Get involved
- We want to hear your favourite picnic memories, locations, recipes and stories. Email them to itpicnic@irishtimes.com. In no more than 300 words, we want to know about the best picnic you ever had, the places you like to go for picnics and the staples that end up in your basket. And send a good-quality photograph if you have one. The winner will receive a two-night break for two, plus picnic, at the Powerscourt Hotel in Wicklow.
OUR PICNIC blanket has more stains than Tracy Emin's bed. But it's okay because we're in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. We can call it performance art. It's our canvas of happy meals.
Welcome to Picnic Times, a special series for the month of August. Every Friday we’re going to hear about a different picnic meal, from the ham sandwich and boiled egg kind to a breakfast fry-up, a harvest picnic on the farm and a stew in a box.
I love picnics. We flapped out our blanket for the first time this year at the Imma Summer Rising event. The Cake Cafe’s Michelle Dermody and artist Fiona Hallinan had put together a bindle. A wha’? A bindle: the bundle that Huck Finn types tie on the end of their stick before hitting the road. This bindle had gobstopper-sized stuffed olives, the freshest sourdough, hummus, cakes, crumbly cheddar, pepperoni and an apple sliced with an orange and then wrapped so the orange juice kept the apple slices from browning. The apple tasted orangey, the orange tasted appley. It was the best picnic ever, since the last best picnic ever.
The secret to a great picnic is get someone else to do all the work. And if you can’t find a cafe owner and an artist to curate your picnic, head to a food shop where the good stuff lives. It’ll cost more than from a supermarket, but trust me: you’ll taste the difference. A picnic is a three legged-stool. If you have good bread, proper cheese (or cured meat or both) and ripe fruit, everything else is a bonus.
Picnics are when my inner nag snoozes in the shade with a straw hat over her eyes. We all get to be children again, sitting on damp grass, munching. Everyone can eat with their hands and combine weird ingredients. Someone wants strawberries in his ham sandwich? Knock yourself out, Heston. Food tastes better outside.
Except, that is, when you’re asked to stage a picnic with a couple of hours’ notice on a busy work day. Could I throw a convincing picnic in a few hours, they asked? The sun was out, but there was no guarantee it would hang around for long. A picnic panic ensued. Then I remembered the posh picnic basket under a cupboard, bought at an auction more than a decade ago. It was furred with dust, and inside were odds and sods of cutlery packed into the leather lid straps along with its original plates and saucers, weirdly just three of each. I picture a 1960s Ladybird children’s book family of mum, dad and blond-haired boy in tweed shorts.
It’s a picnic basket from a time of tartan travel rugs and Thermos; one that deserves to be packed into the boot of a Morris Minor Traveller. So I cleaned it up, swung around to my local market and packed it with good bread, butter, salt, tomatoes, strawberries, cherries, watermelon, cheese and figs. And as I hauled it across the grass in the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin, I realised why we’ve never used it. It’s as heavy as a sack of coal: a basket from slower times, when you pulled up at the side of the road, opened the boot and creaked opened the lid.
I even made lemonade. Actually it was just lemon, water and mint leaves. “Behave or I’ll make you drink the fake lemonade,” was the threat. We tried it out and it wasn’t bad. Later I added cane sugar, which turned it brown so that it looked like ginger beer, and so it got some ginger to go with the look. And lo my picnic recipe was born.
In the end, even the stressful fake picnic was fun. We hope the next three Fridays, when Darina Allen, Tom Keogh and Micheál O’Muircheartaigh share their picnic ideas and memories, will inspire you to become a card-carrying basket case. Next week Darina Allen’s chest of sandwiches; plus a reader’s picnic tale
MAKE IT: REAL LEMON AND GINGERADE
The ingredients
- 100ml lemon juice and pulp
- 2tbs cane sugar
- A half-thumb-size knob of root ginger
- 1 litre fizzy water
- Optional handful of mint leaves
Method
Grate your ginger as finely as you can (if you freeze the whole root it makes this easier). Heat the lemon juice, sugar and grated root ginger in a saucepan on a steady, low heat until it starts to bubble and the sugar is dissolved. Funnel this syrup into a litre bottle. Then top up the ginger and lemon syrup with a litre of fizzy water. Add the mint leaves if you want to use them. Refrigerate and tip upside-down to distribute the bits before pouring. This will keep in the fridge for about a week, but it’s best drunk within a couple of days. Keep it in the fridge and make it the last thing you pack into the basket to keep it deliciously cool.
