The Menu: Lovely edible treats; top notch yogurt and my vote's for these oats
Roughty's Little Sister flower bouquet
The Menu offers last-minute advice to those late-arriving Lotharios who have yet to organise tokens of their love for Valentine’s Day.
Cork’s English Market is always a treasure trove of fine, food-related purchases to charm any heart. The Chocolate Shop remains, of course, one of The Menu’s most favourite edible emporiums to be found anywhere in the world and the selection available is unsurpassable in this country, including VDay hampers. chocolate.ie
Roughty’s Little Sister offers stunning locally grown flowers and wildflowers, for a fine floral display with a minimum carbon footprint, and also stock food hampers including the Pure Cork Tapas Box. theroughtyfoodie.com
Another great Menu favourite, On The Pig’s Back, offers a specialty Valentine’s Cheese and Charcuterie hamper, including and cheeses from one of the finest selections of Irish and French cheeses in the land along with a wealth of other fine fare.
onthepigsback.ie
While cheap card and fading flowers from the garage forecourt may fail to win any hearts, the situation may well be rescued if said card should contain within a receipt for an exclusive champagne dinner (March 3) at the K Club’s Barton Restaurant, featuring six delicious courses paired with Laurent Perrier Champagnes, and including a pre-dinner Champagne reception. Tickets are limited and an additional offer of a room for the night for €299 for two sharing is nigh on essential addition if atoning for neglecting the day in question! club.ie
Many producers of premium Irish specialty food, whose output forms the backbone of the very best menus in the land, have been the lesser noted victims of the impact of the pandemic on the hospitality sector as one of their biggest markets shut down overnight and Mayo’s Velvet Cloud are one such outfit, producers of what The Menu reckons is the finest yoghurt in the country, impossibly rich, creamy and flavour-filled Velvet Cloud, which just so happens to be made from sheep’s milk. For many potential consumers, the very idea of yoghurt from sheep may be offputting so Velvet Cloud are offering free samples convert the wary, a free sample of the large 450g pot of Velvet Cloud sheep’s milk yogurt. Simply add the cost of post and packaging and that will be deducted from your first order — and take it from The Menu, it won’t be your last order. velvetcloud.ie
The new Eatyard Street Sessions kick off with a promising programme of chef takeovers in the shipping container kitchen in Eatyard at The Bernard Shaw, in Glasnevin, in Dublin, serving a one-off limited menu and the first chef up is Lily Ramirez-Foran (Feb 13) who will be serving up an exclusive taco from her brand new book, Tacos, the first imprint from a new series from the very wonderful Irish publishing start-up Blasta Books. the-eatyard.com
James Kelly’s family has farmed on the Kildare and Wicklow border for five generations but James began to steer the family farming enterprise in the organic direction in 2015, harvesting his first organic crops the following year in 2016. Having grown some quite extraordinary milling wheat, but finding it very hard to have it easily milled, he subsequently installed his own mill on his farm in Ballymore Eustace, Co Kildare, and now retails through his Ballymore Organics brand, a range of superb stoneground flours (wholemeal and plain) as well as semolina and oats.
Semolina is one of those edible echoes from The Menu’s childhood that resonates to this day, when he would relish it cooked up as an elemental and simple pudding of milk, sugar and the magic grain made from the middlings (endosperm) of wheat, flavoured with a sprinkling of nutmeg, baked in the oven and served with a generous dollop of homemade jam. All James’ grains are freshly milled on the day of dispatch and The Menu also used this nutty flavoursome semolina to make some quite divine fresh pasta and has since used it as an excellent coating for fried fish and chicken, and they are quite superb in Basbosa, a delicious Syrian cake recipe recently acquired by The Menu from Ahmed Saqqa, chef/proprietor of The Four Liars restaurant, in Shandon.
But back to the oats. Also milled on day of dispatch, they have a golden honeyed hue and a nutty bite. That golden colour is because the oats are truly raw, unlike those more usual ‘perfect’ flat white flakes which are achieved by steaming and heating the grain just before they are flattened, a ‘cooking’ process that means they have already begun to surrender some of their original nutritional bioavailability. Quite simply, they are the finest oats The Menu has ever eaten and that is high praise indeed as it is universally accepted that we produce probably the finest oats in the world in our ideal climactic conditions.
As overnight oats, made with freshly-squeezed apple juice and natural yoghurt, and served with fruit, they are quite gorgeous and have become the current school lunch bedtime snack of choice for No 2 Son and even a simple muesli of raw oats, nuts, seeds and dried fruits would fuel an army for a three-day march.
The Menu himself, however, hasn’t been able to look past serving them up as a good old fashioned bowl of porridge, soaked overnight in one part water, and gently cooked in a Bain marie the following morning with a further two parts milk and a pinch of salt, until the starch is rendered as an unctuous cream contrasting with the textured bite of the deeply flavoursome oats. Over the years, The Menu has added all manner of fabulous additions to his morning porridge but with oats this good, he keeps it simple, a spoon of brown sugar, allowed to melt to a syrup on the surface of the hot porridge and then a glug of fresh cream stirred through. As Ms Goldilocks herself would say: “Just right!”
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