The Menu: West Cork cuisine meets Italian vineyard splendour

Plus: a cookbook with heart - for the Peter McVerry Trust

Sat, 15 Apr, 2023 - 13:48

Joe McNamee

Taste of Cork in Tuscany

The Menu was recently blessed to enjoy several blissful days in the wonderful Spanish city of Valencia, in particular, time spent in Europe’s largest covered food market, the extraordinary Mercat Central.

However, the sojourn was somewhat blighted by the collective ailment of several members of the family party, such that The Menu came home feeling that he hadn’t quite as usual wrung every last bit of “holiday” out of the trip and returning to foul and stormy weather, he had more than a hankering to turn around and head back to the airport for further sojourning.

Which all only adds further appeal to such an offer as Fionnuala Harkin’s Caravino – The Wine Shed tour of Tuscany next June, when she transports the concept of her West Cork-based vinified twinset — the Caravino experience in a Fr Ted caravan and her online Wine Shed virtual wine lovers forum — to the bricks and mortar/vines and grapes of Italy for a splendid epicurean week (June 10-17) in a luxury Tuscan villa.

She will be travelling in tandem with writer Maeve Bancroft who will deliver writing workshops along with the splendidly varied culinary programme of vineyard visits, lunches, and wine tastings, two evening dinners cooked at the villa by a local chef and paired with Tuscan wines, wine, olive oil tastings, and cookery classes.

The local town, stocked with restaurants, cafes, and shops is within walking distance, while a self-service breakfast, lunch, and casual dinner, along with fully stocked fridge is available at all times in the villa. Oh, yes, and the pool looks out over rolling Tuscan landscapes to complete the hardship for an exclusive travelling party of just 16. Flights and transfers are not included but collection can be arranged from the two nearest airports of Pisa and Florence.

Contact thecaravino@gmail.com for more details or check out @wineshedwestcork on Instagram.

The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home, a cookbook published in aid of Peter McVerry Trust

A book with heart

The Menu has a stack of new cookbooks on his desk which he shall be addressing in these pages over the coming weeks, but right now the one most deserving of mention is The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home, a collaboration celebrating the relationship between food and home, in aid of the Peter McVerry Trust.

This very lovely 160-page hardback cookbook features 55 recipes from across Ireland’s food world, with contributions from bakers, butchers, farmers, food champions, producers, shopkeepers and chefs, all recipes celebrating the relationship between nurturing food and the community of home, wherever that may be. It is originated and compiled by Gather & Gather Ireland and edited by Kristin Jensen from boutique Irish publishing house, Nine Bean Rows and is priced at €30 with all proceeds going to the hugely important Peter McVerry Trust.

Last year the trust supported over 12,000 people across the country and gave over 900 people the key to their own home.

The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home is available in bookshops and independent retailers and online at ninebeanrowsbooks.com

Backyard at Blas

After a two-year hiatus, Blas na hÉireann’s “Backyard at Blas” is back on the road, bringing the networking and learning programme to Irish food producers as part of an event (April 27) in The Naul Village, Co Dublin, allowing the Irish food-producing community to mingle in a relaxed and informal setting and hear leading industry speakers offering support and advice to established and start-up businesses, with topics covered including strategic positioning, knowing your brand and a deep dive into sales.

irishfoodawards.com

West Waterford festival of food

If at a loose end this weekend without any concrete plans, The Menu highly recommends heading for Dungarvan, Co Waterford, to dive headlong into the tail end of the very wonderful West Waterford Festival of Food which wraps up tomorrow, Sunday, April 16, with the mighty street market in Grattan Square, a most splendid place indeed to put on the nosebag.

westwaterfordfestivalofood.com

Wasabi leaves from McCormack’s Family Farms, The Menu’s food pick this week. Picture by Shane O'Neill, Coalesce.

TODAY'S SPECIAL

Alex Gazzaniga of West Cork’s Singing Frog Gardens has been, for some time, one of Ireland’s true horticultural innovators and the first to begin growing and selling commercial crops of wasabi rhizomes or roots along with the leaves of this Japanese speciality plant, way back in 2014.

Alex has long had many fans, especially including some of Ireland’s top chefs, for the wide variety of exotic and unusual edible plants from around the world that he has managed to grow here in Ireland and is one of our true culinary pathfinders along with Ultan Walsh of Gort na Nain farm, in Nohoval, who began back in the 90s and first introduced The Menu to spicy oriental greens.

Now McCormack Family Farms which grows on an infinitely grander scale in Co Meath, has hooked up with Beotanics, in Kilkenny, to produce wasabi leaves and petioles (stalks) on a substantially increased scale, hoping to attract national attention from the hospitality sector and The Menu recently sampled some of their output. He has long been a fan of oriental salad leaves, including wasabi, and these showed well, with a crisp, peppery bite, albeit something of a distant echo of the real pungent heat derived from the plant’s rhizome or root, when grated, and which they hope to have available on a commercial basis from next year.

Using up some leftovers of the braised lamb shoulder from O’Mahony’s in the English Market which starred at Easter Sunday’s dinner, The Menu shredded the meat and added chilli flakes and spiced rice mixed with diced petiole, topped that with a fistful of wasabi leaves and Goatsbridge wasabi mayo and packaged the entirety in a tortilla wrap for a very fine and filling supper indeed.