Hurray An Award!

We were absolutely thrilled to win Cookery School of the Year, at the glamorous Good Food Ireland Award ceremony at The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin on Tuesday last.

It was a lovely surprise and a very welcome boost in this challenging economic climate - made all the more special when I got a congratulatory hug from our Taoiseach, Enda Kenny.

During the week the Restaurant Association of Ireland highlighted the fact that there is a crisis in the industry because of the shortage of trained chefs. So this is terrific news for all our students looking for exciting jobs after the course. The January 12 Week Certificate Course is booking really well, fortunately it's now looked on as an investment, because people know they'll learn the skills they need to earn their living in the food industry.

Image credit: Denis Minihane for the Irish Examiner.

Ahilya Fort - India

It must be something to do with getting older – for virtually the first time in my life I'm actually spending a week in the same place. A holiday for me usually means darting from one place to another, spending no more than three nights in any one place. This time we’re in rural India having returned for the second time to a small heritage hotel overlooking the Narmada River called Ahilya Fort. Its owner, Prince Richard Holkar, is a direct descendant of Queen Ahilya Bai Holkar and divides his time between India, Paris and California. 

The hotel is perched on top of the fort on a hilltop about 200 ft above the river. There's endless activity on the ghats below, it starts at dawn and goes on well into the night with all sorts of excitement, both men and women come to bathe, say their prayers and make offerings to their mother river. 

All day long, women in brightly coloured saris wash their clothes on the water’s edge, they bash them with a timber bat and then lather them up with lots of suds all of which goes into the river. Despite all that, it is virtually un-polluted. They swim in their saris and then hold them up to dry in the warm breeze. Pilgrims bathe in the river to wash their sins away and children splash and dive to their hearts content. Holy men with long beards and saffron robes wander up and down paying homage at the many shrines on the ghats and at the temple.

There are lots of little gaily painted boats taking people backwards and forwards across the river to villages on the other side where they grow cotton and make handmade bricks from clay and cow dung, much of the cooking is still done on open fires over wood and dried cow pats.

Ahilya Fort only has 14 rooms, e

very one quite different, and many have little verandas overlooking the Narmada River, the temple or the garden.

There's a constant stream of interesting people coming and going so each meal is an adventure, particularly as there is no dining room as such, so the location of each meal is a surprise, and could be on the terrace, by the pool, in the inner courtyard, or in a little open thatched house in the organic vegetable gardens.

There’s a rich bird life, a paradise for twitchers. There's a fantastic variety of birds, apparently there are over 3,000 species in India as opposed to around 250 in the geographical area of the British Isles. Little chipmunks chirp and dart along narrow ledges.

Goats and cows amble idly around as they do along the main street of Maheshwar and through the market which I always check out when I am on holidays. 

The town itself is throbbing with lots of shops selling the richly coloured silk Maheshwari saris, hand-woven strand by strand in the local workshops.

In the early morning while it is still cool we sometimes take a boat and float down the river to watch the sun rise. And then in evening when the temperature drops again, people go out in gaily painted boats to watch the sun set behind the Maheshwar temple. As soon as darkness falls, hundreds of deyas are floated down the river, little leaf or paper bowls with a candle flickering inside, drifting downstream carrying a wish or the memory of a loved one. It is a breathtakingly beautiful and memorable place.

A Passage to India

 It's so lovely to be back in India, the characteristic smell when you arrive into the airport, women in beautiful saris, and other types of traditional dress. All the officials still in khaki uniforms, there seem to be millions of them, our tickets are checked five times on the way to our transfer plane...

Out of Indore airport into the crazy traffic of an Indian city. We are headed to Maheshwar, which is well off the beaten track, and two and half hours away from the airport. We drive past the slum of corrugated tin shacks and tiny mobile shops. There are people everywhere, yellow and green tuc-tucs and scooters weaving around them and the constant noise of horns. 

The lorries are painted in intricate patterns with BLOW HORN emblazoned in large letters on the back. They carry huge loads, sometimes covered in hessian which billows out over the top of the truck. There are a million motorbikes often with the entire family on board, the women sit side saddle in their saris and the youngest member on the handlebars. I've just seen a long bamboo ladder being carried between two bicycles, the two cyclists pedalling in unison like a stretch tandem. Flat carts on gaily painted wheels, piled high with sticks of sugarcane stacked for juice, coconuts, pomegranates… 

There is pottery drying in the sun by the roadside, men making bricks, little stalls selling a variety of nuts. Everyone is on a mission trying to earn a living in a trillion innovative ways.

There are more traditional forms of transport too. Cattle carts and water buffalo. Some cows with their horns painted. Closer to Maheshwar we see a herd of haughty camels walking along the roadside with their turbaned herder. In the countryside and villages the women are all wearing saris, and some older men are still wearing the dhoti. But in the cities many are opting for western clothes.

Indians are very devout and worship a million gods, so there are a myriad of temples along the road, some just tiny grottos, others huge and elaborately decorated and garlanded. These also create opportunities for others to sell marigold garlands, incense and other offerings. Everywhere is a riot of color.

There's a wide diversity of crops, every scrap of land is used for cotton, sugarcane, papayas, and mangoes which are at their juicy best during the monsoon season. The cherimoya season has just finished but there are lots of dates and chestnuts which they roast until charred black then split.

The sheer regional diversity of the food in India makes it intriguing and deliciously rewarding but difficult to define. From the rich meaty dishes of the Moguls in the North to the superb variety of vegetarian and fish dishes, the rice, breads, the dahls, fruits, pickles and relishes.

Religion plays a major part in people’s diets and is considered to be as critical to the mind as the body. India’s Sikh, Parsi and Christian communities have little or no restrictions on what they eat. Hindus do not eat beef as the cow is sacred and revered. Traditionally they avoid foods that are thought to inhibit spiritual or physical development: some devout Hindus also avoid onions and garlic as do the Jains who believe they heat the blood and inflame sexual desire. The Jains are also strict vegetarians and there are rigid restrictions to avoid injury even to insects so they don’t eat any vegetable that comes from below the ground for fear of potential damage during cultivation and harvesting. Buddhists are mostly vegetarian and pork is strictly taboo for Muslims many of who also avoid alcohol. Many Indians also fast once and sometimes twice a week or longer to gain spiritual rewards and also to better understand the suffering of the poor. Ayurveda, the ancient science of health and longevity also influences food customs. The whole mix makes for a fascinating and diverse food culture which I always relish the opportunity to explore and learn more about on our travels.

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.

And the winner is...

Guess what? My latest book, 30 Years at Ballymaloe, won the Avonmore Cookbook of the Year at the Bord Gais Irish Book Awards last week.

It was actually a total surprise.The whole thing was televised, and very glitzy. In fact it was such a surprise that I didn't even have a speech prepared, but I blustered through it. I do want to say special thanks to Avonmore and Bord Gais for sponsoring these awards.

I was in very good company: Rachel’s Everyday Kitchen and Catherine Fulvio’s The Weekend Chef were also shortlisted as were Neven Maguire’s The Nation’s Favourite Food, Kevin Dundon’s Modern Irish Food  and Ross Lewis for his beautifully produced Chapter One – An Irish Food Story.

The other bit of excitement we had this week Rachel and I were on Brendan O'Connor on Saturday Night, our first interview together! 

If you’re doing your Christmas shopping at the moment, you can order a copy of my book and I will sign and put a special personal message in it for you too. Or of course you can get it on Amazon!

We're running a great competition which is open to the 16th December - just name the year that a number of images featuring me in my trade mark glasses were taken, and win one of 30 two-and-a-half day courses here at the Ballymaloe Cookery School. For more details see our website. 

And don't forget Rory O'Connell's Master It, which I personally think is the cookbook of the year. Yes, he’s my brother and you may well be thinking ‘well she would say that, wouldn’t she?’ but that’s what I truly believe. His long overdue book is a real gem.

And on the subject of books, I’d also I'd like to draw your attention to a semi-secret gem that you might not have come across yet, The RainbowWay: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood, a new book by Lucy Pearce, a long-time friend of the family.

Sicily October 2013

I'm sitting in a rattan chair on a balcony in Italy in the misty morning light overlooking the Aeolian sea. The birds are singing gustily in the lemon trees below. Somewhere in the distance church bells are ringing and I can hear the occasional shot from a hunter's gun.

The balcony at Rocca delle Tre Contrade villa, with Mount Etna in the background.

I'm in Sicily, staying with friends in a beautiful villa in the shadow of Mount Etna. I'm having one of those rare moments of blissful contentment.

Last night we had a wonderful dinner which included both ricotta and wild green fritters, and a risotto with porcini mushrooms collected on the slopes of Mount Etna, as well as parmigiana and a local sausage made with pork and Parmesan in a Marsala and orange sauce. For pudding we had the most sublime crème caramel I've ever tasted, made by a past student Natalie to a recipe from one of the owners Marco Scire. He and Jon bought this villa in an advanced state of dereliction in 2006 and have since restored it to beyond its former glory.

Later in the day we piled into the farm car and wound our way up through the Etna villages to a vineyard between the villages of Passopisciaro and Randazzo, owned by Alice Bonaccorsi and her husband Rosario. Because so many people nowadays can no longer drink the mass produced wines without a reaction, we have a particular interest in the natural wine movement. Etna wines in Sicily are really causing a stir, Jon and Marco are particularly knowledgeable on the subject and they've brought us to visit one of the small vineyards whose wine they really admire. this is possibly the most beautiful vineyard I've ever visited anywhere in the world. The indigenous vines, some over 80 years old are planted on tiered terraces held in place by loose lava rock walls. The soil in the vicinity of Etna is incredibly fertile and the biodiversity is startling. Here and there an ancient olive trees  laden with ripening fruit. There's a white mulberry and Spanish chestnut covered with prickly husks and an occasional walnut tree. Cerise coloured prickly pears are ripe for picking on the cactus and the pomegranate is also dripping with fruit: it feels like the Garden of Eden.

It's harvest time, the pickers are chatting away happily as they snip the last grapes from the Nerello Mascalese vines. The vineyard is alive with bird song and the rosemary and wild thyme are buzzing with bees. Alice points out the edible bitter greens as we walk along the ancient lava paths: wild fennel, sorrel, old lady legs, chickweed, and something called cannelli.  All these are a treasured part of the Sicilian diet, and are  incredibly nutritious, eaten wilted as a vegetable, with pasta, in fritters, sauces. They can be an acquired taste for those of us for whom bitter is not part of our flavor palette but I absolutely love them.

The Bonaccorsis keep a few sheep and goats to clean the vineyards after picking, no mown and manicured vineyards here but a reassuring feeling that they are really farming in harmony with nature, so rare nowadays. The Val Ceresa Etna wines from their small vineyard have already made their way onto the wine lists of some of the smartest restaurants in the world, as a growing public craves something other than the five or six favoured noble grape varieties. At last there more people are beginning to truly value authenticity, craft and tradition in wine-making.

Lunch at a little local restaurant in Randazzo, Trattoria San Georgio & Il Drago, opposite a twelfth century convent with lava rock window surrounds. The food was fantastically good and authentic. We had asked the owner to bring us something local, to which he replied, 'we only have local so how can I choose?' He then proceeded to bring dish after dish, first an anti pasta with about seven choices including cardoons, bitter greens, cured black pig ham, local cheese, zucchini and ricotta frittata, stuffed zucchini blossoms, roast purple cauliflower with chilli and olives.

This was followed by tonnarelli pasta with briony and fungi di feila, local wild mushrooms roasted in the wood oven. None of us had room for pudding but there was fresh fruit and new season walnuts from their trees. It was a feast, and I kept wondering how Sicilian visitors would fare if they called in to a random restaurant in a remote village in Ireland!

The next day, we drove to Catania, a baroque city completely rebuilt in the 1600's after lava from Mount Etna engulfed the city to a depth of 15 to 20 meters. It was fascinating to see the remains of a Roman amphitheatre under one of the main squares.

This region had been the bread basket of Sicily. Up to the 1930's wine was shipped in cask from the port of Catania to France where it was blended with French wines. 

We strolled through the old city admiring the elaborate facades and vaulted doorways. The shops have a charming old fashioned feel with goods displayed in little glass cases on the wall outside. There are markets here and there, and little Vespa vans parked on street corners selling fruit and vegetables. 

We were on a mission to find the best arancini, crispy rice balls with a gloopy texture flavoured with all manner of things from ragu to pistachios. Jon brought us to Savia restaurant, an institution in Catania, opposite the Botanic Gardens. Long polished glass cases piled high with Sicilian pastries, marzipan fruits, cannoli, nougat.....

Some of the delicious selection of pastries at Savia in Catania

At the other end there was a classic Sicilian tavola caldo with a selection of arancini in a variety of shapes, the classic were round and as large as my fist, arancini with ragu are cone shaped, spinach arancini are also round but are easy to distinguish because they are green. Catanese with aubergine are oval.......

We ordered a selection of three and a faggotini, a tender bread parcel stuffed with aubergine, tomato and cheese. The arancini are really substantial and filling, and are eaten out of your hand wrapped in a napkin.

The drink of choice seemed to be iced tea with a dollop of lemon granita so I had one of those and loved it. I couldn't decide which of the arancini was my favourite, they were all good, but I think maybe the spinach. We certainly didn't need a dessert but decided to order a  coffee and almond granita, all in the way of research!

Water ices are an excellent way to round off a robust meal, in Sicily the texture tends to be smoother and less granular than  one expects a granita to be. Granita is also the breakfast of choice for many Sicilians with a soft bun: a perfect start to a sizzling hot day.

MAD food Symposium, Copenhagen

I recently attended the MAD Food Symposium in Copenhagen. The word mad means food in Danish and the theme of this year’s Symposium, held in a red circus tent, was GUTS. This was interpreted in a variety of ways from intestines to raw courage by the speakers. There were many dramatic moments throughout the two days.

The symposium was launched on a stage that represented a Danish forest woodland scene – trees and logs and a carpet of grass and wild plants. A whole carcass of a Gloucester Old Spot pig dangled by the back legs from a chain in the centre of the stage, which gave us a hint that this year’s MAD Symposium was going to be a visceral two days of raw emotions and painful honesty.

I was almost the only white haired woman there, that is apart from Diana Kennedy, the feisty 90 year old cookbook author and noted environmentalist who gave a spirited talk about her life collecting and documenting recipes around remote villages in Mexico for over 60 years. Virtually everyone else was young, so many brilliantly crazy people: chefs, farmers, journalists, politicians, scientists, food writers, some of the brightest minds, all united by a love and passion for food and food issues.

With Ben Reade, a past Cookery School student, head of R& D at the Nordic Food Lab, and the Butter Vikings who we are hoping will join us for the next LitFest

David Chang from Momofuko in New York who co-curated the symposium with René Redzepi and his team, launched the event by telling us about his gutsy decision to open Momofuko in 2004. He introduced Dario Cecchini, the legendary Tuscan butcher famous for being able to recite Dante spontaneously as he butchers his carcass like poetry. He strode onto the stage dressed in red, green and white, knife in hand, with his wife Kim,  and told us the story of his family who have been butchers for over 250 years. He started to learn his trade in his early teens, but didn’t get a taste of beef a la fiorentina until he was 18, as butcher’s families and children traditionally ate the offal and less expensive cuts. He spoke dreamily of the peasant dishes his mother and grandmother used to make and as he did so, he gently slit the stomach of the pig and the guts tumbled out in a neat bundle. He transferred them to the butcher's block, then removed the liver, the heart and the kidneys, all the while talking about the noble craft, the importance of rearing, feeding and treating the animal humanely and being grateful for the gift of meat. All of this in front of an audience of over 600 people. It may sound macabre but it was really beautiful, one felt that the pig was having an honourable end and was being treated with respect, and was meant to promote conscious carnivorism and respect for animals.

Attendees enjoying lunch. With Nordic pears and plums there for the taking in a hollowed-out tree trunk in the foreground.

Over two riveting days different speakers (more than two dozen in all) explored the meaning of GUTS.  Margot Henderson from Rochelle Canteen in London and Barbara Lynch chef-owner of eight successful restaurants in Boston, spoke of the guts and courage it took to establish themselves as female chefs in a largely male dominated culinary climate, what Fergus Henderson (Margot’s husband  and beloved chef owner of St John Restaurant) refers to as ‘blokedom.’ They both got a standing ovation, as did Indian activist Vandana Shiva who has for many years been a stalwart champion of biodiversity, conservation and of small farmers around the world. As ever, she spoke eloquently and passionately about the myth of the ‘green revolution’ and “the dangers of a world where five companies control all life on earth.” She reminded us that the meaning of seed in virtually every language is to renew, so in that sense GM (Genetically Modified) seeds are not seeds at all because they are manufactured to deconstruct at the end of every growing season to prevent seed saving, so that the companies can sell the seeds to the farmers and create a system of dependence. She spoke of the re-colonisation that’s happening in Africa at the hands of the biotech companies and the 250,000 farmer suicides in India that have been the result of these policies.

When ten-year-old Martha Payne, walked on stage the audience went wild, so much so that she was almost overwhelmed. She started writing her blog ‘NeverSeconds’ when she was just nine years old and gained instant notoriety and started a school lunch revolution. Her Dad, a sheep farmer from Scotland delivered her presentation as she stood shyly by his side: beautiful powerful stuff. When her head mistress banned her from blogging, her farewell post got over 11,000 emails of support in response. Her chosen charity Mary’s Meals has raised over €74,000 for kids in African villages.And there was so much more...

It was a truly memorable event.