Sally's blog

"I have long wished that The Ballymore Inn was just around the corner from me. Now I have the next best thing". Diana Henry

Chef Georgina O'Sullivan has just published a book of her cooking at The Ballymore Inn in Ballymore Eustace. As you would expect, it is both an authorative text, and an accessible opening up of techniques and recipes. Here, Georgina demonstrates how she cooks Grilled Flatbreads, Sliced Steak with Baba Ghanoush, a recipe that showcases her style.

The best cooks aren't always the best-known cooks.
Take Georgina O'Sullivan, for instance. Despite the fact that she had, at one time, a prominent media profile as Home Market manager for Bord Bia, many people would struggle to tell you where she cooks today.

There’s a certain time in the career of the celebrity chef, around about four books and a few tv series in, when somebody - probably his or her agent - says: “Why don’t you Do Italian?” These books are often met with derision, except by those fans who buy them for that one recipe for pasta al forno, and then the book lives out its life sitting on the shelf.

Campagne in Kilkenny seemed to arrive fully formed when it opened in 2008 – in the midst of an international financial collapse – and it’s a measure of the sure-footed vision of Garrett Byrne and Brid Hannon that the room today feels as fresh as it did seven years ago. It’s one of those restaurants I always feel like dressing up a little bit for, not because the service is in the least bit formal or stuffy, but because it’s such a great place to be and I always look forward to going there.
 

We need to learn Italian when it comes to protecting our infrastructure, especially in our rural areas.

Take the plight of the rural post offices. Fewer customers. Fewer letters. Reduced revenue. It looks – to a Dublin-based auditor – like a no-brainer: shut up shop. So, let's learn Italian, and get a workable, radical and sustainable solution instead of shutting up shop.

There is a brilliance in Conor Dempsey's cooking, a luminosity that shines a light not only the ingredients he has deftly chosen and cooked in each dish, but which especially marks out the flavours with which he has dressed the ingredients that comprise each plate in Amuse, his Dawson Street restaurant.

Opening any restaurant is a risky affair. Opening a restaurant in the car park of a shopping centre with a car wash as a neighbour on one side and a fast food restaurant on the other side might seem like inviting failure, never mind just taking a risk.

Many people will already know about Delahunt, on Camden Street, Dublin 2.

Their story has been told many times at this stage: the narrative about how the premises has been painstakingly restored into a beautiful dining space, by a plucky restaurateur named Darren Free who bought the building from NAMA.

And you will know already that, in a previous life, the building was a famous old off-licence called Carville’s and, going further back, that the original Delahunt was an opulent food emporium mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Powered by the global success of kimchi, Korean food is making a swift and steady assault on Western palates. In this issue of TAKEAWAY we look at the singularities of Korean cooking and talk to some of the major players in Ireland.

Jordan Bourke will be giving a demo in Ballymaloe this Saturday, 10th October... more details

www.jordanbourke.com

www.hophouse.ie

Dr Frank Cullen, Head of School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology at D.I.T. wrote to us with a lengthy retort to Gary O'Hanlon's Kitchen Mechanics series.
It's not possible to print the entire piece on the web, so we have edited Dr Cullen's piece.