Your Staycation 2009

Regular readers will have noticed how intermittent this column has been of late. The reason is simple: we are working on the 500-page Bridgestone Irish Food Guide!
But, those 500 pages aside, it is time to share some discoveries and hot tips that might prove useful for your summer staycation. Here we go...

West Cork

Blairs Cove, Durrus
Reports of Richard Milnes' cooking in the country's most beautiful dining room are uniformly ecstatic. There is also a simpler bistro-style menu available, so bring the family one night, and save the dinner menu for a special night for 2.

Dillons, Timoleague
Currently run by Julie and John, who formerly worked for Dan Mullane of Echo Lodge in Limerick.

Kinsale
Toddies at The Bulman
Pearse O'Sullivan is doing great things in this lovely bar at Summercove.

Castletownbere
Taste is the shop of your dreams, especially on Thursday afternoon when all the good Cork stuff arrives down direct from the Mahon Point Market.

Galway
Sheridan's on the Docks
Here is what our friend Leslie wrote about his last visit:
Lunch at Sheridan's on the docks last week - fab lamb stew with barley, truly great. Excellent bread, funky atmosphere while still a regular pub. Outstanding espresso for 1 euro: outside of Italy I don't know anywhere with coffee for 1 euro!

Mayo
Knockranny House Hotel, Westport
Chef Seamus Commons is making serious strides in this big hotel, and has even started smoking his own salmon, and doing so superbly. Definitely the hot Mayo spot.

Clare
Gregan's Castle Hotel, The Burren
At the risk of over-stating ourselves, the cooking here is off the chart, and so is the place itself.

The Wild Honey, Lisdoonvarna
A pretty pub with rooms, from that fine cook Aidan McGrath, which is shaping up rather nicely.

Kerry
Valentia Ice Cream: don't miss the chocolate in particular.

Kenmare
An Leith Phingin Eile: some nice cooking is taking place in this most atmospheric little restaurant.

Waterford
The Lemon Tree, Dunmore East
Joan Power is now offering evening meals on Friday and Saturday evenings, with super cooking.

Banyan, Tramore
Eugene Long is doing the good thing here in the former Coast building:lovely food, lovely room.

Belfast
The Barking Dog
The former Rain City room at the bottom of the Malone Road is firing out some ace cooking. Sunday brunch is particular is very fine indeed.

Happy travelling!

O'Brien Chop House

The inimitable Justin and Jenny of beautiful Ballyvolane House are set to open a new restaurant in lovely Lismore.
O'Brien Chop House will be in the former Barça premises, and this beautiful old pub has been left well alone, so its charming original features will shine as you enjoy some smart cooking, using well-sourced ingredients. The end of the month is when the doors should open. For more details, contact Justin Green on 025 36349 or info@ballyvolanehouse.ie.

Mindful Eating/The Irish Times

The Irish Times Healthplus/June 2009


Mindful Choosing


The first time I read about Brian Wansink’s Campbell’s tomato soup experiment, my reaction was to feel distinctly queasy, followed by a distinct loss of appetite.
What did Mr Wansink do to make me feel this way?
He simply sat people down in front of a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup, and told them to eat as much as they wanted. In “Nudge”, their witty book about how humans exercise choices, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler take up the story of an experiment they call a “masterpiece”:
“Unbeknownst to them, the soup bowls were designed to refill themselves (with empty bottoms connected to machinery beneath the table). No matter how much soup subjects ate, the bowl never emptied. Many people just kept eating, not paying attention to the fact that that they were really eating a great deal of soup, until the experiment was (mercifully) ended”.
Sunstein and Thaler call this sort of behaviour “mindless choosing”. Their conclusion is devastating: “Eating turns out to be one of the most mindless activities we do”.
So, we know the cola is packed with numerous spoonfuls of sugar, but we drink it anyway. We know the breakfast cereal is as salty as seawater, but we eat it anyway. When someone asks if they can supersize that order for us, we say “Sure, go ahead”, even though we know it will do us no good whatsoever. We open our mouths and, it seems, we switch off our brains.
Where does this mindless choosing get us? “Nearly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese”, Thaler and Sunstein tell us.
But if mindless choosing can get us to a bad place where our health is out of control, it seems to me that we are, in fact, headed to a much worse place altogether, thanks to switching off our brains when it comes to food.
A couple of years ago, I spoke to a bunch of food producers at a convention in Northern Ireland, middle-aged men for the most part, the sort of people who might be called “strong farmers”, men who rear beef and sheep and have good farms.
They were, without exception, the most demoralized and bitter group of people I have ever encountered. Why? Because they were part of a morally bankrupt food system, a food system where what they were paid for what they produced was controlled entirely by big supermarket chains.
Their relationship to the supermarkets wasn’t one of client and customer. It was, instead, a relationship of master and slave, and they knew they were the slaves.
Strong farmers. Weak slaves.
Two years on from that day, and I see photographs in The Irish Times of potato farmers storming into supermarket management meetings to protest at purchasing policies that are leaving them with no future. We read of retailers demanding cost reductions of up to 40%. 40%!
How much is your pay packet down this month? Just imagine if it contracted by 40%. Could you survive? Of course not.
Kate Carmody of the Irish Organic Farmers & Growers Association is quite clear about the choices we need to make when we decide what is to be put on the table:
“If we want a vibrant local economy we must support it by our purchasing decisions. Most of us can afford to do this if we choose, even in the recession”, says Ms Carmody.

“Buying seasonal, local, organic food is quite simply better for us, our environment and our economy. When we shop, we can all make a small but significant difference to pulling the country out of its current difficulty and supporting our friends and neighbours in retaining their jobs. The choice is ours”.

What Ms Carmody is proposing is the opposite of Thaler and Sunstein’s mindless choosing. We might, then, call it “Mindful Choosing”, the recognition that our choices, and our mindfulness about the food chains that link us all together, have direct consequences not just for our health, but also for our present and future wealth.

To be mindful is to take thought or care about what you do. With food, the issue is actually much bigger than that bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup that never empties. If our mindlessness goes no further than considering the cost of our basket of groceries in a supermarket, then we shall soon see all around us an agricultural and social wasteland. Every farmer will be like the farmers I met two years ago in Northern Ireland.

Instead, through mindfulness, our eating, the final act in the chain that begins with sunshine and photosynthesis, that works its way through the work of the farmer and the producer, and which ends with the skill of the cook and the appetite of the eater, can be the most mindful thing we do, each and every day. “The choice is ours”, says Kate Carmody. Indeed it is.

A New Star

Remember this face.
This is Annette Minihan of Minihan's of West Clare, and Ms Minihan is one hell of a talent. How far would you walk – barefoot in an electrical thunderstorm – for the best baked vanilla cheesecake you ever tasted? If you are like us, then you would walk any distance for that cheesecake, and for Annette's cheesecake – and her lemon tartlet, and her chocolate and orange and hazelnut tart – we would crawl on our hands and knees in a thunderstorm. Superb work, and we haven't even tasted the award-wining spinach and got cheese quiche yet. Well, avoiding thunderstorms etc etc, you can get this amazing grub here:

Thursday Kilrush Farmers Market from 9.00am to 2.00pm
Friday Ennis’ Regular Market from 8.30am to 2.00pm
Sunday Limerick (Bedford Street) from 12noon to 5.00pm

www.minihans.com