Sally's blog

If we say that we call it culinary mindfulness, you might ask: Well, what’s that about?
To try to explain it, take the example of Ciaran and Melanie Breslin, of Derry’s Primrose Café.
He’s a butcher. She’s a baker. If you bring the idea of culinary mindfulness to their respective skills, you ought to find the perfect collaboration in the form of a hamburger: his beef, and her breads. Their mindfulness ought to draw attention to each detail of the hamburger: the beef; the bap; the condiments.
If the mindfulness is successful, you should end up with the perfect burger.

As soon as I had Lynda Booth’s new cookery book, Fearless Food in my hands, I went straight into the kitchen and made avocado smash on bruschetta with chilli and mint oil and poached egg and feta. Good start.
Then, for lunch, I roasted some squash and served it with Lynda’s pomegranate and mint dressing and St Tola goat’s cheese. I went out to the fish shop to get a bag of mussels to cook her grilled mussels with coriander and coconut pesto.

1.8 miles long, 40 foot high, and 30 foot wide, the granite and basalt ancient Walls of Derry form a complete circular walk around the inner city and encapsulate the tumult of Ireland’s history. A tour of the walls should be on the bucket list for anyone interested in the goings on on this island since 546AD, when Saint Columba first established a monastery on this oak covered grove.

“It’s not too mad in here, so we’re ok for help.”
As the lady behind the counter in Sprout, on Ballsbridge Terrace in Dublin, calmly said this to her fellow worker who was offering to lend a hand, I took a look around me.
The queue was out the door. The staff were working at a frantic rate filling the bowls and making the wraps. The shop was sardine-packed with hungry people. The brews were brewing. The soup was bubbling. The juices were flowing. The orders were stacking up. The till was churning.

Adam Lynas has an impressive CV in Irish food - he worked alongside Andy Rea in Roscoff, and put in kitchen time in Belfast’s excellent Shu restaurant.
But the direction of his cooking changed after he met Mexican Eliza Vignolle, in Montreal, and travelled back and forward to her native Monterey, all the while learning the nuances of cooking real Mexican food.
In 2016, he opened La Taqueria, in an utterly unprepossessing upstairs room in the building that also houses the Belfast Cookery School.

Starting at the top of the town in pretty little Ballycotton village, in East County Cork, the Cliff Walk travels a well-worn single track path that follows the cliff edge, and the walk culminates after 8kms at Ballyandreen Beach, where you can either pick up the second vehicle you parked earlier, or else walk back on your tracks and enjoy the views from the opposite perspective.

We imagine that, like ourselves, most of the hungry citizens of Cork city had been eagerly awaiting the opening of the West Cork Burger Company, on Washington Street, an area fast becoming Cork’s Food Quarter.
Day after day, waiting for the renovations to finish as we walked past the large, anticipating sign above the door of the restaurant, we would dream of burgers and fries, beers and shakes. Henry Hegarty and his team had made everyone in Cork into a panting Pavlovian, eager for some sort of release from our cravings.

Rory O’Connell is your wise friend in the kitchen. He’s the cook who will walk you through the process of making light, crisp pastry, poach the perfect monkfish with accompanying green sauce, even make complicated stuff like langues de chat biscuits (definitely a life skill worth knowing).
Whilst Cook Well Eat Well is unambiguously a book of dinner party recipes, there are many tricks and treats here that can be ticked off as valuable life skills, rather than simply seeking success in seamless entertaining.

In the beginning of Diana Dodog’s cooking was the word.
And the word was ‘Wow!’
You get proof of the Wow! word every time you stand in the queue at Diana and Mike’s Food Depot cart, and see the people ahead of you take their first bite of Depot Curry,  or Rakott Krumpli, or Double Chocolate Brownie.
They take a bite and, either audibly or silently, they say: Wow!
They can’t help it. Nobody can help it. Confronted with food of this deliciousness, this succulence, this excellence, we are all reduced to monosyllables of delight: Wow!

Perfection in restaurant cooking operates on a biblical time frame.
Every seven years or so, you have a meal in a restaurant where everything is perfect. You get the 10 out of 10, the perfect score, the Nadia Comaneci, the faultless parade of food, the peerless understanding of cooking.
Having had that perfect meal, thanks to Matt Strefford’s cooking in Moy House, just south of Lahinch in County Clare, I’m already looking forward to 2024.