It’s St Patrick’s Day and when I think of Ireland and her culinary traditions I don’t think of Irish stew. I remember wonderful family meals at my Grandmother’s house in County Down, of course. Always fresh meat and veg and spuds dug from the garden. All traditional fare, of course.
But it’s the breakfasts that I remember most clearly: you just can’t beat a good Irish fry-up. A delicious fresh egg is a must. With lovely bacon and some small pork sausages are essential. We had grilled tomatoes often but very rarely beans.
But you also need potato bread. That’s fried in the pan too and you put your egg on it and have it with the egg yolk dripping over it. Soda farls. White fluffy soda bread is a must too. Again, you can fry that in the pan too or just toast it. It’s yummy and filling. And if it’s toasted you can have that with jam at the end with proper Irish butter.
And then there’ your brown wheaten bread. Toasted or plain. With butter again. It’s delicious and thanks to dear Paul Rankin and Irwin’s bakery we can get potato bread, soda farls and wheaten bread in England here too.
Hop around the MyDish web site in the run up to Easter and you may just make springtime a little sweeter!
Join in the fun by hunting the site to find a total of 7 chocolate eggs by clicking on the egg when you find it. Fill your basket with all 7 eggs for your chance to win 1 of 5 prizes of personalised Thorntons Easter eggs for the whole family. The luxury chocolate eggs from Thorntons will be personalised with your name or message in icing.
In addition to the luxury personalised Thorntons eggs on offer, every person that successfully finds all 7 eggs will receive a 10% discount off any Thorntons products bought through their site www.thorntons.co.uk.
MyDish Easter Egg Hunt closes on Tuesday 7th April.
Wendy Richard was one of those stars of TV who inspired nothing but affection. Whether as the dollybird Miss Brahms in Are you being served? To the sometimes forbidding matriarch Pauline Fowler in Eastenders, she one of those people that everyone liked, probably because she seemed so down to earth.
At her funeral this week, at her request, she included something unusual in the order of service: a recipe. ‘Wendy’s Chilli Con Carne’ gets a whole page in the booklet. You can imagine people round at Wendy’s house, tucking in to huge portions (for this is not a recipe for dieters), having a drink and a laughing a lot. That’s presumably why she included it: it was famous among her friends.
It’s a bit of an eccentric recipe, obviously honed and tweaked over the years. There’s tarragon vinegar and chocolate too. It’s not a very hot chilli. I can imagine chilli purists (mostly boys) not being very impressed. But that’s hardly the point. Food has the power to evoke such memories. It can immediately transport you back to a particular time or place. And that is why, I suppose, Wendy Richard shared this recipe with her friends at her funeral. They will make it and think of her. Which is rather touching.
Keith Floyd has his own inimitable style when it comes to communicating how to cook. Pour yourself a little drinkie, up here Clive, and enjoy this classic bit of Italian cookery.
It’s dead easy to get your hands on a lovely £5 voucher you can spend at Marks and Sparks with MyDish.co.uk. Just invite two friends, family members or colleagues to join up and when they do we’ll despatch a shiny voucher for you to spend on what you like. It could be the easiest fiver you have ever earned. Find out more here.
It might seem like it’s too early to start thinking about Mother’s Day on 22nd March but actually now’s a great time to get started on building your unique cookbook for mother dear. Rather than the usual flowers or chocolates, why not gather together your favourite family recipes, add some family photos and create a fabulous personalised cookbook? Find out all about out cookbook here.
Don’t worry if you don’t have lots of recipes, we can help. We’ve created some ready made books that you can tweak and amend or you can pick some other recipes from other people on MyDish to build your book.
To get your Mothering Sunday book ready in time, you need to have ordered it by the 4th March because they have to be printed individually. And if you need any help, don’t worry, the MyDish team are happy to help.
With a cull of grey squirrels underway in Scotland, Walkers punting out new ‘Cajun Squirrel’ crisps as part of their ‘Do us a Flavour‘ campaign and everyone looking to save money on food, there’s only one question on our lips at MyDish.co.uk: should we be eating more squirrel?
Often maligned as ‘rats with PR agents’, a quick look around the net has revealed plenty of great ideas. BushCraftUK has recipes for fricasse squirrel, barbeque squirrel and also invlaubale tips on skinning and gutting the blighters.
Last year, the Observer profiled Rupert Mitford, the 6th Baron Redesdale, and Paul Parker a pest controller who together form the ‘The Red Squirrel Protection Partnership’. Part of protecting the red squirrel is culling the grey one. The red squirrel is native to the British Isles and endangered, so if you fancy some squirrel stew you’d be breaking the law if you went for a red. In any case, grey squirrels are bigger, with more meat. In the article, David Ridley of Ridley’s Fish and Game in Northumberland described the flavour of squirrel: ‘They have no fat on them and they live mostly on berries and nuts so the flesh is sweet. I’ve roasted them. I’ve flash-fried them with fresh thyme.’ Ridley sells squirrel in his shop and apparently each has to be labelled: ‘May contain nuts’.
Have you got any great squirrel recipes? Should we be eating more squirrel? Would you even try it it? Let us know!
You might have noticed that in the past month or so that we’ve been adding some new features to MyDish. If you want to find out more, read on.
At MyDish we’re passionate about food and cooking and we’re always looking out for new recipes to try. But MyDish is so much more than a recipe website. That would be boring. We’re much more interested in building and being nation’s favourite online food and cooking community. Sure the recipes are great. But we’re much more interested in people.
So, the new features we’ve been introducing of late are all about people. First of all, we’ve given MyDishers the ability to become friends. Just like on other social websites you can now add people on MyDish to your ‘friends’ list. Additionally, if you know someone who would love MyDish, or have someone in mind you would like to share your recipes with, you can invite them to join tooand build you network.
When you’re friends with someone, we’ll automatically let you know when add a new recipe, leave a comment or join a group. This means that you’ll be getting fresh idead every time you log into Mydish. And finally we’ve made it easier to communicate with each other. Using the new communication wall, you can publish a ‘shout’ addressed at your friends.
