Rocking Grass Archives: Food
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15 June 2007
Irish Stew
I’m not sure how the Irish Stew came to be labelled with “Irish”. At home, it was just stew, and it rather confused me later on to find references to it by nationality, as though stews elsewhere were different. Stew is also a winter sort of a dish, or at least autumn, but it’s a […]
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14 June 2007
Yeast
Those who have been monitoring my various online adventures and/or who know me in real life know that yeast cookery is one of my taller hobbyhorses. In the past, this used to mostly concern its (lack of) availability in Ireland. Understand: yeast baking to me very nearly represents the pinnacle of comfort food. When I […]
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11 June 2007
The Search For Anchovy Essence
Searching for a given obscure ingredient in Ireland can be a very difficult proposition. Dublin isn’t a big city, and there are a limited number of shops, but going through all of them on foot, searching the shelves, and asking shop assistants who don’t necessarily recognise what you’re hunting for, would probably take weeks. Given […]
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6 June 2007
The Desirous Pie
Pies were not something I was much exposed to, growing up. There were apple pies, of course, or apple tarts as they were called, rhubarb tarts, and occasional forays into other fruit pies, but generally speaking, the only savoury one I knew of was steak and kidney, and I thought I didn’t like kidney. So […]
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5 June 2007
How Irish Food Has Changed
Irish food has changed, to an incredible degree, over the last twenty years. This is a topic I’ll be returning to often, because it fascinates me. I was brought up with what seems to have been an unusually large range of food, probably because my mother had a respectable collection of cookery books, and collected […]
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17 December 2006
Finnish Gingerbread Biscuits
These are one half of the essential seasonal baking duality found all over Finland in December, the other half being plum tarts. Together these two sets of baked goods occupy the same place on the Finnish tables as mince pies do in Ireland, with the difference that more people like them. In Finland you can […]
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6 November 2006
Samhain dinner
I had one and a half kilos of boneless beef rib, one butternut squash which has been sitting in the vegetable rack for over a month (but as we know, squashes are immortal, so no need to worry about its quality), some parsnips, onions and mushrooms, and a bag of strawberries frozen when they were […]
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27 August 2006
Review: O’Connell’s (in Ballsbridge)
It is an ill thing to attend a feast of any sort when one is suffering from the pangs of cold. Were I a professional restaurant reviewer, it would be an even more unfortunate thing for the eaterie in which I would find my ailing self. A cold wreaks havoc to the senses: not only […]
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9 August 2006
Karelian hotpot
My grandmother is from Karelia, one of the areas of Finland that were lost to the then Soviet Union after the Second World War. That area had, and still has, among the descendants of the refugees and in those parts of the “tribal” area that remained within Finnish rule, an extremely rich culinary culture. It […]
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18 July 2006
Review: Harry’s Polish Menu
For some reason, when I think of Harry’s Bar and Café in Dun Laoghaire, my mind attempts to insert a projected image of Rick’s Café Americain from Casablanca. The difference here being that as much as I would like to think of Harry’s as the gathering den of the Polish expats in Ireland (which it […]