FOOD FILE: Food festivals are contributing significantly to the revenues of many Irish towns these days, as well as giving us something to look forward to.
The organisers of the Savour Kilkenny event have lined up an extensive programme for their celebration of the city and county's restaurants, cafes, food producers and growers next Friday to Monday, October 23rd-26th.
The full programme for the bank-holiday weekend event can be viewed at www.savourkilkenny.com, and one of the highlights is the medieval banquet (€80) which will take place in Kilkenny Castle on the Sunday night at 7pm, under the direction of chefs Eugene McSweeney and Mark Gaffney (above). The menu will be locally- and historically inspired – the pig's head is only for display.
This year's festival has apples at its core, and if you rate your apple tarts highly, you can enter a baking competition, to be judged by chef Kevin Dundon and radio presenter Sue Nunn (Saturday, 10.30am), or bring your homegrown apples (and empty bottles) to Rothe House Gardens (Saturday, 11.30am-4pm), to make your own juice using a traditional press.
Sound Bites and Food for Thought, a Slow Food event at Fleva restaurant on High Street (Sunday, 2pm-4pm) is described as a three-course family-friendly "learning lunch" of locally sourced food, interspersed with multimedia shows, short talks and a few surprises.
To keep the kids happy, there are pizza-making parties in La Revista on Parliament Street (Saturday, 11.30am-2pm) and in Extreme Pizza on Barrack Street (Sunday, noon, 2pm and 4pm), and junior chef cookery classes at the Loreto Convent secondary school (Monday, 10am-2pm). New artisan foods are being launched at Discovery Park in Castlecomer (Saturday, 2pm-5pm), and perhaps most unusual of all is a guided tour of the Kilkenny livestock mart (Saturday, 1pm).
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Oven stackers
Small ovens and large parties don’t mix, and, on the other hand, it seems wasteful to heat up a big oven for one dish, so these stacking oven dishes by the Danish company Menu, present answers to both dilemmas. They are made of porcelain, intended to go from oven to table, and are designed to allow heat to circulate between them during cooking. Two medium dishes will fit on top of one large dish, and two small dishes will fit on one medium, (or four small on one large).The largest costs €69.95, with smaller dishes for €39.95 and €24.95. From www.pressieport.ie, tel: 01-4605350.
* Theremay be no such thing as a free lunch, but the baking demonstrations at Kitchen Complements in Chatham Street, Dublin 2 today (noon and 3pm) don't cost a cent. Shop owner Ann McNamee will be talking about the different types and quality grades of baking tins, and why one is better than another. She will also demonstrate how to line a tin properly, and will bake a Battenberg cake. With Halloween approaching, it will be a ghoulish-sounding black and orange one, with orange marzipan.
Pots of flavour
“Posh pot noodle?” inquired a colleague as a few of us tucked into a lunchtime snack from the new range of Hot Pots from Cully Sully. Much nicer, and more nutritious than those additive-riddled things, the microwaveable Hot Pots come in four varieties – Irish stew, beef stew, chicken curry and chicken casserole. They are made in Ireland (in Lusk, Co Dublin) with seasonal ingredients, and carry the Love Irish Food logo in support of a new initiative to promote Irish food products (see www.loveirishfood.ie). The recommended retail price of €3.99 makes these Hot Pots a good alternative to a lunchtime sandwich, and they are now on sale in Superquinn, with further retail outlets to come. And the bonus point? “One of the things we were amazed by was that the Irish stew is only 1.8% fat. That’s really low, about the same as our carrot and coriander soup, and the others are surprisingly low in fat too,” says Cullen Allen of Cully Sully.
