Gone Fishing

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Last weekend we were in County Kerry for the Dingle Food and Wine Festival. (So much about that sentence makes me happy.) On Sunday morning we were invited to join some fellow foodies on a fishing trip, so six of us found ourselves gathered in the marina on a foggy morning. We were uncertain. We were wearing layers. Can you fish in the fog, we wondered, such landlubbers were we. This is brilliant weather for fishing, our skipper assured us, sounding nothing like a pirate. (Bill and I had hoped he’d sound a little like a pirate.)

Heading out to sea

We boarded the Sarah Ellie and headed off across the glassy water. We could see the mouth of the bay in the mist, but in a few minutes we were lost in the fog. Our skipper, Paul, killed the engine and gave us a two minute lesson on sea fishing–Let her out, keep your thumb on the spool, then reel her back in a little. Out. In. Keeping her moving.

From the moment the first lure hit the water, our day turned magical. Within seconds Ollie had reeled in a 6kg pollock. It was a stunner of a fish. We were all amazed. Even Paul was amazed. The fish went into the blue fish bucket, and we all set ourselves to fishing, hoping to match Ollie’s catch. In. Out. Keep her moving. A few more pollock came on board. I caught one that weighed few kilograms. We caught lots of mackerel. They all went into the fish bucket, gasping a bit, but shining silver, the mackerel’s backs covered in green and black tiger stripes.

Ollie's prize winning catch

Paul moved the boat to a new location. We all hit twitter with our fish tales. Fishing is fun! Then we fished some more. We threw back tiny mackerel. We sang sea shanties. (Not really, but we should have.) We caught a load of fish.

Bill reels in few mackerel

Gathered around our bucket of fish, we snapped pics of our catch like they were celebrities. That’s deadly, Niall said. Irish slang for great. It was deadly, the deadliest catch! All thanks to our excellent skipper, and some mad, foodie fishing skills. Great job Bill, Ollie, Niall, Aoife, and Ross!

Our catch

We both have fishing in our genes

Back at the marina Paul filleted the fish. Slice in behind the gill, down along the bone. On the mackerel, flip over and repeat, to create a butterfly. On the larger pollocks he cut separate fillets on each side. Ollie’s fish was almost too large for the knife. You can feed ten people off that fish, Paul said. He bagged the fish for us and send us over to the Marina Inn and told us to ask for Darcy.

Paul fillets a mackerel

Fillets of fish

Darcy is the chef at Marina Inn and she prepared some of our fish for lunch. We washed the scales from our hands, and restored ourselves with post-voyage pints of Guinness and Crean’s lager (from Dingle Brewing Company). We shared a starter of tasty mussels in cream sauce. Darcy played a blinder* and served us three fish dishes–fried, beer-battered pollock; pollock with Parmesan cheese crumb; and mackerel with chorizo, potatoes and sun-dried tomatoes. Everything about the fish was great–the texture, the flavor. Eating fish that had been swimming in the ocean not more than 90 minutes before is incredible. I think the mackerel was a favorite–it has a bit more flavor that the pollock. A lunch to remember.

Freshest fish I'll ever eat

Many thanks to Aoife for organizing, and to Paul of Dingle Bay Charters and Darcy at the Marina Inn.

*I’m using Irish slang! It means, performed excellently.

 

Four Years: Looking back

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Today marks our fourth year in Ireland. To commemorate this anniversary, I’ve collected a few of my favorite posts about life on the auld sod.

We arrived with seven suitcases, and shipped four boxes of books. (Three of which arrived.) We just moved house, and I’d say we’re at 50 suitcases worth of belongings now. Seven suitcases were filled with my clothes alone!

6 Oct 2007–We made it

 

4 Feb 2008 Behold the ground hog

Isn’t Groundhog Day a day when everything happens over and over again?

 

19 April 2008 Busy, Busy Week

Can you cross the United States driving only through states that start with a vowel?

 

18 April 2008 Fiesta!

Our weapons: Pork Tamales and homemade corn tortillas with three taco fillings– Pork and Potato, cold chicken salad with chipotle vinaigrette, and shrimp in garlic lime butter.

 

29 May 2008 Tea vs Brown Water

My brewing time is 36 times that of the typical brewing time in my office.

 

25 May2008 Saturday in the Park

…we walked back to the Green, found a sunny spot and lay in the grass.

 

8 June 2008 Long days of summer

In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day.

 

10 Oct 2009 116 Things We Know Now

Number 108–We like mushy peas.

 

20 Feb 2010 Saturday in the Kitchen with Bill 

James [Martin] is a polarizing force in the world of television hosting…

 

3 Jul 2010 Tastes of Home

So, I talk about meat.

 

28 Aug 2010 The Question

We sold a bunch of stuff and gave away stuff and threw away stuff and sent our dog to live in Indiana.

 

27 November 2010 Thanksgiving Distilled

 But cooking a Thanksgiving meal does not Thanksgiving make.

 

3 Dec 2010 Provisions

We’re out of onions now, so Bill says we definitely need to make it to the store tomorrow.

 

Our Journey to Morcilla

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On our first trip to Spain we visited Barcelona. We came home raving about grilled squid.  Next we went to Grenada and Malaga and were introduced to Tinto de Verano. Last year we visited Galicia and experienced Padrón peppers. Common to all our trips was an increasing appreciation for bacalao, an immediate addiction to jamon iberico, and the lovely refrain of “Dos más caña, por favor.”

We were in Madrid for a week at the beginning of the month, and again Spain rocked our culinary world. This time it was the morcilla. Spain’s black pudding.

A morcilla bocadillo

We’ve been on a slow journey toward black pudding. Americans are squeamish about it. I think somewhere in our cultural heritage black pudding was used to separate us from our British overlords forebears. Young children were rocked to sleep at night to their mothers cooing, Aren’t you glad you’re independent of the British Empire, with all that cricket, and royalty, and heavens, they even eat pudding made of blood! As a kid my images of blood pudding were disturbing indeed; knowing only American pudding, I would imagine bowls of cold, congealed, bloody goo.

Those thoughts hadn’t fully left me when we arrived in Ireland, but of course I wanted to engage in the Full Irish Breakfast experience, so I tried the round of black pudding on my plate. It was okay. More like a breakfast sausage patty than a hematoma. Not disgusting, a little bitter. Nothing special. So I ignored black pudding for a while and Bill would buy only white pudding for our (only occasional) fry ups.

Sometimes Bill ordered dishes with black pudding in restaurants–chicken stuffed with French Black pudding at Restaurant 1014; a chorizo, potato, and black pudding starter at The Winding Stair. Those were both tasty dishes, so I decided that black pudding was nice as an ingredient. It was fine in a group of friends, but you wouldn’t really want to hang out.

Then it seems that everyone on twitter started talking about black pudding and I heard tale of creations such as black pudding with chocolate and pistachios. Fellow expats who had once spit out a black pudding canape happily attended a dinner hosted by Clontakilty, a name synonymous with pudding. A black pudding renaissance was underway.

At the O’Brien Chop House in Lismore last Spring, I ordered a black pudding dish, the classic combination of scallops with black pudding. An absolutely perfect pair–the earthiness of the pudding meeting the sweet sea of the scallop. The next thing I knew I was at Sheridans Irish Food festival watching the three big names in Irish black pudding–Jack McCarthy, Ed Hick and Tom Doherty–make black pudding from scratch. I even tasted the black pudding before it was cooked. When it was still red. I had crossed over.

I ate that!

We brought home some Tom Doherty’s terrific pudding, we really like his spicing, which Bill prepared using a Nigel Slater recipe for Black pudding with mustard cream sauce. Since then we’ve tried every variety of black pudding we’ve come across, including a lovely, mild loaf of black pudding from Inch House.

Black pudding with mustard cream sauce

And so we found ourselves on a warm evening in Madrid, on our second bottle of cider at the Asturian Sidrería down the street from the apartment (the cider ritual was another new experience), having already consumed a plate of charcuterie with the most ruby red jamon and a pile of  Padrón peppers, when we were enticed by a plate passing by to the next table. “Huevos,” I said dreamily. “With Morcilla, I think,” Bill said, “black pudding.” Moments later we had our own plate, and we found yet another Spanish food to love. We think it’s the cumin that makes this black pudding delectable. It’s crumbly, and made with rice. Served with fried eggs and fried potatoes, this dish is killer. We ate morcilla at every opportunity, in bocacillos, in pinxtos, and even returned to the Sidrería to eat their huevos rotos con morcilla one more time.

The eggs may appear to be the star, but the morcilla is what blew us away.

The pintxo version

“How can we have been to Spain three times and never had morcilla?” I asked, amazed and a little indignant. But then I understood what Spain had known all along: We hadn’t been ready.

Our Veg Guy

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On a recent Sunday, Bill and I drove to South County Wicklow to visit our veg guy. That’s right, we don’t have a local–that pub where everybody knows your name–but we do have a veg guy.

His name is Duncan Healy, and he’s at the Red Stables Market in St. Anne’s park every Saturday. I’ve mentioned before that the market is part of our favorite Saturday routine, and after a bunch of Saturdays of chatting over chard or tomatoes, Bill and I started referring to Duncan by name and saying things like, oh, if Duncan has some nice kale today I’ll make a kale and white bean stew. Well, Bill would say those things.

And then one day there were tomatillos.

The way I remember it, I was at work on a Saturday, and I received a single-word text from Bill: Tomatillos! I let out a yelp and raised my phone over my head like large-haired Joan Cusack at the end of Working Girl.

While my recollection may be altered by the mists of time,  we did indeed find tomatillos in Ireland and we were stoked! If you’re unfamiliar with the tomatillo, it is like a cross between a tomato and a pepper and is in the gooseberry family. Tomatillos are common in Mexican cuisine, frequently used in salsas and sauces.

My favorite use for tomatillos is to toss a few  into a blender along with a clove of garlic, a serrano chile (or jalapeno or bird chile), and an avocado. Blend. Then enjoy a bright, perfect marriage of creamy and tangy. It’s great as a dip, or served with Rick Bayless’ potato and pork tacos. (See right.)

Bill likes to roast tomatillos. For a fresh salsa, throw a few tomatillos, a clove of garlic, and chiles into a roasting pan and roast about ten minutes until blackened. Blend these ingredients to a puree, and then add some diced onions and cilantro. The roasting mellows the flavor of the tomatillo and adds tasty charred bits. You can also freeze the puree of roasted tomatillos, garlic and chiles. This base can be added to browned onions to make a salsa verde, which is excellent with pork (see below) or add onions and cilantro for salsa as above.

We were delighted to be invited to visit the Healy farm. Duncan grew up on the farm, and returned a few years ago to work with his father, Denis. The farm operates as Organic Delights, providing produce to restaurants and through stands at many markets including Temple Bar and Dun Laoghaire. We’re really happy that our local market sells so many veggies grown right down the road in Wicklow. What they can’t grow in Ireland, they will import, so the Organic Delights stall is always bursting with selection.

After feeding us homemade pizza, salad and blueberry crumble, Duncan led us and a contingent of kids and other family members around the farm to visit the pigs and see all the baby veggies growing big and strong. We snacked on plums, apples and raspberries as we explored the greenhouses with onions drying, tomatoes blushing to red, and pea tendrils climbing their trellises.  We collected a few veggies to bring home, including two round, green squash that when cut open looked like a cross between the seedy pulp of a crookneck squash and the stringy spaghetti squash, and tasted better than that description indicates. In fact, they were lovely stuffed with quinoa, beef mince, onion, tomato, and a couple tomatillos, and topped with cheese.

Thanks to Duncan and Cindy and family for a great day on the farm.

Petting a pig

A pocket full of watercress

Raspberries (still not used to berries being an Autumn fruit)

Tomatillos!

 

From the market this morning. Oh what goodness lies in store!

 

Cake Kismet

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Hanging out with foodies is a good thing. You get to bask in a camaraderie of cuisine and take pictures of your plate with impunity. And sometimes you get free cake.

On our recent foodie field trip to Eastern Seaboard we met Caryna of Caryna’s Cakes. In the chitchat over our calamari and pig’s cheek, we learned that Caryna is a full-time baker who sells baked goods at various markets and supplies some small cafes and coffee shops as well as special orders. As a matter of fact she had been working at a market that very day and had driven straight to meet up with us all in Drogheda. She still had all her market gear in her car. She also mentioned that she had made a pumpkin apricot cake for the market that day, and that she had a few remaining slices in her car. She said she thought it was the kind of cake that would be even better the next day.

Pumpkin. We love pumpkin. Canned pumpkin is one of the items we accept in exchange for room and board in our apartment. When my aunt and uncle came to visit us they moved the cans of pumpkin into a carry-on to reduce weight on a checked bag, forgetting that canned pumpkin is, by Transportation Safety Authority definition, a gel. When questioned about this can of gel my uncle explained very passionately, Oh, I have to take that to my niece. She has to make pumpkin pie! Oh pumpkin pie, the agent said, well, of course. And the pumpkin boarded the plane. Pumpkin pie trumps terrorism risk. As well it should!

So, throughout our wonderful meal a little part of my mind kept thinking about the pumpkin cake in Caryna’s car. While eating the black pudding ballotine and sweet potato fries I kept thinking about pumpkin cake. As we left that evening I inquired as to whether I could purchase a slice. Dear reader, she gave us all her leftover pumpkin cake! She even sent it home on the pretty china plate, saying we could return it the next time we meet.

So I rode home from Drogheda with that cake on my lap (see photo at right), and that evening we read about that exact cake on Caryna’s blog. I marveled at the power of foodie fate that led that cake from a stranger’s kitchen into my home on that magical day.

Bill and I each took a slice to work on Monday. The cake was terrific. Full of those warm spices with perfect cream cheese frosting. We had no shortage of baked goods, having returned from Brown Hound Bakery with a gift box and a lemon cake. The pumpkin apricot cake was not overwhelmed by those treats at all.

Caryna has a great story about the provenance of the pumpkin apricot cake (plus the recipe) on her blog. She also has a recipe inspired by our visit to the Brown Hound Bakery and more information about her baking business.

Did I mention she delivers cakes on a vespa?