Menu: Rachel Allen cookery demos and the return of the Macroom Food Festival

Plus the inaugural Grill Master Ireland is hoping to evolve into an annual event showcasing the best in BBQ and open-fire cooking

Launching the Macroom Food Festival, which is set to return to the West Cork town.

Off to the races

Taste of Kildare (Sept 24-25) returns to the Curragh Racecourse during the Autumn Racing Festival, showcasing all that is fine and edible about the county and the wonderful Rachel Allen headlines an extensive programme of live cookery demos, food tasting experiences, and music. The local food scene will be putting its best face forward with a mix of well-known Kildare chefs, restaurants, food producers, and food innovators to showcase, with over 40 food suppliers, restaurants and food trucks in attendance. There will be a special seven-course Taste of Kildare menu featuring restaurants including Firecastle, Carton House, Fallon & Byrne, and Harte’s of Kildare.

• www.tasteofkildare.ie

Rachel Allen is just one of the many chefs and food producers turning up for this year’s Taste of Kildare at the Curragh Racecourse.

Make room for Macroom

Next weekend sees a return of the Macroom Food Festival (Sept 23-25). It is a modest affair this year: A culture night in the Castle Hotel with live entertainment is free to all and the main food-related activities take place on Sunday in the main square with a large food and crafts market, live family-friendly entertainment, including the free event, SECAD Celebrating Multi-Culturalism Through Food, with tastings from 12 countries.

• www.macroomfoodfestival.com

The thrill of the grill

The inaugural Grill Master Ireland (Sept 23-25) in Castleisland, Co Kerry is hoping to evolve into an annual event showcasing the best in BBQ and open-fire cooking. Expect specialists in the field competing at the Crown Bar over three days, showcasing skills and completing exciting challenges, to be crowned Grill Master Ireland 2022, with plenty of opportunities to taste, as well as a range of food producers, street vendors, craft stalls, outdoor bars, and live music.

• www.grillmasterireland.com

TODAY’S SPECIAL

Recently, The Menu did the weekly shopping on behalf of an elderly and ailing relative. Armed with a shopping list and strict instructions to purchase all only from a specific supermarket, the only place she shops, he fetched up in an enormous outpost of one of the large multiples which dominate the Irish shopping market.

The Menu hadn’t been inside this particular supermarket for at least 20 years though he passes it regularly and was astonished at its transformation into a gigantic food hall, featuring the standard offering along with, admittedly, some fine Irish foodstuffs.

He was, however, even more astonished, actually, make that horrified, at the prices — were The Menu to attempt to replicate the fare that usually pops up on his own table each week by shopping solely in this supermarket or, to be honest, pretty much any of the major multiples, he’d be in the debtor’s prison inside a fortnight and what’s more, the quality of the produce can’t, for the most part, match that available in his more usual shopping outlets.

The Menu has been around long enough to have experienced penury in his lifetime, including several periods of great economic crisis, and knows only too well the feeling of trying to keep a few farthings on life support to make it through to the next payday. Even to this day, The Menu still very much has to watch the wallet and that was long before the current cost-of-living crisis arrived.

But in all those years, The Menu never ever starved and he and his family never ever went wanting at the table. What’s more, The Menu continued to be able to invite other guests to gather around his table and put on the nosebag for these kinds of communal social gatherings that are so essential to our physical and mental wellbeing.

Neither were these gatherings ever once held at the expense of other essential household bills for The Menu has always been a dab hand at putting on the Ritz at pound-shop prices, never once skimping on premium produce. He puts this down to two key skills: The ability to cook good food from scratch; and the ability to source and shop for that aforementioned premium produce on a tight budget.

The Farmer’s Market is always one of The Menu’s first ports of call when doing the weekly food shopping.

The Menu has been at it for decades, but cooking isn’t any great secret alchemy known only to the privileged few and neither is it rocket science. It is actually pretty straightforward: Begin with simple dishes, practice them until they are second nature and then move on to more challenging fare; days, months, years, and passion gradually add finesse to what might start out as basic but nutritional and tasty fodder.

When it comes to food shopping and sourcing, The Menu is only doing as all our grandparents stretching back generations did, utilising common sense and knowledge built over thousands of years, and only lost over the last 50 years or so as we exchanged that knowledge for the convenience of the supermarket. The downside of that exchange is we instead became profoundly ignorant about the food we eat, how it is produced, where it comes from, what happens to it en route, and the deterioration in quality, taste, and nutritional value of much of that food. In addition, in this industrial food model, the primary producer and the eventual consumer fare most poorly in an economic sense, while giant food processors and multiples bank millions.

The Menu also shops in supermarkets, but his consumption patterns form an inverted pyramid, with supermarkets the last place to be sourced from. Instead, he begins his weekly shopping, purchasing from local growers and farmers’ markets, followed by independent food retailers (butchers, fishmongers, specialist shops, ethnic food stores; The Menu is also a member of a collective purchasing group, buying in bulk from an independent wholesaler) and only finally turning to supermarkets for items not available elsewhere. Certainly, it takes more time than a weekly trip to the supermarket, but conversely, it is infinitely more rewarding from a social perspective and also results in far better food on the plate for often a lot less money.

Over the coming weeks, The Menu will offer regular tips on alternative food shopping, to save money without enabling the race to the bottom and continuing to destroy our own native food production sector by the false economies of purchasing below-cost-selling fruit and vegetables and inferior imported goods, but instead continuing to enjoy the best of local, seasonal and nutritional Irish fare, supporting our fine producers and the communities we all live in together.