The Menu: What's big for food in the week ahead?
Slow food celebration
This time last year, The Menu and clan put down a mighty couple of days in Lisdoonvarna for the Burren Slow Food Festival (May 11-13) and, hand on heart, the leavetaking at the end of a truly wonderful weekend was a cruelty of the highest magnitude so it goes without saying that a return for the 2018 festival is most high on the list of familial priorities.
This year’s theme is a celebration of seafood on the Wild Atlantic Way and an opening ferry trip from Doolin to Inis OÃrr for a seafood supper launches proceedings in style while back at base camp, in the Pavilion, in Lisdoonvarna, home for the weekend to the excellent little food and craft market, ongoing events include a cookery demo from the ever prolific chef/restaurateur Niall Sabongi and a whiskey workshop by Dingle-based cookbook author Trevis Gleason.
One of Ireland’s most renowned chefs, Kevin Thornton, presents an interactive happening, of which The Menu is none the wiser but is still inclined to pursue, Thornton being not only a fine chef but a considered and deep thinker when it comes to putting on the nosebag and having shared a stage last year with archaeologist Dr Bill Schindler, UCD visiting assistant professor, The Menu can promise his delving into our culinary past will prove most compelling indeed. The annual Burren Slow Food Banquet, in the Burren Storehouse in Lisdoonvarna, is reason alone for travelling, an event combining great food and most wonderful post-prandial high jinks. (www.slowfoodclare.com)
Buckfast bonanza
Though not quite sure where he stands on the epicurean merits of a drink that once fuelled many a youthful peer’s nocturnal shenanigans but was never really to The Menu’s taste, he nonetheless salutes the chutzpah of the Bernard Shaw crew for staging a World Buckfast Day (May 12) at the Dublin ‘gastropub’ with Buckfast 99 ice creams, a Buckfast chicken lunch, Buckfast wine and cheeseboards along with similarly themed quiz, bingo and DJs.
Sunshine package
One of The Menu’s more favoured hotels, Brooklodge at Macreddin Village offer a very tempting free dinner in their Italian restaurant, La Taverna Armento, with their midweek sunshine package, including free B&B and a rejuvenating vitamin E flourish organic facial at The Wells Spa €136pps (www.brooklodge.com)
Month of delights
The Menu cuts the ribbon today (May 5) in Blarney to kick off what should be a splendid month of food-related activities as part of the Old Butter Road Summer Féile 2018 (until June 4) celebrating food producers in North Cork, with a busking festival and a spit roast pig on offer while tickets may still be available for the very wonderful producers tasting menu dinner (May 6) at Blarney’s Square Table restaurant. Also look out for related food tours during the following week. www.oldbutterroads.ie
TODAY’S SPECIAL
There is no denying The Menu’s sweet tooth but what may surprise is the restraint with which it is unleashed, the better to truly relish what sweetened treats might come his way.
The latest favourite, sourced via The Roughty Food Trader, in Cork’s English Market and The Menu’s current food emporium of the year, is a Goat’s Milk Dulce de Leche, a Hiberno-Argentinian collaboration through marriage, by the Corrigan-Gaetani family, from Ballyshiel, in Co Offaly. To make a good dulce de leche—a gradual reduction of milk and sugar and bicarbonate of soda — is a time consuming and laborious process so any chance of a short cut to this golden nectar is to be relished.
Whether it is the goat’s milk at play or not, The Menu does detect a smokier, almost burnt flavour, that is deeper and darker than any cow’s milk dulce de leche he has hitherto tasted and all the better for it, an especial treat with a fine vanilla ice cream made with a custard of fresh eggs and cream (www.ballyshiel.com).
