My Food Heroes Come to the Kerrygold LitFest

One of the most exciting parts of the Kerrygold LitFest is getting to bring absolute food heroes of mine here to Ballymaloe. Some are less well-known to many here in Ireland, but who are living legends in their fields, so I want to take a little time to properly introduce them to you.

This is a once in a life time opportunity to see Diana Kennedy (do read all about my visit to her in Mexico last year), who is, I'm sure she won't mind me telling you 90 this year. Diana is one of the most iconic food writers in the world, branded the Julia Child of Mexican cooking, having written the standard works on Mexican food and has been decorated for her services by the Mexican government. She's electric, she has such a presence and a wealth of knowledge to share. She doesn't do cookery demonstrations any more, so we were very fortunate to persuade her to come all the way over from Mexico to join us. Don't miss her, rush to the website and book now.

STOP PRESS - news just in, Diana has just won the James Beard Life Time Achievement Award! We are soooo delighted for her!

Maggie Beer is a well-known Australian chef, she has written nine books, has her own TV series as well as making appearances on the Australian Masterchef. She is the incredible woman behind the verjuice revival and has established in Australia a similar thing to what we have here at Ballymaloe: she's all about simplicity and great produce. Don't miss her. She will be involved directly in two events at Litfest: as Guest Chef for Saturday lunch in Ballymaloe House (now sold out) and doing a Cookery Demonstration on Sunday at the Ballymaloe Cookery School for which there are still a few places left.

We all know that Middle Eastern cuisine is hot right now, due to the Ottolenghi effect (his demo and pop up dinner are completely sold out, but there is still room in the Grain Store to hear him speak, along with Sami Tamimi and Ariana Bundy). 

Whilst you'll all no doubt be familiar with the names of the Ottolenghi boys, you might not know Ariana, author of the simply beautiful book Pomegranates and Roses, who I especially invited to give us a taste of exquisite Persian food. She will be doing a fragrant Cookery Demonstration alongside our own Rory O'Connell on Saturday afternoon at the Cookery School.

This is only a tantalising taste of the multitude of demonstrations, workshops, talks, meals and readings that we have planned for the weekend of the Kerrygold Ballymaloe LitFest of Food and Wine, we look forward to seeing you on the weekend of the 16th of May.

Diana Kennedy, the Doyenne of Mexican Food: A Long-Promised Visit

Diana Kennedy arrived to collect us from our little hotel near Zicateuro in the state of Michoacan in Mexico in her aged Nissan truck, a feisty 89-year-old who on her own admission doesn't suffer fools gladly. No power steering here, we were flabbergasted by her sheer physical strength as she turned this trusty old vehicle with 12 inch wide tyres in an impossibly awkward space, Diana was not to be defeated and off we sped up the bumpy cobbled road to her little farm, a biological preserve she has created on seven hectares gradually acquired over 35 years.

She is a truly remarkable woman who has created a body of work on Mexican food of such importance and integrity that she has been awarded the highest honor given to foreigners by the Mexican government, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, for her work of disseminating Mexican culture through its foods. There have been numerous other awards from gastronomic institutions all over the world and an OBE from Queen Elizabeth for her contribution to strengthening cultural relations between Mexico and the United Kingdom.

Diana, originally from Essex was first introduced to Mexico by her husband Paul Kennedy, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in the 1970's.

We are welcomed up the stone steps into her beautiful, rambling house built on several levels around the huge boulders of the hillside, the atmosphere is gentle and relaxing, lots of timber, book-filled shelves, simple antique and craft furniture and a splendid collection of utilitarian pottery from all over Mexico.

Diana's kitchen is so beautiful, long horizontal timber windows overlooking the outdoor eating area with wood-burning ovens and a char-grill. The dresser is laden with beautiful pots and casuelas, well-used and much loved. There's a tiled 'peninsula' in the kitchen with several gas jets and pots and jars full of intriguing ingredients and utensils, lots of assorted wooden chopping boards and blue enamel spoons. Along the walls and overhead, there's a pleasing collection of saucepans, sieves and other Mexican utensils including a Molina for frothing up hot chocolate.

We've been invited to join Diana for comida, the traditional Mexican main meal usually eaten at 3pm. First we have a relaxing beer and catch up, it's been several years since we met, conversation ranges from Diana's research for her last book on the food of Oaxaca, a province we both know and love, to the myth about fat, and the preservation of her jotters which contain the notes from her travels through Mexican villages and the recipes she has collected from cooks throughout the country over a period of 35 years., a priceless resource which will now be preserved.

Our feast started with a rich yellow ochre squash blossom soup with roast poblano chili and squash blossom on top. This was followed by a delicious chicken cooked in pulque with rice and pickles.

Next we had a nopale leaf salad with lettuce from the garden. Nopale are huge cactus leaves as big as a table tennis bat, which are trimmed of thorns and cooked to tenderness.

Finally a selection of sweetmeats, all homemade: peaches from the garden, green mango, squash, figs, all preserved. Diana loves to cook and does everything from scratch.

The coffee, served in pretty china cups, is home grown, Arabica beans, fermented, roasted and freshly ground.

After comida, Diana took us for a walk around the vegetable garden and farm, the biodiversity on this little farm is truly astonishing, vegetables and fruit even watercress, asparagus and raspberries beside loquats, guavas, and a variety of citrus.

Next day, we went with Diana to the bustling market in Zitacuero, I bought several bunches of beautiful cinnamon and a couple of casuelas, Numerous types of chilies and dried shrimps, sacks of beans, corn-fed chickens, freshly butchered meat and every imaginable type of offal were piled high as well as fresh vegetables and fruit, Mexican herbs and spices. Other stallholders sold kitchen utensils, fresh fish, a variety of bread and freshly squeezed juices.

The comida that day started with a salad of leaves from the garden with little foie gras croutons and sublime Huitlacoche crepes and sweetmeats once more followed by excellent coffee.

Diana has a solar plate warmer to heat her plates and another to heat up her kettle, it's several thousand feet above sea level, so it takes ages!

We ran out of time because we had to get back to Mexico City before dark, we didn't realise that we were in the middle of narcoland, a totally no-go area for Americans, so no driver would agree to drive after dark, aaaaah!

We stayed at the airport Camino Real so we could catch our 8am flight to Oacaca and another adventure.

Sizzling Chilis and Aromatic Spices at LitFest

As you have seen from my blog over the past months I love to travel, and an integral part of every journey are the new foods and flavours I discover along the way. My recent trips have taken me to the aromatic marketsof Laos and the vibrant coast of Mexico, eating food in the paddy fields of Sri Lanka and the mountains of India. So I am delighted that we will be hosting a number of experts in far-flung cuisines bringing some spice to the LitFest proceedings!

We have Madhur Jaffrey, grand-dame of Indian cuisine, a long-time colleague of mine, giving a demonstration at the cookery school on Saturday morning. Her events tend to sell-out fast, so grab a ticket while you still can. On Sunday she is giving a talk in The Grain Store on our love of curry.

Then we have David Thompson, world-renowned expert on Thai food, and chef-patron of the world’s first Michelin Starred Thai restaurant, will be giving a cookery demonstration on Sunday morning. The air will be fragrant with the scents of chili, lemongrass and galangal and participants are guaranteed to be wowed at the final tasting! David is also giving a talk on Thai street food in the afternoon in The Grain Store which is sure to be a feast for the eyes and ears.

And if you're a fan of spicy food, but never know what wines to pair with it, then wine expert MaryDowey will demystify us on Sunday afternoon.

Also on Sunday, respected authority on Mediterranean food, ClaudiaRoden will be bringing us some Spanish sunshine, as she discusses her most recent book. 

Let's hope we have some sunshine for the weekend too! 

Watching the Sunset in Punta Zicatela

A second installment from my trip to Mexico...

How can I possibly find the vocabulary to describe where I am, sitting on the terrace of a thatched palapa overlooking the Pacific ocean just north of Puerto Escondido in Mexico? There are huge craggy rocks and several types of cactus growing out of  them, and the sort of evergreen undergrowth indigenous to this coast.

It’s maybe five or six minutes from sunset, the sky has taken on a rosy glow, the sea is crashing underneath, the waves rolling onto the white sand underneath. It’s a blissfully peaceful moment, almost spiritual – the house goes quite, no one wants to speak for fear of breaking the spell.

Tim is swaying quietly in the hammock, I’m on one of the low wooden chairs, barefoot, just watching mesmerized as the golden ball of sun sinks slowly over the sea and disappears below the horizon like a giant free-range egg yolk. The little fishing boats are speeding towards the harbour. The pelicans are flying slowly home to roost by the lagoon. The colours of the sky and the clouds are changing from burnished orange to dusky pink, gold, to bluey greys and eventually almost charcoal. Suddenly, bats fly out from under the eves in their hundreds, like tiny little birds. When the glow of light leaves the sky the cicadas start to sing in the undergrowth and a little gecko (tiny lizard) clucks as it races up the wall. How can such a tiny lizard make so much noise? I don’t feel like moving.

In a natural landscape like this one can understand how ancient Mayans worshipped the sun. 

Winter Sun in Puerto Escondido, Mexico

We've had a wonderfully relaxing week here at Punta Zicatela doing virtually nothing except reading , swimming and chilling out, I've had several delicious massages and one long walk. Mind you that was a complete endurance test, I'd forgotten that Rodolfo's idea of a short walk is a 6 hour and a half hour tramp over the mountains! The scenery was of course spectacular, mango , papaya, bananas, and lots of coffee bushes, huge tree ponseittia, tall whispering bamboos and a million vanilla vines romping up any available tree.

We saw women with their children around them picking coffee into baskets and the men processing and raking it out in the sun to dry, you can't imagine how much work goes into our cup of coffee and how little money they get paid for it.

The walk ended in a village called Santa Maria Tiltepec, We, at least I, tottered to the one and only pub, cum village shop cum radio station where as we arrived the man was announcing that a donkey had just been found and could be claimed at the back of the pub, The cold can of beer he handed me was one of the best things I've ever tasted !

We were quite a curiosity in the village and a girl got her pet parrot to walk up my arm and perch on my head. Afterwards we went along to a local potters house where Rodolfo collected two huge preordered terracotta comales and braziers.

They insisted on feeding all 10 of us in the courtyard of their family home,they cooked hand made tortillas which they had ground from their own corn, We ate them with beans, again home grown and a volcanic salsa made from tomatoes roasted on the comal with tiny rare chillies called tuzta. There were chickens running around so they broke a few eggs into a polystyrene tray,whisked them with a spoon and then cooked it like a flat omelette on the hot comale over a timber fire.

We ate it greedily with the tortillas and beans, simple , delicious and all from that place shared with such generosity of spirit.

The town of Puerto Escondido is crawling with tourists and surfers so we don't go down very much , I'm made a few forays to the Mercado, once with Rodolfo and once with Ana's husband Hugo, it was brilliant to have an interpreter, I'm normally at a huge disadvantage not being able to identify lots of strange ingredients or to ask what to do with them. With Hugo, I picked up courage to buy some of the scary dried fish being sold by several stalls and the indigenous woman I bought it from, explained how to eat it flaked on tostadas with tomato, coriander, lime and lots of finely chopped harbenero. We slathered guacamole on the tostadas and piled this mixture on top and it was a great hit.

On another trip I bought a molinillo for frothing hot chocolate, some tiny dried camerones, dried hibiscus flowers to make the Hamica drink and a clay comal to cook tortillas on.

Today is our last full day here so we packed a lot in, To start the day Rodolfo had arranged for us to leave before dawn to drive in convoy to see tiny turtles being released into the sea in a turtle preserve in Chila.
It was an extraordinary thing to experience, turtles come back to the place they were born to lay their eggs, each turtle lays between 80 and 150 eggs in a nest in the sand, then they cover them up and go back to the sea never to return. There is a long tradition of eating turtle eggs in the state of Oaxaca. Many species of turtles are now seriously endangered so the practice is banned to try to build up the numbers once again however there's a lucrative black market in the soft shelled turtle eggs and many people are very poor so it's a battle of wits between the poachers and the rangers.

In about 30 days the little turtles start to hatch out in the warm sand and in nature start to scuttle towards the sea. Apparently only about one in 100 survive because they are gobbled up by the sea gulls and other predators.

When we arrived at the Turtle Santuary they got us to line up about 10 ft from the waters edge, they placed a little turtle gently into each of our palms. On the count of three, we were allowed to put them down onto the sand. They instinctively started to scurry towards the sea with their tiny flapping flippers. It was so funny like a little Turtle Derby but I felt sooo privileged to witness it.

Just after we had released them a flock of pelicans hovered overhead, we were all traumatised but apparently the pelicans don't fancy them so there was a sigh of relief all round.

Keep wondering how my little fella is doing, he was quite a lively little chap !

It was bright by then so we raced off to Las Negras to join an early morning bird-watching trip in a flat bottomed boat the Manialtepec Lagoon. It was absolutely fantastic, we saw over 100 different species of birds, Michael Malone who has been running these trips for over 32 years had a set of brilliant binoculars for everyone so we had terrific sightings.

By about 10 o'clock we had reached the barrier where the lagoon meets the sea. A local family had set up a little cafe in a palapa on the sand.

They served the fresh fish and shrimps from the lagoon all absolutely freshly cooked on a huge comal over a wood fire. Closeby, a chap was chopping the top off green coconuts and serving them with a straw, delicious refreshing juice which apparently helps to wash the parasites out of your system !

After our little feast we raced back through the lagoon and back to la Punta for a swim and to watch the sunset. We managed to get some lobster so I cooked dinner, they all loved it particularly the potato salad.
Rodolfo arranged for their cook Angelina to show us how to make a special type of Tamales Amarillo de Pollo wrapped in banana leaves for our last breakfast, she used 32 guachillo and 7 coseteno chillies in the salsa, it was fantastically delicious and surprisingly not too hot.

We had a last swim, packed up and are now on our way to Mexico City where we will spend a night before coming home.