Menu: Grilled cheese sandwich trucks, takeaway tacos and new potatoes
Harvest Day’s 28 year old Founder & CEO, Fergus Halpin, visiting one of the farms the startup supports, Dan Hogan & Una Wycherley’s Larkin’s Hill Farm in Puckane, Co. Tipperary
The Menu believes his great comrade Kristin Jensen’s newest venture, , is set to be an imprint that will radically alter the Irish cookbook and food publishing landscape. Food writer, Kristin, is also Ireland’s foremost cookbook editor and has licked into shape the epicurean epistles of a whole raft of top Irish chefs and food authors enabling them to become some of our most treasured food publications.
After two decades at the coal face, she is fully aware of the logistical difficulties involved in bringing the traditional cookbook of perhaps 250 pages to market, from testing, styling and photographing of around 100 recipes to printing and marketing, meaning only those with a high profile, ideally surfing a current trend, stands any real chance of being published.
Believing many voices and areas of Irish food culture were inadequately represented, Kristin has settled on an alternative format cookbook: A5 size with just 72 pages, roughly 30 recipes at most, no fillers and each absolutely integral to the overall project.
Says Kristin: " are to cookbooks what street food is to restaurants. They give people a fun, accessible, and affordable way to eat exciting food."
She has launched a Kickstarter fund facilitating advance orders and providing valuable working capital to produce a quarterly series in in 2022, and any funds raised over the initial €25k target will fund books three and four in the series.
The first on the list is , by Ireland’s Mexican cuisine queen, Lily Ramirez-Foran (Picado Mexican), followed by , by Russell Alford and Patrick Hanlon. If targets are met, the next pair, from chef Jess Murphy (Kai) and baker Eoin Cluskey (Bread 41) and from chef Kwanghi Chan, will also be delivered in 2022 — stylish little tomes all to eventually form a wonderful wall of words on the bookshelf in the years to come.
kickstarter.com/projects/blastabooks/blasta-books-little-books-big-voices
The Menu’s soapbox is the hardest working pulpit in the food business for The Menu is forever climbing onto it to proselytise about the innate superiority of finest, local seasonal produce over any inferior imported versions, most especially when this produce is chemical-free or organic. The trouble is, State support mostly directed to the agri-biz sector, it is so much harder for such growers to establish their enterprises and bring produce to market, in turn making more difficult again for the consumer to source such quality chemical-free produce, so The Menu is delighted to welcome to the fray, Harvest Day, a nationwide delivery service of freshly picked organic and naturally grown and all of it is 100% Irish.
Established by Fergus Halpin, an entrepreneur with a passionate commitment to the principles of the sector and sustainable practices, Harvest Day works closely with up to 20 different small scale organic and pesticide-free farmers, throughout Ireland. For complete transparency, full details are provided on grower and growing methods for every item of produce, all delivered directly to your door. While sourcing direct from your local grower will always be the ideal method of consumption, Harvest Day’s nationwide delivery system is a far more sustainable operation than shipping fruit and vegetables from around the globe, as happens with so much of the produce on our supermarket shelves.
The Cork International Hotel offers a Takeaway Taco Box, including freshly-prepared meats, tortillas, guacamole, sour cream, chillies and salsa, serving two for €35. Available seven days a week. Tel 021 454 9800.Â
corkinternationalairporthotel.com
Having reared himself on toasties, and being something of a universal master in the Art of The Grilled Cheese Sandwich, The Menu is intrigued by a recent outbreak of food trucks offering same, including Sebastian Thomenn’s Toast, in Ballinlough Community Centre car park, Jonathan Wallace’s Nag’s Head, in Kinsale; and Paul Moore, of Rebel Chilli, and partner Mike, whose Toasted truck is located on Monahan Road. The Menu will be investigating further!
If new strawberries have The Menu rummaging around in the back of the cupboard for his summer slacks and sleeveless vests, the first of the new potatoes is the other seasonal signal that has him lathering on the Hawaiian Tropic and hightailing it off down to Fountainstown in the Speedos. It is the ultimate edible confirmation of winter’s exit stage left — or at least it used to be until the weather became so contrary, winter apparently having no intention of vacating the premises anytime soon even though we are more than half way through May.
The Menu, however, is quite content for the moment to huddle up to a warming bowl of these freshly harvested and most tremendous tubers, this year’s first sampling, Home Guards grown by Richard Williams, in Castletownroche, procured from the very splendid Menloe Stores independent food store in Blackrock, in Cork city.
It is the only time of the year when The Menu is content to eat pretty much the same dish, night after night, for several weeks on end. Freshly steamed and roughly crushed, the precious potatoes are smothered in more butter than Kerrygold can churn out in a year, sprinkled with chopped parsley, dusted with black pepper and perhaps some fried chorizo as a grace note, though it is hardly essential. The Menu’s first bite into the slightly waxy flesh of the earthy sweet spud was as ever, bliss indeed, a true taste of summer even if the weather gods think otherwise.
