Evan Doyle and Freda Wolfe are the couple who have built the Brook Lodge Inn complex from scratch in Macreddin Village, Co Wicklow, and their radical vision extends to the food they source and cook in the Inn's Strawberry Tree Restaurant.
"At the Strawberry Tree all our ingredients are organically grown or reared, freerange or gathered from the wild," it says on the menu, and this is no idle boast. This pair are likely to have spent the afternoon foraging for wild flowers and leaves to include in salads.
Their determination to find foods with the keenest, most vivid flavours makes for bold, impressive cooking. The braised wild rabbit risotto, with its punchy thyme and red wine gravy, tastes feral and sexy, putting one in mind of the great instinctive flavours winemakers can summon from red-wine grapes: pairing the monkfish with dillisk, meanwhile, intensifies the saline spell of the dish.
In a world where restaurant cooking can all too often tend to the polite and the pacific, Freda Wolfe's cooking - and her funky method of passing on her recipes, as you can see below - is wild and original.
Braised Wild Rabbit, Mushroom Risotto, Thyme and Red Wine Gravy
For the rabbit
1 rabbit
Cracked black pepper
Sea salt
15 ml oil
Chunks of vegetables (used to impart flavour during cooking, but removed before service) - 2 carrots, 1 onion, 1 leek, 1 celery stick
"Flavour deciders" - 3 bay leaves, 3 sprigs of thyme, cinnamon stick, whole black peppercorns
1/2 bottle red wine
Glass port
Chopped thyme
50g knob butter
For the mushroom risotto
2 shallots
2 cloves crushed garlic (or 25g wild garlic pesto)
Pinch chopped thyme and rosemary
75g wild mushrooms (or use Fran and Jim Fraser's forest mushrooms from Cork)
Knob butter
100g arborio rice
300ml chicken stock
50g grated parmesan
Chopped tarragon and parsley
15ml cream
Cut the rabbit at the joints as you would cut a chicken for sauteing. Chop the carcass in three. Season. Heat oil. Seal and brown the rabbit pieces. Remove meat from the pan into a casserole dish. Place the chunks of vegetables in the pan and saute to brown the vegetables.
Remove from the pan. Strain off the oil. Deglaze the pan with wine and port. Simmer for five minutes. Place all the flavour-deciders in the casserole dish. Pour in the wine, cover and braise in the oven for one hour, 30 minutes at 180 celsius.
Take out the meat. Strain the sauce, reduce sauce until you have a nice coating consistency. Add chopped thyme and finish with the knob! Check seasoning.
For the risotto: If you are using dried mushrooms, soak them in warm water for two hours and keep liquid to add to risotto when cooking. Melt half the butter in a pan. Add the mushrooms, finely chopped shallot and garlic. Add herbs and fry onion mixture over a moderate heat until transparent. Add the rice, stirring continuously, until it begins to change colour.
Add boiling chicken-stock and stir until completely absorbed. Cook for 20 minutes. If necessary, add additional stock to prevent rice from drying out. Stir in the remaining butter and parmesan. Add the shredded meat from the rabbit shoulder and saddle, chopped tarragon and parsley, and finish with a wee splash of cream.
To serve: present risotto in a ring with the rabbit-leg sitting on top, spoon some gravy around the plate. Garnish with a sprig of thyme and a chive flower or herb robert.
Serves two as a main course, four as a starter
Dillisk Monkfish
100g dillisk
600g monkfish (prepared by a fishmonger for stress-free cooking)
4 baby carrots
200g green beans
3 fennel bulbs
25ml oil (half sunflower, half olive)
25g butter
Glass white wine
Lime juice
Bay leaf
Dill stalks
150ml fish stock
For the sauce
4 shallots
25g butter
575ml fish stock
2 glasses white wine
Bay leaf
2 limes
200ml cream
Soak the dillisk in cold water.
Wash the baby carrots, leave whole with stalks on. Cook in boiling salted water for one minute, refresh in cold water. Top the green beans, blanch and refresh.
Cut the fennel into wedges, leaving each piece intact by a piece of the root. Heat oil in a pan. Brown the fennel pieces. Strain off the oil. Add the butter, glass of wine, fish stock, bay leaf and dill stalks. Cover and simmer on a low heat for 20 minutes or in the oven.
For the sauce: Fry chopped shallots in butter. Add lime juice, wine, stock and bay leaf. Bring to the boil. Add monk pieces, cook for three minutes and remove. Continue to reduce, poaching liquid for five minutes. Add cream, continue to reduce and thicken (three minutes more, or so). Remove the bay leaf (strain sauce if you prefer). Add the monkfish and drained dillisk to sauce to complete cooking for two to three minutes.
To serve: Place three wedges of fennel in a wok bowl. Put green beans and carrots in boiling water for 10 seconds to reheat and place as you see fit around fennel wedges. Place the monk on top of the fennel, crack a tad of white pepper onto the monk. Complete your monk with a lashing of dillisk on top, and garnish with a sprig of dill.
(In the Stawberry Tree, they sometimes like to place an unshelled prawn on the plate to garnish.)
Serves four.
The Strawberry Tree at the Brook Lodge Inn, Macreddin, Co Wicklow. Telephone: 0402-36444, or email: brooklodge@macreddin.ie