Monday 27 October 2014

Harvest Home ! Lemon Cucumber Soup

Last January, I was lucky enough to take a Food Safari for work purposes to San Francisco organised by the Irish Food Board.

It was a fascinating & inspiring trip and I bought back lots of ideas.

One of the things I saw were cute round Lemon Cucumbers - and I decided to have a go growing some this Summer !

They grew pretty well and at the end of the season, when I was clearing my VegTrug for my winter crops, I was left with a few too many (slightly woody skinned !!) fruits to eat in salads !


So I decided, rather than waste them, to try making a Lemon Cucumber Soup instead!

The Lemon Cucumbers were peeled & chopped, combined in simmering in chicken stock with some of my home-grown garlic, chopped chives & Apache chillies and then whizzed with a stick blender to make a fairly thick but very tasty soup.

A much better result for the final harvest than just putting them on the compost heap !






Saturday 25 October 2014

Meatopia Tobacco Dock September 2014

Time is whistling past & winter is rapidly making her presence felt, but I did want to look back to the warmer first weekend of September when we went to Meatopia - a festival of meat cuisine held at Tobacco Dock  !

Working in the meat industry this was part work & part a fun day out.

It was a gathering of well know and up & coming chefs all show casing the best in modern meat cooking - lots of smoking of meats featuring too !






We headed out in to the slightly urban grunge, atmospheric old warehouse clutching our "Meat Bucks" - tokens you had to buy so the individual stall holders didn't have to handle hard cash - and sampling our way around the diverse selection of dishes.

Some of the dishes were delicious, some trying too hard & just ending up as pretentious, some zinging with flavour, some traditional and some ultra trendy.







But on all it did prove the age old truth that unless you start with decent quality cuts, no about of fancy concepts or ingredients will turn it into tender meat (short of very slow cooking !!)  
Some meats we tried were just plain tough and fatty & no amount of fancy ingredients could disguise this fatal flaw !

Still we had some favourites, enjoyed the buzzy vibe and all in all had a great time !


Friday 3 October 2014

Foodie Cauldron

After 30 years working in the Food Industry I decide it was about time I had place to record my foodie adventures !