Compiled by MARIE-CLAIRE DIGBY

Tarts you'd go a long way for

Dublin to Westport is a fairly long way to go for a custard tart, but the pasteis de nata that Portuguese chef Jose Barroso (above) makes for Sol Rio, the cafe and restaurant he runs with his partner Sinead Lambert Barroso, are extraordinarily good. Armed only with a colleague’s sketchy description of where she’d bought them, and instructions to buy as many as possible, I set out to find them, while wondering if they could really be that good. And they were. Made fresh every day with buttery puff pastry and a creamy egg-custard filling, the pasteis, which sell for €1 each, are hard to resist. Care packages destined for Dublin lovers of the Portuguese delicacy have been known not to survive the return train journey . . . so we’ve persuaded chef Barroso to give us his recipe.

Sol Rio pasteis de nata (makes 12)

puff pastry

500g cream flour

500g butter (slightly softened)

250ml water

pinch of salt

Custard filling

250ml cream

160g white sugar

25g corn flour

4 egg yolks

1 egg

25g butter

grated peel of half a lemon

You will need 12 individual pudding moulds, or small, deep tartlet cases, or a muffin tray. To make the puff pastry, mix the flour, water and salt in a mixer until it comes together. Take the dough out and roll it out so it is one-inch thick. Rub butter all over the pastry (do not use it all as you need to repeat this step), then fold the pastry in half and roll it out again. Repeat this process three more times. Leave the pastry to rest in a fridge while you make the filling.

Bring the cream and lemon rind to the boil in a saucepan. Stir in the sugar, butter and cornflour. When the cream comes back to the boil, strain it into a heavy-based saucepan. Mix all the ingredients together over a gentle heat. Separate the four egg yolks from the whites and whisk the yolks and the one whole egg together.

Add the egg mixture to the sauce pan, off the heat, and mix. Leave to rest for three hours.

Heat an oven to 200 degrees/gas mark six. Fill each tartlet case or mould with pastry and pour the filling in; do not overfill.Put the moulds on a baking tray and cook for 15 to 20 minutes until they go a nice golden brown on top. Decorate with icing sugar or cinnamon.

Book of the week

The Modern Pantry Cookbookby Anna Hansen (Ebury, £25/€29)

At first glance, The Modern Pantry Cookbook– another book-of-the-restaurant offering – seems to have strayed into Peter Gordon territory, where Asian ingredients are employed in unusual ways, and culinary boundaries between east and west are blurred. So it comes as no surprise that Anna Hansen, proprietor of the Clerkenwell restaurant and author of the book, worked with Gordon, a fellow kiwi, at his Sugar Club venture in London, and was one of the founding partners, again with Gordon, of the Providores and Tapa Room on Marylebone High Street.

Hansen opened The Modern Pantry in 2008 and garnered glowing reviews, with critics heaping praise on her innovative fusion food. You’ll still find lots of Asian influences in Hansen’s cooking style – she says sugar-cured prawn omelette with smoked chilli sambal is The Modern Pantry’s signature dish – but there are also subtle echoes of northern Europe, the influence of her Danish mother and family, and the Middle East gets a look in, too. It’s quite an intoxicating mix, and in less assured hands might not succeed.

But Hansen embraced Peter Gordon’s early advice to approach cooking with a completely open mind – “a lesson to which I attribute my creativity”, she says – and she has completely mastered her cooking style. “Unlike many chefs I am not concerned with the origins of each ingredient, in the sense that I do not let its origins dictate how I choose to cook with it.” Thus tea-smoked salmon and coconut fishcakes with yuzu hollandaise sit happily alongside Persian-spiced pork skewers with sweet tomato yoghurt, and chorizo scotched quail eggs.

This is truly world cuisine; if it tastes good, she’ll use it. Just how she uses it is the surprising, and often delightful thing.

Dinner on the house

There may be no such thing as a free lunch - but dinner at the Jacob's Creek pop-up restaurant, intriguingly named See Beyond the Label, will be free for those who win a place. Clodagh McKenna willl be doing the cooking, at a secret location in Dublin city centre, and David Whelehan will be running wine tasting masterclasses. The pop-up will run on four nights, from June 28th until July 1st, and you can enter a competition for an invitation by sending an email with your name, date of birth, choice of date, and contact details for you and your guest to jacobscreek@idl.ie.

The art of the table

Compliments to the chef? You can express your appreciation for a great meal by leaving a message of thanks on this fun, washable tablecloth afterwards. And when you become bored with your masterpiece, just run it through the washing machine on a cool wash, and start again. Of course it's really aimed at kids, but we can see them having to fight for a go with the coloured markers that come with it. The washable tablecloth can be bought from creativekitchen.ie, which sells kitchen utensils, cookware and kitchen linens, set up by Kela Ledwidge. It comes in two sizes: medium (180cm x 148cm, €39.99) and large (250cm x 148cm €46.99). Ledwidge will have a selection of her carefully chosen range on sale at Taste of Dublin this weekend.