The Menu: Food news with Joe McNamee
Any opportunity to return to Kilkenny is a special one for The Menu is most fond indeed of the Marble City and never more so than during the magical masticatory melee that is the Savour Kilkenny Food Festival (Oct 27-30) with over 30,000 hungry heads expected over the four-day extravaganza. Highlights include a return by the ever-popular Neven Maguire; a mushroom hunt at the School of Food led by the very lovely Bill O’Dea; the Medieval Food & Craft Village, and Foodoppi, a fusion of science and the nosebag.
Dr Ollie Moore (whose myriad talents include his writing on organic farming for the Farm Exam) hosts another SpeakEATsy (Oct 29), at Billy Byrnes combining dinner, performance, DJs and public interviews on the subject of deepening local food culture with a special focus on the Riot Rye Bakehouse and Cloughjordan Eco-village. Kilkenny Civic Trust host a number of events including craftspeople demonstrating medieval skills (cooking, leatherwork, coin striking, arrow making, fletching) at the Medieval Mile Museum, while Butler House executive chef Ger Dunne hosts a cooking demo and a Sounds of the Afternoon Sea seafood repast.
One of The Menu’s great culinary comrades, Keith Bohanna, brings his Bia Beag collaboration with the equally splendid Julie and Rod Calder-Potts, to the latter’s Highbank Orchards & Distillery for a very vital evening, Fats, Facts, Fictions, debating the unfolding food science, with recent medical research revealing that much of what has been preached around fat consumption and its impact on human health has been questionable at the very least. Speakers include Darina Allen, nutritional therapist Jemma Kehoe, organic farmer Ben Colchester and olive oil sommelier Karen Cryan.
savourkilkenny.com
Halloween approaches once more with Galway Food Tours (www.galwayfoodtours.com) offering a mystery jaunt (Oct 26, Nov 2) around the City of the Tribes to four venues
sampling wine, cheese, poitin, desserts and spooky storytelling, while closer to home, O’Driscoll’s in Ballinlough host a Bubble Brothers wine tasting (Oct 27 & 28) with spooky treats, and food from On the Pig’s Back and Gubbeen.
The Pigtown Food & Culture Series in Limerick concludes this month and a supper in The Mustard Seed (mustardseed.ie ) at Echo Lodge in
Ballingarry, Co Limerick offers a five-courser (Oct 25) with option of overnight B&B while the equally attractive Barnabrow House, in East Cork, an old
favourite of The Menu’s, sees head chef Stuart Bowes offer a seven-courser (Oct 28) with wine pairing from ENO wines, again with the overnight B&B option. (barnabrowhouse.ie)
The monks of Glenstal Abbey, in Co Limerick, are very busy boys indeed, for along with their daily routine of prayer and contemplation, they also run a boarding school for boys, a working farm and a guesthouse, rather harking back to medieval times when Irish monasteries were the equivalent of small towns and a hive of industry in general. But The Menu is not too sure if any of those medieval men and women of God could turn their hands to making chocolates and, even if they were, sincerely doubts if they approached the calibre of Glenstal Abbey’s Apple Brandy Truffles, yet another string to the order’s celestial bow.
Made with 54% cocoa solid, dark chocolate casing, bearing faintly bitter smoky notes, eventually, melts in the mouth to unleash a molten flow of Longueville Apple Brandy liqueur. Now, as keen readers will be well aware, The Menu is a firm fan of the aforementioned golden nectar, which here makes itself known with a high spicy, even ginger-filled kick to the palate that softens into the molten chocolate leading to a state of ecstatic reverie that has The Menu, at least, hymning the hosannas like a choirboy! glenstal.org
Email details of Irish food news/events/produce to themenu@examiner.ie
