Some time back, The Menu eagerly took delivery of what purported to be a definitive tome on vegan cuisine from one of the world’s premier cookbook publishers.

The Menu is very much looking forward to the mingling with the 10,000 or so expected at Cork City Hall for the 2019 Cork and Kerry Food Market (November 1-2), a showcase for splendid food and drinks produced in the two counties.

Food news with Joe McNamee.

Food news with Joe McNamee

Food news with Joe McNamee.

Joe McNamee plates up the latest in food news.

Food news with Joe McNamee

Here is all the latest food news with Joe McNamee

The Menu will be taking an extremely well-travelled road out to Blarney to help launch the second annual Old Butter Roads Food Trails Festival in The Church of the Resurrection, at 3pm on May 5, a producer- and supplier-led initiative that he is only too delighted to support.

How time passes when you’re having fun. And time has certainly passed for the 11-year-old West Waterford Festival of Food 2018 (April 20-22), an event at which The Menu has, in years gone by, put away more fun than a clown school on nitrous oxide.

Welcome to The Menu’s House of Love, a special loveheavy edition of this column.

Do, please, come in and sit down, 2018! Extend your palm thusly, that Mystic Menu might divine your path over the coming 12 months. As always, this Al-Menu-nac for the year ahead begins with a brief look at predictions delivered in January last year, the hits and the misses.

Welcome to Part II of The Munchies 2017, in which The Menu salutes some of the heroes and achievements of the culinary calendar.

If there is a case to be made for GIY being one of Ireland’s most progressive food activist organisations, then The Menu is always happy to testify accordingly, especially taken as he is with this latest initiative, a social eating programme for primary schools, called Eat Together, that begins to address the crucial issue of food education in primary schools.

Here’s what’s going on in the world of Irish food. 

On the pig’s back

Check out this week's Christmas foodie news with Joe McNamee.

The Menu has to cast his mind back to the literal and metaphorical dark days of boarding school to recall the last time he regularly ate in total darkness, scoffing biscuits under the covers after lights out, the better to supplement the school canteen’s daily deep-fried offerings of items that may or may not have contained actual food.

Should you be looking for The Menu in the coming weeks then he shall mostly be found atop Neidín, roaming the wonderful wilds of West Cork with a knife in his belt and a skillet on his back for the Taste of West Cork Food Festival (Sept 9-18).

The Menu enjoyed a splendid repast, cooked by some of Ireland’s finest chefs, including Eurotoque Ireland General Commissioner, Graham Neville, of Dublin’s Restaurant 41, at Ballymaloe House this week. 

Attention, Class! 

Time once more for Mystic Menu to ponder a culinary year ahead and, appropriately, for his first glimpse into the future, he is not taking stock but talking stock. 

Nobody knows Irish food better than Joe McNamee. From chutney to cheese, craft beer to chocolate, he’s put together The Menu’s Annual Christmas Hamper – full of the local products that really stood out this year. Plus, he’s got the top gifts for foodies.

The splendid Taste of West Cork food festival (Sept 4-13) rolls around once more with yet another celebration of the food culture of Ireland’s original larder and the mighty programme is more ambitious than ever, 140+ events spanning 32 towns and villages, along with eight islands, throughout West Cork. 

One of the great ironies of the ‘Edible Erin’ calendar is that the arrival once more of a new school year coincides with the busiest time of the year for food festivals, the season really beginning around now.

The Menu has spent the last decade bending the ears of any with pockets of sufficient depth and the business nous necessary for creating and maintaining such aforementioned fiscal fortitude about the viability of a ‘permanent’ farmer’s market, believing it to be a marvelous business opportunity with equally positive social implications for the community.

One of Myrtle Allen’s lesser-hymned but no less commendable achievements is her role in co-founding Euro-Toques, in 1986, the European chefs organisation dedicated to guiding chefs in preserving traditional culinary cultures and in the value of using the very best of local, seasonal produce. 

The promotion of local maritime activity as part of the Ocean to City: Cork Harbour Festival (May 30-June 6) is heartening, with one event especially catching The Menu’s attention, Boats & Bites: Boating & Seafood Tasters (June 3, 6pm-8.30pm). 

BOYNE BECKONS

Suitably decked out in 40 shades of verdant green, a most patriotic Menu is all set to celebrate Lá Fhéile Pádraig, in the only way he knows how: the consumption of the finest of Irish produce.