The Old Folks photographed by Caitriona

Well a great start to the food blog award with a terrific winner in Italian Foodies.
She does the best recipes, best photos and has the most enthusiasm.
Only sorry she couldn’t be there.
Sile and I made it and we met some food bloggers, Val and Laura and Kieran and would have liked to have met more but there is only so much peering at name badges that one can do before you start to look like a dirty old man.
Kieran had the right idea by wearing his whites he proved a magnet for foodies, maybe next time we should all wear aprons…..
Anyway we left before the eighties disco, for someone my age everything after the sixties is too advanced.

The night was very well organised with brilliant Bush video gags and an excellent commentry by Rick O Shea.
(and it is amazing to discover that Twenty Major is not a knarled old chinaman.)

Many thanks to Damian Mulley for everything.

I have always been a fan of Richmal Crompton’s “William” series, the books only, the TV versions have never got it right.
I remember one story of hers when the 29th of February occurs for the first time in William’s life and he gets the slightly wrong end of the stick.
He thinks that because it won’t occur for another four years that all memories of the day will likewise be obliterated.
As a consequence he is even more outrageous than ever and spends the day performing the most appalling deeds of destruction and anarchy, safe, he assumes from retribution for at least four years.

Oh to be a William!
Aren’t there people out there that you would like to put in their place, whose bubbles you would like to prick, or on whom to get revenge for some past slight?
Do it today.
According to the “William Gospel” all will be forgotten at midnight tonight and we can start with a clean slate tomorrow.

(And Happy Birthday Noirin, lucky you to have had so few!)

Long before I ever thought of cooking as a career I had heard of George Perry-Smith’s restaurant in Bath; The Hole in the Wall.
This was principally because my cousin Dermot Staveacre, who was a student in Cambridge, used to work there as a waiter in his holidays and tell us stories of the goings on behind the scenes.
It all seemed incredibly glamorous to a 14 year old school-boy in Cork.
When, about eight years later, in my early twenties I went to England looking for experience in restaurants I used the Good Food Guide as my short list of the type of restaurants I wanted to work in.
As I looked into these restaurants, the starred restaurants of the early seventies, there was a thread running through them, all the chefs seemed to have worked in Perry-Smith’s restaurant in Bath and been trained by him.

He was the Gordon Ramsey of his age, without the histrionics.
It was he who took the recipes of Elizabeth David which were revolutionising home cooking in England and translated them into restaurant foods.
When I in fact found work, in the Wife of Bath in Wye, the chef, Michael Waterfield was another Perry-Smith protégé and spoke very highly of him.
Perry-Smith had at this time moved to a “Restaurant with Rooms” in Helston in Cornwall called the Riverside but had an ex Wife of Bath chef there; Simon Mallet, so we were all kept abreast of the happenings there when he visited his alma mater.
It was either Simon or Michael who one day , in passing, said that whenever they served Moussaka in The Hole in the Wall they used to top it with a cheese souffle.

This sounded like a brilliant idea to me and obviously intrigued me because I have kept the idea of this Moussaka in my mind since.

Moussaka and Lasagne vied with other as the dinner party dish of choice in the early seventies, they were both ideal dishes, one pot, hostess friendly and cheap.
I think the differences blurred in the seventies, I’m fairly sure I ate a few hybrids but eventually Lasagne conquered all before it and now we see it as the convenience dinner of choice, pre cooked and pre packed in the local deli.
Moussaka, outside of its home in Greece, has become almost forgotten.

There are as many variations for Moussaka as there are for Irish Stew so I presume that this national dish of Greece doesn’t have a true definitive version.
A lamb stew, usually minced lamb (although beef was also used) and aubergines were essential and come sort of topping, a cheese sauce or, as in Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food, where she gives a recipe which has a baked batter top like a Yorkshire Pudding.
Perry-Smith’s take, seemed to me ideal.
Moussaka I felt, needed to be looked at again, and I felt I might give the this version a try. I hasten to add that this is all based on a chance remark, I have no idea which this bears any relationship to the Moussaka cooked in Bath thirty some years ago.

Moussaka
(for 4 )

Olive Oil
2 Medium Aubergines
350g (12 oz.) Minced Lamb (or beef)
2 medium Onions
2 fat cloves Garlic

2 Carrots
1 Cinnamon Stick
280g (10 oz.) Tomato Passata or Chopped Tomatoes
1 teaspoon dried Oregano
Salt and pepper

Souffle Topping:
60g (2 oz.) Butter
60g (2 oz.) Flour
225ml (8 oz.) Milk
110g (4 oz.) strong Cheddar
3 Eggs

Method;

First cook the Aubergines.
Slice them in 2 cm. thick slices, diagonally is the easiest.

Fry these on both sides in hot oil until browned and cooked through.

Brown the mince in a pan in a little olive oil, breaking it up well with a wooden spoon.
Put this to one side.

Chop the onion, garlic and carrot and fry these on a high heat for a few minutes until beginning to colour.
Add the mince to the pan, the Oregano ,the cinnamon stick and the tomato.
Bring this to a simmer and simmer gently for about 45 minutes.

Add some water or stock if it dries.
Take out the cinnamon stick and discard.

Now using a casserole or souffle dish of roughly twoand a half litres capacity put in a layer of the sauce, a layer of Aubergine then repeat this ending with a layer of Aubergine on top.

Now make the souffle.

Melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour then add the milk to make a stiffish white sauce.
Grate the cheese and melt this into the sauce.
Separate the eggs, stir the yolks into the sauce and beat the whites until stiff.
Fold the whites gently into the cheese sauce then spoon this on top of the layer of Aubergine.

Put the oven to 190C, 375F, Gas 5.
Cook the Moussaka at this temperature for about 40 minutes.

The souffle will rise a little and make a delicious but light crust on top of the Moussaka.

I don’t think this really needs potatoes or rice, maybe some bread and a salad.

Post Script March 5th ’08

I found this quote in an article by Rowley Leigh on Joyce Molyneaux (another graduate of Perry-Smith’s);
Part of the guiding principles in Joyce’s cooking – much of it inherited from the great George Perry Smith at the Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath – was that nothing was wasted. If a salmon had been poached on the bone, the meat would be scraped off the bones afterwards with a teaspoon, to be used in a croquette or a pojarsky de saumon. Mushroom trimmings would go into a stock, the tops of leeks would clarify a consommé and trimmings from the rack of lamb minced to make a moussaka or at least a shepherd’s pie for the staff.

Perhaps the Moussaka was never served in the restaurant but was merely staff food?

Todays London Independent

Congratulations Hugh!

You did it!

It is utter nonsense that the stone which we have been kissing in Blarney Castle for the last hundred years is the wrong one and not the giver of gab.
The scientific proof which refutes this idea, recently postulated in a book about the castle, lies in the my own fondness for talk.
As a child we lived in Cork, about ten miles from Blarney so any time we had visitors, and my family were always hospitable, we always went to the castle and any time we went there I kissed the stone.
Anyone who knows me will agree that in my case this kissing “took” and as a consequence I have been generously endowed ever since with the gift of speech.
This has its downside, like nature I abhor a vacuum so do tend to fill silences with speech which might not be as apposite as it should be, a tendency to “go on and on “ about stuff, particularly when wine has been taken, might be a criticism my nearest and dearest might justifiably make.
The plus side is that I am the answer to a radio producers dream and living in Waterford, and having done a piece about food on the local radio, WLRFM every week for twenty odd years now, they are starting to haul me out every time that need someone prepared to rabbit on about anything.

As a result I now make frequent verbal appearances on Sunday View, which is a discussion of what has been on the Sunday papers, and every other week, for the last three or four years I have been reviewing works of non fiction on a Saturday morning.

That this had made me read lots of books I never would otherwise have is the great gift of this exercise. I have been educated about the war in Iraq, the state of the Congo in Africa, and even read an immense tome on the life of Che Guevara.
There have also been turkeys, biographies of young whippersnappers like Brian O Driscoll or Colin Farrell are difficult to keep awake through. Sharon Osborne’s effort was so full of contradictions that I think she should have sued herself for misrepresentation.
There was even something called The Secret by one Rhonda Byrne which made me wonder if Fahrenheit 431 wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.

This weeks offering which Mark Graham, the presenter of the programme assigned is the stiffest one to date.
That this has been on the best seller lists many times on the last twenty years gave me the feeling that it must be readable and (for some people) it may even be.
If you ever want an insight into what AA Milne intended Pooh Bear to feel when he described himself as “a Bear of Very Small Brain” just try reading Stephen Hawkins Brief History of Time.
Here we are introduced to the world of Big Bangs,Black Holes, Quantum Physics, Imaginary time, Quarks and Antiquarks.
How all these behave, and interact obviously fascinates Hawkins but can be really hard going for someone who gave up maths at Inter Cert.

Let me just give you a small example of the speed at which Haw kin’s brain runs;
He imagines an Armageddon situation in which nothing remains except an excess of quarks rather than antiquarks, between brackets he then adds the following useful piece of information (Had it been an excess of antiquarks , however, we would simply have named antiquarks quarks and quarks antiquarks)
Are you all with me?
And I have to talk about this on the radio for fifteen minutes next Saturday?
Come back Sharon Osborne, all is forgiven.

Acknowledgements and thanks to this weeks New Yorker.

Laura and Ann

A very special welcome to our newest grand-niece
Laura Frances Mc Veigh, born last Friday
and congratulations to Eugene and Ann

(and thanks Eugene for the picture)

Gérard Depardieu in Quand j’étais chanteur

Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová in Once

We saw two excellent films over the week.
Once a friend brought around and we watched on DVD, the Depardieu was the offering of the film society.

They were both remarkably similiar in theme, and title come to think of it!
Both were about men singers whose lives were changed by the arrival of a stranger, a woman, into town.

In both films the story was told more in the songs of the film than the dialogue.

Both ended with the protagonists walking away from each other, into their own sunsets.

Once was a surprise.
Made on a tiny budget with a singer I would not put into my top ten I wasn’t expecting too much.
In fact it was beautifully done, Hansard’s sometime OTT singing was beautifully tempered by Markéta’s subtle harmonies and both delivered nicely understated performances.
Dublin looked terrific, it was a relaxing feel-good movie, one I could happily watch again.
The French offering was a little grittier with Depardieu putting in a marvellous performance.
What is it about this now fat and aging actor that he can light up a whole screen with a smile?
In this film he played an aging Chanteur, a sort of cross between Johnny Halliday and Daniel O Donnell
His love interest was played by the beautiful Cécile De France, the first French actress to seriously challenge Catherine Deneuve in both looks and ability.

Glen Hansards moving and beautiful song from Once ; Falling Slowly, has just won an Oscar, if any song could have challanged it it must have been Depardieu’s heart breaking French version of the old Drifters standard ; Save the last Dance for Me.

Strangely similar in plot, the performances were so different that they complimented rather than made any odious comparisons with each other.
I really can’t decide which of the two I enjoyed most.

About two years ago, here, I gave directions as how to poach the perfect egg
and at that stage I thought there could be very little to add to those directions.

As I was poaching this morning’s egg I realised that there is a little refinement to my technique which has occurred since daughter Caitriona and son-in-law Aonghus came back from Tokyo last year.
They brought back a tiny Japanese jug, beautiful simple and white.
It has no handle and it just exactly fits an egg.

Now my technique for poaching an egg is not the swirl technique, which involves whipping the water into a vortex and then slipping the egg into the centre, thereby, in theory, utilizing the laws of centrifugal force, and so archiving a perfectly cylindrical orb.
I have tried to do this I promise and failed miserably.
Anyway even if you do achieve perfection this way how in the name of God do you manage the second egg without making shite out of the first one?

No my poaching method is what I call the insinuation method.
I bring the water to the boil, vinegar it lightly (optional), then turn it down to the merest shudder, now insinuate the egg into the water, that is slip it in, in one gentle movement, unobtrusively , making the least possible disturbance of the water, and then poach until it is cooked to your desires, somewhere between one minute and two for me and my preference for a barely set white and a soft yolk.

As I already said before the only essential was a free range egg which should be as fresh as the hen will allow.
I have now discovered that the little Japanese Egg Jug makes the insinuation even easier and has become an essential element in my old mans habit of my morning egg.
I am quite sure that any wee milk jug would do the same service.

I am struck by the similarity of the two current controversies being aired in Ireland; those concerning Bertie Ahern and Cahal Ó Searcaigh.
Both, it appears have performed actions which were morally dubious.
Both made no secret of their transgressions at the time- Bertie putting his acquired money straight into his bank account, Ó Searcaigh marching the boys to his room past the film maker.
We must assume that both felt themselves above suspicion and both now claim this transparency as their ultimate defence.
Even the nature of the transgressions have a certain ambiguous moral similarity-Bertie saying that the donation was intended for his personal use, Ó Searcaigh saying that the boys were over the age of consent.
Both are being judged not on their actions but rather on their position in the country, one as the Taoiseach, the other having poems on the Leaving Cert course.

What interesting times we live in.