compiled by MARIE-CLAIRE DIGBY
Cork food trail
Eveleen and Pamela Coyle’s Fabulous Food Trails has spread its wings to Cork, where you can join in a walking tour of the city’s top food spots including markets, cheesemongers, fishmongers, butchers and bakers. The tour takes two and a half hours (at a gentle pace), with frequent refuelling stops, and costs €45. They are on Saturday mornings at 10am and you can book by tel: 086-8094560, or see fabulousfoodtrails.ie.
Belfast’s culinary history can be explored in Kabosh Theatre Company’s Belfast Bred, a two-and-a-half hour walking, talking and eating production that runs Friday and Saturday mornings until September 3rd, at 10.15am. Tickets (£20), can be booked online at gotobelfast.com or tel: 0044-28-90246609.
US roving restaurant
A US “roving culinary adventure – literally a restaurant without walls”, as its creators describe it, embarks on its first European tour this autumn, taking in six venues including Ballymaloe Cookery School in Co Cork (Monday, September 5th). The other venues are in Wales, Denmark, Holland, Spain and Italy.
Chef and artist Jim Denevan is the founder of Outstanding in the Field, which aims to reconnect diners with the producers of their food and its origins, by setting up tables in farmyards, vineyards and urban gardens. The meals are cooked by local guest chefs, and are eaten at a communal table.
The Outstanding in the Field team, who served almost 10,000 meals across the US last year, travel in a big red bus with California licence plates (rumoured to be Elvis Presley’s tour bus in a former incarnation) It will be shipped to Europe for this autumn’s tour to set up its stage.
Darina Allen will be the guest cook and Eileen O’Donovan is the host farmer. The long table will be set up in a greenhouse on Ballymaloe’s 100-acre organic farm. A seat at the table will cost €142, to include a farm tour and five-course meal with paired wines. It can be booked online at outstandinginthefield.com.
That first week in September will be a fantastic time to visit Ballymaloe Cookery School as chocolatier Paul A Young, who recently opened his second shop in Soho, will be doing a full day demo on the same day as the outdoor dinner, followed the next day by former Ballymaloe pupil Stevie Parle, now running his own restaurant, Dock Kitchen, in London, as well as writing for the Telegraph. These guest chef events cost €245 each, including lunch, and can be booked at cookingisfun.ie, or tel: 021-4646785
Webwatch food52.com.
New York food writers Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have harnessed the power of the great American public to make their website and online community of cooks one of the world’s best. At food52 you can read food news, shop, have your culinary queries answered by experts, watch food prep videos, enter weekly recipe contests, and search through a vast recipe archive.
You can join up (it’s free, and the Sunday night newsletter is excellent) and compile your own personalised selection of recipes from the site with a single click on each one that takes your fancy. And they don’t just operate in cyberspace – the food52 cookery book is due out in October, published by HarperCollins. mcdigby@irishtimes.com