The Menu: Whiskey passports; no-added-sugar granola; and food waste solutions
Flahavan's no added sugar granola: strawberry and almond
The return of the Waterford Harvest Festival (Sept 6-12) in 2021, having been cancelled last year, is further evidence that some semblance of normality is returning. A full programme of events has been unveiled for the Deise capital — all following Covid HSE guidelines — and it's a chance to once more savour the dining pleasures in the south east.
Everett’s, a Menu favourite, hosts Appreciation of Harvest: A Meal to Celebrate, a three-courser celebrating wonderful Waterford produce Momo offer a five-course tasting menu, From the Garden Harvest. Loko covers all grounds with a midweek veggie/vegan menu followed by a weekend meat feast and their 20km Brunch sourced entirely from within 20km of the restaurant.
The Apple Market hosts a variety of venues, including Revolution Bar, with a Mega Burger Challenge daring all comers to attempt to devour said burger and fries within 25 minutes to get it for free. The Menu is not a great man for those Man V Food excesses but he’d certainly be keen on making a dent in the 22 different releases from Waterford Distillery carried amongst Revolution’s vast Irish whiskey selection, with whiskey tasting trays from €20.
Walsh's Bakehouse, Blaa makers supreme, celebrates its 100th birthday with a one-day live outdoor ‘feastival’, including Blaas, BBQ and beats and a trip to GIY’s GROW HQ is an absolute must for it is one of the jewels of the Deise food scene, with GIY founder Mick Kelly and GROW HQ chef JB Dubois hosting their garden tour and pizza demo, also including a seed sowing masterclass.
An eight-course Waterford Food Tasting Menu, to be held inside the 13th-century Choristers’ Crypt with drinks reception, is hosted by Bishop’s Palace Cafe & Blackwater Distillery in conjunction with the Waterford Museum of Treasures, while one of The Menu’s most favourite boutique Irish distilleries pops up again for an evening of Prohibition-themed cocktails and entertainment in a Jazzy speakeasy at Shush with Blackwater Distillery.
Check out links to the many local hospitality special offerings of bed and board during the festival and full programme of events and booking details on www.waterfordharvestfestival.ie
Justifications for the myriad iniquities of the global industrial food system are invariably bolstered by the argument that there is no other way to feed the whole world. Well, globally we throw away 1.3 billion tonnes of food each year with about the same number of people going hungry every day and even The Menu would struggle to eat a ton of food in a single year.
And before any parochial smugness takes hold, Irish households and businesses waste a million tons of food each year — 2.5 times Croke Park, filled up to the top.
Chef Conor Spacey, long to the fore in promoting zero waste food initiatives in Ireland, is joined by chef Erica Drum to host a special six-course Supper Club in Dún Laoghaire’s INK Café at DLR Lexicon on Friday, September 10. It will be a class of sustenance for body and mind as the evening will also focus on food waste tips and tricks, along with an introduction to various Irish businesses working to provide solutions to food waste.
The Middle Eastern-inspired menu will be dreamed up on the day as the two chefs will respond to the challenge of creating dishes from surplus ingredients delivered by the very splendid FoodCloud, a non-profit social enterprise that collects and redistributes waste food from the Irish retail sector to deserving social initiatives and charities around the country.
www.eventbrite.ie
A new ‘Irish Whiskey Passport’ sounds exactly like the class of documentation the Menu fancies brandishing when travelling the high roads and by-roads of this green isle. The IrishWhiskey360° Passport will provide a unique record of your journey through Irish whiskey distilleries, collecting stamps at each distillery en route.
And when you reach six stamps, you are crowned an IrishWhiskey360° Champion, which leads to all manner of special rewards, yet to be announced. Passports are available from any Irish Whiskey Association member distillery around Ireland, with maps and details of all members available on IrishWhiskey360.ie
The Menu’s meteorological meanderings, mostly based in his belly, are telling him there may yet be more sunshine to be squeezed out of this curious summer and a return to al fresco dining with a vengeance merits a visit to your nearest Wine Buff outlet (ten shops in Ireland including Cork, Dungarvan, Ennis, Galway, Gorey, Kilkenny, Limerick, Nenagh, Portarlington and Sligo) for a very reasonably priced and always enjoyable exclusive summer selection.
This selection also features plenty of decent rosés — a criminally neglected wine, to The Menu’s mind. 100% Irish-owned, all wines are sourced directly from sustainable family-run vineyards.
See www.thewinebuff.com
The Menu has been churning out a homemade granola recipe for quite some years that is enormously popular in the homestead, most especially with The Progeny. And even Mrs Menu is quite partial to it, albeit always giving vent to her usual ‘complaint’ that it is more forbidden pleasure dessert than the rather more ascetic experience with which she likes to begin her day.
Flahavan’s no-added-sugar granola appears to have very much cracked it as far as she is concerned: the strawberry and almond version features a very elemental mixture of oats, sunflower seeds, almonds and freeze-dried strawberries with any further sweetness coming courtesy of chicory root, a natural sweetener that comes in very low on the glycemic index and is often used by those with blood sugar issues.
And if that sounds more penance than pleasure, well, The Menu and Progeny were most pleasantly surprised to find the toasty nutty oats and their culinary companions all made for an exceedingly tasty breaking of the fast, scattered over sliced fresh fruit topped with homemade natural yoghurt. Did we perhaps add a sneaky drizzle of fine local honey when Mrs Menu had her back turned? That would be telling!
