Monday, 5 March 2012

Going Back in Time in Sligo

Every year my family try to organise a weekend we all get together.  We are scattered over four counties and all have busy lives so to get a weekend that suits everyone can often take some organisation.  To date we have stayed in Galway (Connemara Coast), Waterford (Faithlegg), Leitrim (Ramada and Lough Rynn) among others.  We have been doing this now for probably the last 10 years.

This weekend gone we went to Markree Castle in Sligo.  It is a stunning place, totally unspoilt and a really authentic experience - down to the dodgy boot-camp showers, cool bedrooms (temperature-wise) and the threat of an appearance by the resident ghost!  It is a throw-your-boots-off and throw-your-leg-up on the coffee table, type of place! The drawing rooms are filled with elegant ancestral paintings, huge fireplaces and big comfortable old couches.  I spent most of the weekend wandering around in my socks.  They allow dogs which is lovely and there were a mixed assortment from pooches to big smelly hounds including my sisters's totally mad border terrier. The bedrooms are a real surprise; I had a big "frilly" (my brother's description) four poster bed in a lovely room with the most amazing view.  It had some very interesting antique furniture as well.  The other bedrooms were not quite as impressive but they were quirky.  One had steep steps down to the en suite - I could imagine a few worse-for-wear guests found that a challenge in the middle of the night!



View from the knot garden
Main entrance

The beauty of the place was that we all felt as if we could really make ourselves at home and as if we were the only guests (even though it was full on the Saturday night).  The staff were mostly eastern European and were efficient as they tend to be but they lacked the real charm and friendliness of the Irish staff or the willingness to think "sideways".  One late night barman when asked for a pot of tea answered "it is not my service to provide".  The bar and the whole place was empty by this time and we were the only stragglers left.  We wanted nibbles earlier before dinner and were unable to get them so one of our party drove to the local filling station.  However we did feel that if we arrived in with our own wine and nibbles we would not have been challenged.
 
My bedroom

View from my window
The food while not bad was not great either but I am always accused of being the critic from hell.  The garnish was very dated with piped swirls of mashed potato and the side orders of veg were the usual unadorned lumps of broccoli, carrots and very roasted - roast potatoes.  Some of the family had the steak the first night and said it was really good and to be fair when I had it, I asked for it - "walked through a warm room," and they obliged!  We had little option but to eat in the hotel both nights as we had young children with us and we would have needed a fleet of taxis to go the 15-20 minute drive into Sligo.  They screwed up on the gluten-free request for my brother giving him the correct bread but a non gluten-free sausage and a triangle of toast under his scrambled egg.  Oh, and the tea was dire at breakfast, but this is coming from a family of tea leaf users, with the tea pot scalded and the milk in first brigade. 

Overall the experience was very positive and we all agreed we would be very happy to go back again.  It could have been amazing though and that makes me sad.  There was no sign of either the owners or even a general manager all weekend and one or two staff cover both the reception, the bar and the bar food service so when you go to order drinks you had to go look for someone!  However, all that said we had a great time and are already looking forward to another get together.

The very elegant dining room
We spent a lovely morning in Sligo pottering about the great selection of foodie and craft shops.  We had lunch in Hargadons, a pub decorated with every imaginable accolade outside.  They were justified, as the food was great, the service fantastic and so friendly and the atmosphere charming. After lunch we had a bracing walk on the beach at Rosses Point.  On Sunday we went to Tobercurry as my father had worked there over 50 years before as a newly qualified accountant.  Then onto Tarmonbarry to the fantastic Purple Onion for lunch (another well decorated establishment).

Sunday, 26 February 2012

A Marriage of Taste

Gingerbread has not really been "in vogue" for a while now.  It's funny how foods go through cycles of popularity - from being on every trendy bistro menu to suddenly disappearing.  Prawn cocktail, baked Alaska, Black Forest gateau have all made the comeback as "retro foods". So why not gingerbread?  I have to admit I love gingerbread and remember my mother making big trays of it when I was a child.  She had an old beaten up copy of Maura Laverty's Full and Plenty, which was well-used and had drawings of cats and other doodles at the back, done by my father and me and my siblings.  Funny the things you remember - so when I found the copy at home recently I got all nostalgic for gingerbread.  There are four recipes in the book and I just took down one and true to form modified it. 

I made it the first time recently - the same weekend I had invited people to dinner.  More due to laziness than anything else I decided to turn the gingerbread into dessert and started thinking how I could "jazz" it up.  For some strange reason caramel sauce came into my head.  I had never made it before so did a search in Google for a recipe.  What followed was a marriage made in heaven.  Some combinations just work together and this works supremely well.  I served the gingerbread with the caramel sauce and a good vanilla ice cream. 

This is my version of Maura Laverty's Recipe

100g Butter
150g dark brown sugar
2 eggs
300g spelt flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. grated zest of lemon
1 tsp. grated nutmeg
2 tsp. ground ginger
A piece of stem ginger (optional)
half a cup of boiling water
2 heaped tablespoons of treacle or molasses

Cream the butter and sugar until soft and fluffy.  Add in eggs one at a time and continue beating. Add lemon zest, nutmeg, ginger, stem ginger chopped finely, treacle or molasses.  Then fold in sifted flour, baking powder and gradually beat in boiling water.

Place in a lined roasting tin and bake in a pre-heated oven gas mark 4 for about an hour or until feels firm to a light touch.




Caramel Sauce
100g butter
100g brown sugar
100ml cream

Heat together until combined and then simmer for a few minutes.  Pour into a jug.  It can be re-heated in the microwave if it cools and thickens.

Gingerbread   Caramel Sauce  Maura Laverty  Full and Plenty Cakes  Dessert Recipe Ideas  Food

Tuesday, 21 February 2012

What's up with Wheat?

My brother got a big scare recently when he had some tests done and they discovered he was very anaemic. Usually in a male this is considered serious and may be an indication of internal bleeding.  He now suspects that he may be gluten intolerant the same as our mother.  When I was studying nutrition we were given a statistic that in the general population, 1:2000 can expect to be coeliac but people from the west of Ireland have a much higher incidence; up to 1:200.  But this does not explain the explosion of people now saying they have an intolerance to wheat or to gluten.  Gluten is the protein portion in wheat and is what allows the bread to rise, being elastic and therefore able to trap the bubbles of carbon dioxide produced by yeast metabolism. 

I read an article by Dr. William Davis in Rodale News about the modern wheat plant.  He claims that by selective cross-breeding the plant we grow now does not have anything in common with the original wheat plant.  It is almost half as tall with a huge seed head and is bred for high yield.  As it is a hybrid it would be unable to grow in the wild and so has to be doused with a combination of toxic chemical fertilisers and pesticides.  Now before you say "oh, that only occurs in America", which to be honest was my first thought, my mother was told in a farmer's market by one of the women working there that this happens here in Ireland.  She said wheat is soaked in Roundup before sowing!!  Not a very nice thought because I certainly do not want to eat anything soaked in Roundup or Agent Orange.

The same doc says that modern wheat is so nutritionally deficient it may be responsible for obesity, diabetes and other inflammatory conditions,  This is due to the changes that have occurred in the gluten protein gliadin which has become a "potent appetite stimulent". He goes into a lot of other theories about why this has occurred but by this stage I had had enough, however if you want to read his article here is the link http://www.rodale.com/wheat-free-diet-0?page=0,0&cm_mmc=Twitter-_-Rodale-_-Content-RecentNews-_-mutantwheattakingoverbreadaisle

Now you may think that by only buying certified organic flour that you will be on the pig's back however, if the actual wheat genus has been mucked about with that much, you are still getting a nutritionally deficient product, albeit free from the toxic chemicals; so what is the point?

I decided to eliminate wheat from my diet and then started looking into alternatives.  I now use spelt flour for almost everything and today I experimented with making bread using rye flour, buckwheat and a "new" product called Kamut which is an ancient type of wheat grown by the pharaohs in Egypt (Triticum turgidum).  Because it is a wheat variety it contains gluten so would not be suitable for diagnosed coeliacs.  The recipe I used is as follows:

1 mug each of rye, buckwheat and Kamut flours.
1 mug of oat bran,
2 tablespoons of mixed seeds (sesame, pumpkin and sunflower)
1.5 teaspoon of bread soda sieved
1 tablespoon of olive oil
Buttermilk to give the consistency of gloopy porridge
Some more seeds sprinkled on top

If you wanted you could add a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses to give a nice dark, sweet flavour which makes the bread really good to eat with cheese.



I baked it at gas mark 6 (200degC) for about an hour and then turned it out and cooked it upside down for another 10 minutes until the base sounded hollow when tapped.


The resulting loaf was delicious, liberally smothered with butter and some of my brother in law's honey!
My next plan is to try making yeast bread and pizza dough with the Kamut flour and I will let you know how I get on.

Wheat  Wheat Intolerance Coeliac