Women's Christmas, cakes and the Jeremy Kyle show

New Years Eve

I was glad to read in Psychology Today that a quarter of people fail in their new year resolutions in the first week. Phew, at least I'm not on my own.

In fact, that's a complete lie. I didn't make any.

You could say this arises from fear of failure but it's probably more a healthy case of can't be bothered. New year resolutions are great, and setting ludicrous goals even better, but for the month that's in it, January doesn't signify anything too dramatic for me other than using up half a tonne of frozen turkey, baking a Galette des Rois, and getting back on top of work deadlines..

I cheated at my Galette this year. Traditionally it's a cake for the feast of the Epiphany which is the 6th January. This date is also known as Little Christmas or Women's Christmas, which is just as well as I had two girls nights out in a row - one with old schoolfriends and the second with women from my village who have a traditional meet up in the pub for Nollaig na mBan. We had wine, laughs, gossip and in a rural area like ours a night like this forms important bonds. I am lucky enough to have wonderful neighbours on whom I can call at a moments notice for rescue and respite (and regularly do). A day before Christmas our thoroughbred broke out of his stable and ran wild down a public road chased by a motorbike. 

*Ring Ring*  

"Hey,  can I drop the kids in? Having a bit of a problem here...."

Seriously, there's never a dull moment with thoroughbreds. They are the runway models of the horse world; beautiful, possibly anorexic (ours is) and with insanely tricky personalities. I am going to end up a crying wreak on the Jeremy Kyle show with all my kids taken into care if he doesn't start behaving himself soon.

Gallette des Rois

Back to cakes. In Catholic France the gorgeous Galette des Rois almond pastry celebrated the arrival of the three wise men. This was possibly because under the Julian calendar, Christmas Day fell on that day whereas under the Gregorian Calendar, (the present day system) it's the 25th.

As we're not great Christmas cake, pudding or mince-pie eaters in this house, the Galette is a Christmas staple, and devoured long before the Epiphany. It's a simple recipe, and if you are pressed for time as I usually am, you can use pre-made puff pastry and the result will still be pretty delicious. After you roll out the pastry it literally takes about five minutes to prepare. It's simple, mouthwatering and for me, the most perfect of French pastry treats.

May you all have a happy and healthy 2013; may cooking and food provide you with pleasure, comfort and fun in these strange and often unsettling times that we are living in. Basketcase will still be here; keeping you company in your travails; supplying scandal, food news, the wild, obscure and occasionally profane.

But in the meantime have a slice of Galette, and let me know how you get on. Happy Eating.

Galette des Rois

100 grams ground almonds

100 grams caster sugar

100 grams butter

one egg, lightly beaten

400 grams home made or ready made puff pastry

three drops almond essence

Mix the butter and caster sugar into a paste then add the ground almonds and the almond essence. Bind together with the beaten egg.

Roll out the pastry into two 10 inch rounds. Spread the almond paste on the first round, spreading it out to within an inch of the edge. Place the second round of pastry on top of the first, press the edges together, and score the top in semi-circular lines. Brush with a beaten egg and bake at 180 for 25 minutes.

You better be hungry x

Wild goat. Euthanise, rehome or shoot?

Goat, Wicklow

Here up in the mountains sometimes even domestic animals pose a problem. We live within five minutes by car to the Sally Gap - a wild Wicklow upland known for its wandering sheep and possible store of dead bodies which appear from time to time buried in deep bog. It's also a place of outstanding beauty but a site near enough to Dublin for people to think that driving up there with unwanted animals is a good idea. How wrong they are.

Less than three miles away from the main cross roads of tiny bog roads in the Sally Gap is our place. At the moment we are paying the price for again living in an environment where people sometimes feel a loose or unwanted pet doesn't cause a problem. This week it's a (probably once domesticated) billy goat with full horns. He is  stressed, confused, and making our life pretty much hell. On the lane outside our house he is now challenging cars, chasing sheep belonging to our next door farmer into wire fences and freaking the crap out of all animals in the area including "rescue and rehab" - our two re-homed horses and ponies, one of which nearly landed me in hospital today by knocking me over on the road in front of a car. He's 600 kilos. I'm not.

The Sally Gap Wicklow, Ireland

Ringing the Gardai isn't an option. I've done so and they've said "not our job love". As anyone knows living in an environment like this there are few people or agencies around to help you out. In the past I've collected loose and abandoned horses on roads in my own trailer and on my own time. One of them resulted in me getting personal threats and night time visitors at home. The Irish Horse Welfare Trust is brilliant at rescuing equines on limited resources and pursuing prosecutions for neglect and welfare abuses. But with animals that come between the livestock and pet categories it's much more difficult. Often the code is in the country - don't call anyone, shoot it and say nothing.

If loose animals are quiet, the SPCAs might collect if the animal is already penned but again in this area of Wicklow it's tricky .Wicklow SPCA due to dwindling funds cant afford to collect and look after animals like goats. The DSPCA, they sometimes pick up animals outside Dublin but it depends on the nature of the job. A loose dog or injured swan is one thing. An injured cow or dumped goat is another.

Sheep in the Wicklow uplands

In the meantime my neighbour wants to shoot the goat. With 400 pregnant ewes out on grass it isn't a good time to have them harassed or running loops round a 20 acre field as they were doing yesterday and possibly early aborting.

Lesson here is folks... and I know I don't have to stress this to anyone who reads this blog - do not buy animals you can't cope with once they are fully grown. That cute kid goat at a country fair will grow into a 60 pound guy that is full of territorial and sexually aggressive behaviour with full horns to boot. Unless he's in an environment with plenty of space and is free to behave in his herding and domineering way, this animal is a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. It's sad to reminisce, but at the last house we lived in near Kilcroney in Enniskerry, the dumped animal of choice was pot-bellied Vietnamese pigs (killed) and decapitated deer; presumably shot for trophies. There was such a pile of rotting animals on the lane at one point that I rang up the council and they replied "Yeah, that's what people are doing. Get used to it."

This evening I found said goat now in the field next to our kitchen. Tomorrow I will have to make a call on it. My local farmer will shoot it if I tell him, or else I can leave the animal to take its chances. As you can imagine these kind of issues come on top of real life trundling on. I'm trying to finish up my food column for a deadline this week, I'm writing script for a piece with Pat Kenny (RTE radio one) on Thursday and a lecture for an Taisce for Saturday on genetically modified foods. We've small children sick with the flu and one of the horses suffering near fatal colic. Fantastic!

I'll let you know how it goes, and in the meantime, gather together your Christmas ham recipes for a piece I'm doing. Glazes; honey, mixed spice, marmalade, jerk Caribbean? I need the best and most tastiest of suggestions! x

A party about ...lamb prices

I spent last night at a party with neighbours talking about farming, the price of food and how most farmers in my area now had off-farm employment in order to keep going. One neighbour told me how even when he farmed 1000 ewes he couldn't make a living producing lamb. He now works night shifts in a factory to pay the bills, keeping a few sheep but not planning about getting back into farming full time. He laughed as he looked at the drink in his hand "Basically it wouldn't put diesel in the car".

It's the same story on so many farms across the country."So what's your solution?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders - "no one wants to pay more for food and that's what lies at the bottom of it". He's right, we do want our food cheap and retailers know that; employing hugely competitive strategies to get our business. Competition between them is relentless and they use two for one offers, discounts and sell some goods like milk below cost to get customers in the door.

Milk is a KVI - a retail term which means "known value item". Many shoppers search for bread or milk at the lowest price possible as households use a lot of these foodstuffs. But consumers will also pick up food other than just KVIs in a store, so the retailers sell product at a loss in order to to make profit on other lines. Unfortunately the person at the end of the chain - the farmer, is who suffers. Recently in the UK, huge pressure on the retail price of milk caused farming protests and eventually, agreement on a code of practice between the dairies and the farming unions. Some retailers also agreed to put up the price for milk, a surprising move in a market that is as sharp as Ireland if not more competitive.

Food prices in Ireland actually have varied little in the past five years, and one of the reasons for this is huge competition among retailers for a marketplace that is in recession. Incomes have fallen and so has our food spend. Research shows we look for KVIs, discounts, offers and are shopping around more. The growth of Aldi and Lidl in both Ireland and the UK are testament to our lust for bargains. While retailers say the customer wants cheap food, we also as customers don't want a food chain where the retailer takes huge percentages of the price we pay for an item, while the person who sowed the crop or raised the livestock gets the smallest slice of the pie.

What's interesting about the farming and food policy of the present Government is their sluggishness or lack of courage in implementing a retail code of practice to encourage fairness in the chain. There's been consultation on this done by the previous Government, it was set to continue and promoted as a badly needed policy in the last election campaign but so far there is no movement on it. Yes we want cheap food but a code of practice spreads the price of that food item more evenly to all the people who contribute to it.

Lamb prices are good now but my neighbour is still not tempted to re-enter the full-time farming fray. We also talked about how Harvest 2020's targets for more sheep on Irish farms could knock back prices as higher supply tends to do. There are no easy solutions but what we all agreed was that the massive power the supermarkets wield has been let go unchecked despite promises to engage with the issue. At the end of the night we took our torches, hi viz vests and walked home on country lanes underneath the stars, stopping at another house for a nightcap, which we needed like the proverbial hole in the head. One thing that keeps rural areas strong is people talking to each other, sharing issues and concerns and also laughing - about kids, animals, livestock... or the financially perilous predicament many now find themselves in. It would be great though to see policy addressing the inequality in the Irish food chain..If we're to see a vibrant rural sector and future generations still farming, we have to step up to the plate and engage with the elephant in the room.  

Building an Artisan food sector in Ireland - hey folks, it's already there

I returned windswept and shaken from a conference in Tullamore last night. It wasn't the content of the day that had me in shock but rather getting stuck on Brian Cowen's throw-s***-loads-of- money-at-Tullamore-to-keep-my-seat series of ringroads built without a single sign back to the motorway that tested my nerves. Let alone that the weather did its level best to add to the confusion.

Happily, earlier in the day I was speaking on the subject of building jobs in rural Ireland from the artisan food sector - a subject close to my heart, and my stomach. According to Bord Bia's figures released last week the artisan food sector is in good nick - the 400 small food companies they work with provide 3000 people with employment and with a turnover of 400 million annually it's grown at a rate of 7% per year since 2007.

But all isn't rosy in the garden, and as someone who talks to food producers throughout the year and tells their stories, things are a little harder on the ground. Getting paid is a major issue for small food producers, with suppliers of cheese and the like waiting long periods to get paid from outlets which buy their stock; particularly restaurants. Not only does this create cash flow problems but it fosters fear that their buyer is about to go under which isn't the nicest feeling in the world.

If you're a small food company, getting money from banks to expand or provide more employment is almost impossible at the moment, and dealing with very restrictive food regulations is also driving people mad. I know that Eurotoques the chefs group has made representations to the powers that be to make things easier for smaller producers; putting Irish food businesses through the hoop on regulations that aren't followed in other EU companies seems particularly unfair.

We all want to eat safe food, but if we see butchers in France with more casual set-ups than what's required in comparison to here still producing good safe food, then the legislation can surely to be adapted to be more flexible.

The decline in consumer spend is the biggest problem communicated to me by producers. Whether they have a stall at a farmers market or produce large quantities of a premium product to the multiples, their customers are spending less money and business can be tight at times. However, I spoke with one food seller yesterday who pointed out that if people come into your shop and spend less, you just need more customers to come in the door to make up the same numbers at the end of the month.

So expanding customer base is key, while keeping the customers you already have. I feel that even in these less than rosy times, people who buy artisan food even occasionally find it difficult to go back to eating total rubbish. I think once you're converted you stay that way, and if you spend less now on food (like most of us do), then so be it. It's simply the case at the moment that if more consumers are tempted go down the local/artisan food route, and spend money on it even now and again, then producers can stay in business.

My presentation (which you may not gather from the above) was actually very positive about the Irish small food business sector and this was backed up by case studies by Joy Moore from Oldtown Hill Bakehouse and Bernadine Mulhall from Coolnaowle Country House and Organic Farm from who gave a potted history of how their businesses had started and where they stood now. Both were really interesting examples of successful hard working entrepreneurs who had a passion for what they do.

Bernadine's situation in particular stood out as herself and her husband had left conventional mixed farming to start an organic system. After spraying their wheat crop with pesticides every year her husband was ill afterwards for several days. So they turned organic and his health recovered. This doesn't say much for what we're putting on our fields, though I think we knew this already.

Overall the conference was a great day, and thanks to National Rural Network who invited me to speak. It was lovely to catch up with buddies from my old days on Ear to the Ground and with Ollie Moore, Catherine Mack, Duncan Stewart and other writers who share a common agenda in keeping good food in production in Ireland. While it's clear that it's our large scale dairy and beef sectors that are the real contributors to the 8 billion euro worth of food we export each year, artisan food still has a very important place at the table. It functions as a way to keep people farming, making food and living in the Irish countryside, which far outways the attractions of producing factory food at low prices.

While there's a world wide market for cheap food, we will kill farming in Ireland if we adopt the US model of producing at the lowest possible price point. Somewhere in the mix Ireland can occupy the middle ground and in fact, the upper ground as well.

Thanks again to all the great speakers who contributed to my knowledge on renewable energies, dairy expansion and the other subjects which aroused a lot of discussion on the day. A further big thanks to David Meredith and Kevin Heanue from Teagasc for letting me grill them on supermarkets; getting to the bottom of their huge margins and understanding what exactly they are up to.... but we'll hold that news till later.

x

The Country Cooking of Ireland - dig in

Thought I'd show the lovely image from the front cover of Colman Andrews book, it makes you want to dig in and start cooking right away.
He really has done a great job, really getting to grips with the essence of Irish food. The cooking collated here is the type of stuff that reminds me of my nana's kitchen, especially with his focus on the traditional staples such as soda breads which has almost spurred me into taking them on again. Any attempts I have made in the past have yielded brick-like disappointments, and even when I got the consistency right, the taste just wasn't there.

I think my soda bread standards have been ruined by memories of being a little girl and getting out of bed on cold wet mornings in my nana's house in Donegal to find slabs of warm soda bread dripping in butter on the table. Oooooh how good it tasted! I would eat my soda bread, and perhaps if I was motivated, spread it with some honey from the hives outside. I remember every detail of the scene; the blue and white crockery, the milk jug with rose blossom and the Sacred Heart looking dolefully down from the wall. As I ate my soda bread the mist would clear in the field that lay on a hill overlooking the garden, and the cattle would began to graze again and enjoy some early sun on their backs.

My nana baked bread every morning of her life, in a range oven, fired by burning peat from the strip of bog that they cut every year. The smells of that time will never leave my head, nor my nana’s cooking which was about using the food she grew yourself and whatever few bits she could buy on top of that with the household money she made from keeping poultry and selling eggs. She was a typical Irish woman of her time and learned to cobble together great cooking in often very austere times. But there was always plenty of butter. Like rural France, butter is the make or break ingredient when your foodstuffs are limited.
Again, really wonderful publication from Andrews and great to see Peter Ward involved in setting him on the right road in his exploration of Irish food. He couldn't have a better guide x