A round-up of today's other stories in brief
Super supper classes
Eimer Rainsford, who previously worked as a chef at the Avoca and Conran restaurants in Ireland and the UK, has just celebrated teaching her 200th class at PinkGinger Cookery School, which she runs at her Sandymount, Co Dublin home. She has recently added a new concept to her programme – Supper Clubs, which combine learning how to cook new things in a relaxed atmosphere, with a sit-down meal and a glass of wine. You’ll need to get a group of eight together to book, and the cost is €65 per person.
“The class is a demonstration format, although guests can don an apron and get involved if they wish. The menu is tailormade in that the customer will give me an idea of what type of food their group is interested in, and I then send them a menu from which they choose the dishes that appeal to them most,” Rainsford says. There are 20 suggested themes on the pinkginger website, including “Avoca Favourites”, during which you can learn how to make some of the cafe/restaurant chain’s best loved dishes.
A recent Supper Club menu focused on fish, and during the evening the group tackled Thai fish cakes, salmon and asparagus puff pastry plait, coconut fish curry, roasted sweet potato, spinach and feta bake, and chocolate cake with Baileys. The supper club goes on for between four and four-and-a-half hours, and “absolutely everything is made during the evening; no shortcuts”, Rainsford says. See pinkginger.ie.
Great Tasting corned beef
If you were to guess which food product took the supreme award at the 2011 Guild of Fine Food Great Taste awards, corned beef probably wouldn’t even have made the shortlist (and we’re talking about the pressed meat variety rather than the spiced, boiled type). But McCartney’s of Moira, Co Down, a family run butcher shop (below), took the honours. Its corned beef, made by hand using dry-aged local beef and a traditional meat press, was picked out of thousands of entries from across the UK and Ireland.
“This is a product that is very time consuming to make. All the fat has to be meticulously removed and the beef is dry cured, weighed into the presses and cooked long and slow with natural gelatine,” says George McCartney, who now runs the business with his brother Gordon and daughters Judith and Sarah. At the moment the corned beef is only available from this shop, and from September 19th from Selfridges in London, but they are working on an online ordering system.
In excess of 7,000 products were entered for the awards, and more than 350 chefs, critics and specialist food buyers were involved in the judging process. The final judging was done by a panel of 15, including writers Charles Campion, Xanthe Clay and Lucas Hollweg; chefs Antonio Carluccio and Dhruv Baker; and cheese-maker Alex James.
Yeats Country organic full-fat soft cheese was also a winner at the final judging, taking the best Irish speciality award.
There was more good news for Northern food businesses last week when Robert Ditty of Castledawson was named baker of the year at the BIA Baking Industry awards in London.
Food buzz
Co Louth cheesemaker and dairy farmer David Tiernan (on Twitter):
“So much talk about Russian Roulette last night. I thought it was milk I was producing, not BULLETS”
Pork butcher Ed Hick (on Twitter): “The Raw Milk debate last night – where scientists delivered anecdotes, and journalists delivered facts”
Pop up penguins
For one night only you can have dinner with the penguins in their enclosure at Dingle Aquarium. On Saturday, October 1st, chefs Kevin Murphy and Sinéad Sheehy will serve a seafood menu in this unusual location as part of the Dingle Food and Wine Festival. Tickets cost €40 for a menu of oysters, crab, lobster and prawns. Diners are advised to wrap up warm, and just 40 tickets will be available, from the festival office, tel: 087-9550649. No chocolate biscuit gags, please.
See dinglefood.com
Book of the week
'I Love Good Food',published by Poolbeg, €19.99 How nice to pick up a cookery book that you can cook from without guilt. You won't find salt in any of the recipes in this book, compiled by Orla Broderick for the Irish Heart Foundation, but they're not lacking in taste, relying instead on other spices for their seasoning punch. Broderick has written numerous books, worked for the BBC, and was chief home economnist on the RTE Masterchefseries. There are lots of contributions from chefs and celebrities, including singer Mikey Graham's spag bol; radio and TV presenter Marty Whelan's veal marsala, and actor Tony Tormey's Chinese-style steamed scallops. As a very useful addition, each of the recipes has its nutritional content listed, including calories per portion. I Love Good Foodis available from bookshops nationwide.
