Pancake Tuesday, farmhouse cheese and Fishy Fishy Café
PERFECT PANCAKES
Perfect your flipping technique in time for Tuesday's annual pancake-making spree, when every child in the country will be demanding them for tea. Amazingly, people actually buy commercial pancake mixes, rather than combining a couple of cups of flour and a pinch of salt with a beaten egg and some milk (works every time; just whisk in enough milk to make a loose batter, and let it rest for at least 15 minutes before you use it). But, if the ready mixes are your preference, Superquinn has some special offers this week, including Betty Crocker pancake mix (99 cent, two-for the-price of one). More tempting are the Merchant Gourmet dulce de leche toffee sauce from Spain (€2.99 for 450g, 25 per cent off this week); Tradewinds organic maple syrup (€5.75, 250g, reduced by €1), and Fiddles Payne's burnt orange and cinnamon, or lemon and lime sugar (210g, two for €5). Marie-Claire Digby
QUITE CHEESILY DONE
I have just recently tasted Glebe Brethan, a farmhouse cheese made in the style of Comte. Comte is surely one of the great cheeses of the world, not just France. Glebe Brethan is made from Montbeliarde cow's milk and fashioned into 45kg wheels. It is sensational. Fruity at the start, it follows through with a nutty roundness and has a long, lingering aftertaste, all herbaceous and floral. My sample might have benefited from a little more further ageing but was still undoubtedly one of the most exciting Irish artisan foods I have tasted in the past few months. It is available from a number of delicatessens around the country, including Cooper's Fine Foods, in Navan, George's Patisserie, in Slane, and Paul Murphy's, in Foxrock, Co Dublin. Hugo Arnold
FISHY FISHY STORY
Martin Shanahan's Fishy Fishy Café in Kinsale (021-4774453) regularly has a queue of hungry diners waiting for a table but, from May, the lines should shorten when Shanahan opens a new, much bigger restaurant in the town, in a former art gallery near Acton's Hotel. The original Fishy Fishy Café will remain open, too, trading as the Kinsale Gourmet Store, and serving a fish and chips and chowder menu, in addition to having a wet fish counter. In the meantime, as Lent approaches, you can satisfy your craving for the Fishy Fishy experience by cooking one of 60 great recipes in Irish Seafood Cookery, which Shanahan has written with Sally McKenna. The book, due at the end of February, is the third in the Irish Cookery Library series by Estragon Press. Although almost double the size of its predecessors, it will cost only €3.99. Marie-Claire Digby