Category: Cooking and Ingredients

  • Easy Food Home-Cook Hero Awards

    The Easy Food Home-Cook Hero Awards Cookbook has just hit the shelves. Published annually in spring, the cookbook features 30 finalist recipes from the annual cookery competition, alongside over one hundred recipe favourites from Easy Food magazine. (Edited by Dee Laffan, editor of Easy Food, and published by Zahra Publishing. Available in supermarkets and newsagents…

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  • Paul Flynn’s Family Food

    None other than IFWG Chairperson, Lizzie Gore-Grimes, has edited Lidl’s new cookbook, written by celebrated chef Paul Flynn of the award-winning Tannery Restaurant in Dungarvan. This gorgeous, family-friendly cookbook is stacked with easy-to-follow recipes that use inventive flavour combinations to impress, rather than fussy culinary technique. No matter how little time you have on your…

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  • Remembering the late Gerry Galvin: chef, food writer, poet and dear friend to many in the Irish food industry

    By Georgina Campbell. It was with great sadness that we learned of the untimely death of Gerry Galvin earlier this year – friend, colleague and inspiration for so many years. It’s hard to believe he’s gone, he was a gentlemanly giant of the hospitality world, quietly involved with so many good things right up to…

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  • A Private Audience With Gordon Ramsay

    By Myles McWeeney. It is certainly not every day you get Gordon Ramsay cooking up a storm for you personally. Recently I was fortunate enough to meet him in the Ritz Carlton in Powerscourt, when the hyper-busy restaurateur was on one of his rare visits to his eponymous restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at Powerscourt. The space…

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  • Seaweed Song

    By Lizzie Gore-Grimes. Underneath our very noses here in Ireland we have a rich culinary resource that goes largely untapped; and that gastro-goldmine is our sea vegetable-rich shoreline. From dillisk to carrageen and bladder wrack to alaria, there are myriad varieties of edible Irish seaweed that keen cooks should be charging to the shoreline to…

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  • Gourmet Cooking Experience in France

    By Jeanne Quigley. When I saw the ad ‘Places available for journalists on a Gourmet Explorer Cookery Course in France’ I jumped at the opportunity. Five days in the kitchen with a Michelin-starred chef and a Chef d’Excellence – what could be better? I contacted owner Moira Martindale immediately and a couple of weeks later,…

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  • Christmas Cookbooks

    Aoife Carrigy suggests a selection of home-grown Irish cookbooks from members of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild as the perfect Christmas gift for the foodie in your life… If you’re still looking for inspiration for deliciously thoughtful Christmas presents, many of our Irish Food Writers’ Guild members have homegrown cookbooks on the shelves this festive…

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  • Caraway Seeds in Abundance

    By Marion Maxwell. They have been found by archaeologists at the bottom of  Swiss lakes and in Egyptian tombs. In Germany they were  placed under the beds of  restless children and sprinkled  in coffins. They were widely believed to have the power to banish demons – not to mention  bad breath and trapped wind.   North…

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  • Cooking With Flavours

    By Petra Carter. Take a spoonful of sugar. Take two. Or even three. Nice? Not really. But combine the sugar with something bitter (say coffee) and its sweetness is transformed into something delicious.  Take meringues, decidedly sickly on their own, but add something tart like raspberries and both sweet and sour tastes explode in your…

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  • It’s Bean A Good Year: Auspicious Eats, Propitious Provisions, New Year Cuisine

    By Lizzie Gore-Grimes. All over the world people ring in the new year in a thousand colourful and clamorous ways. But they all have one thing in common. Whether they are celebrating New Year’s Day on 1st January, observing Jewish Rosh Hashanah in September/October or marking Chinese New Year in midwinter, every culture does so…

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