Oyster season is in full swing, which makes it a great time to explore the Sea Louth Seafood Trail, which launched this summer. Carlingford and Cooley are two of the oyster producers on Carlingford Lough that are participating in the scheme, which has 49 restaurants and nine seafood producers signed up.
The Carlingford Oyster Company picked up two three-star awards at the recent Great Taste Awards in the UK, while Cooley Oysters, which opened a retail showroom in Hong Kong this year, took a two-star award.
Tourist offices in Carlingford, Dundalk and Drogheda can issue Sea Louth passports, which guide visitors to 14 scenic viewpoints along the county's 70km coastline, each of which has a special stamp available to add to the passports. When completed, including two restaurant stamps earned by ordering a local seafood special, the passport can be exchanged for a Sea Louth memento.
My Life Through Food
He makes a mean negroni, he loves Kerrygold butter and he writes exquisitely about food. What's not to like about the US actor, producer and writer Stanley Tucci, who has just released a memoir, following on from his two recipe books.
Taste: My Life Through Food is published this week by Fig Tree (€23). It is in hardback, though a compact size, which is good because you'll be pulling this one off the shelf regularly, not just for the recipes but for when you really need a belly laugh, to revisit Tucci's relaying of the time he ate andouillette in Normandy with Meryl Streep.
It’s not all a barrel of laughs, though. The title of the book becomes more poignant when, towards the end, Tucci writes about his December 2017 diagnosis with oral cancer and the treatment that followed. Eating, that thing he loved so much, for a while lost its joy. But there’s a happy ending: his sense of taste returned and his appreciation of food and drink was restored.
Food on the Edge
Tickets, both for on-site attendance and virtual, are now on sale for the Food on the Edge symposium, which moves out of Galway for the first time this year, setting up its stall at the Airfield Estate in Dundrum, Dublin 14, on Monday and Tuesday, October 18th-19th. A two-day ticket to attend in person costs €300, while a single day is priced at €175, and two-day virtual access is available for €95. They can be purchased at foodontheedge.ie.
Speakers confirmed include Garima Aurora, the first Indian woman to win a Michelin star, Taiwanese chef André Chiang, Australian food writer and broadcaster Alice Zaslavsky and Peruvian chef Virgilio Martínez, whose The Latin American Cookbook will be published by Phaidon later this month.
