Caitríona , Deirdre and Eileen (with their father in the background ) photographed by Phil on Caitríona’s camera

It looks hopeful for my Lemon tree, it is just laden with blossom,

As is my little Seville Orange .

Back in Dublin last week to attend Ruadhán’s Christening.

Ruadhán with his Granny Síle

With his Grandad Martin (whom he has already started to answer back )

With his Tante D

Fionn and his Grandfather enjoy a picnic in the park.
The saying of the week was the same Fionn saying to the same grandfather ;
“Mortin (sic) , I need to go to France ”
Well he is now booked in for a holiday in June and another in August.
Roll on the days.

Ever since I read the following passage in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist I have had a fondness for the word Tundish- which basically means the dish which was used to funnel liquid into a tun.

Here James is talking to a cleric in the physics labatory in University College Dublin.
After a short discussion about philosophy they talk about the methods used to fill a lamp:

— To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

— A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.

The french use the word entonnoir which has the same etymology as tundish.
Therefore I have always tended to think of my collection of glass funnels as tundishes.

These have come from I imagine several sources.
because I bought the first near the town of Grasse I always imagine it was used in the perfume industry.
Others were undoubtably used in the winery and yet more of them in laboratories.

In the restaurant, which had plenty of display space , they lined up nicely on a counter – they weren’t so easy to house out here .
And then I saw this picture in a French interiors magazine.

Suddenly I had a way of killing two birds with one stone – a home for my tundishes and a really good chandelier for my black lime stone table.

My original six have recently become eight when I managed to find two more on a trip to Annecy.

They are now en route to Ireland where my friend Clive has been comissioned to design the tundish chandelier.

Watch this site.

I found this again yesterday while looking for something completely different.
It was taken in the back garden of my sister D’s house in Dublin in 1971 and the children are her son Richard and daughter Ann.
I am exposed in all my glory as a 22 year old hippy, believe it of not I still have the trousers somewhere in an attic in Waterford.

All of 40 years ago.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

At a stall in a Vide Grenier in Causse et Veran I saw these two glasses.
They are blown , worn , Café glasses , quite large therefore probably meant for beer but ingraved with a measure which means they were also used for absinthe.
The date probably fron the early 20th Century where they would have been used in Cafés and restaurants.
They were a mis matched pair – but then in the days of hand blowing no glasses were identical.

I asked Madame the price, she told me 50 centime for the two.
I took them.

An hour later in an antique shop in Villeneuve we saw a single similar glass for sale for €25 , a fair price I would say.

Nice to see that the original of our Eileen Gray table (above) sold at Auction in Paris this morning for a quarter of a million Euros.
Great that this Irishwoman is now being valued over here.

My Boxty

Potato cakes were very much a part of the culinary repertoire at home when I was growing up.
Any time we had a fry , which could be either for breakfast or tea (that being the meal we had in the evening, dinner was eaten in the middle of the day) and there was some left over mashed potato , potato cakes would be made.
The mash would be augmented by a couple of handfuls of flour , made into a pastry like consistency and then rolled out, cut into triangles and fried in the bacon fat in the pan.

The resulting cakes were not my favourites , I always found that they left an unpleasant taste which I later realised was the taste of the raw flour, not cooked out by the brief frying.

However Potato Cakes as very much a traditional Irish dish so when I ran my restaurant I was determined to make a version I liked .

I ended up completely leaving out the flour , mixing the mash into a soft dough with
an egg or two, then forming them into patties, coating them in egg and breadcrumbs and shallow frying them in olive oil.
These were , I thought , delicious and I used them frequently in Dwyers as a basis for various starters of Prawns in Herb Butter , Smoked Salmon with Horseradish ,Lambs Kidneys in Manzinilla and Scallops in Garlic .

My Scallops in Garlic on a Potato Cake as photographed by Caitriona some years ago.

Last night I started to cook dinner and then discovered that, except for three medium sized spuds and a bowl of left over mash in the fridge I was out of potatoes .
To save my self the run down to the Super U just for spuds I racked my brains for a way out.

Now I had already decided that we were having some fillets of John Dory , breaded and shallow fried with some Lemon Mayonnaise and some quick fried Florence Fennel on the side.
With this combination neither rice nor pasta were appropriate.

Boxty seemed the obvious solution.
This is traditionally made with a combination of mash, flour and grated raw potato made into cakes and fried.
I decided to give the dish the same treatment as I had the potato cake by leaving out the flour and getting the egg to hold the mixture together.
It worked , we all thought, extremely well.

My Boxty.

250 g Cooked Mash Potato
250g Peeled Grated Raw Potato
2 Eggs
Salt and Black Pepper
Olive Oil for frying
Once you have grated the potato you want to work fairly quickly as they tend to turn blue , this doesn’t seem to affect the taste but doesn’t look great.

Mix the mash with the eggs to a smooth mixture with a beater or a wooden spoon.
Stir in the grated potato and a liberal seasoning of salt and pepper.

Heat the oil in a heavy pan and when hot drop tablespoons of the mixture on the pan and flatten it out a little with the back of the spoon.
Cook until browned, flip these and brown on the other side.

Keep these warm in a warm oven while you are cooking the rest.

( I haven’t tried as yet but I am sure that if you added some chopped herbs or even grated cheese to the mixture they would be good just on their own)

This is a repeat of a piece I blogged about four years ago.

Something to Declare

This is the title of one of my favourite books.
It is written by Julian Barnes, possibly an even more obsessed Francophile than I, and consists of a series of short pieces about France.
One of these pieces, called ; The Land Without Brussels Sprouts” is about Barnes’ attempt to cook a tomato soup from Elizabeth David’s’s Italian Food.
Her instructions read that he should peel the tomatoes, cube them, and then “melt them in olive oil”
Here is Barnes reaction;
Melt? Melt a tomato ? Even a chopped one? The implausibility of the verb froze me. Perhaps if you are south of Naples, and beneath the intense noonday sun your fingers have just at that moment eased from the plant something that is less a tomato than a warm scarlet deliquescence waiting to happen; then, perhaps the thing might melt under your spatula. But would these muscular cubettes I was now easing into the oil ever do such a thing? I found myself, as the anxious pedant frequently does, caught between two incompatibilities. On the one hand, I believed, or wanted to believe, that with a few encouraging prods the tomatoes would, by a culinary process hitherto unknown to me but promised by my trustworthy tutress, suddenly melt; at the same time I was pursued by the sane fear that cooking the surly chunks any longer in the oil and thus adding to the over-all ten- minute time limit would make them lose their freshness and vitiate the whole point of the recipe.
For several stressful minutes I waited for the miracle “melt”.
Then with a cookish oath I seized the potato masher and mashed the shit out of them…

Yesterday was my turn to get the bread and, as it was Monday, I had to go to the Point Show as Monday is the bakers day off (Point Show , also called Point Chaud is the place where they bake pre-made bread thus hot point and also where they used to rent videos thus picture show point )

I ordered the croissants and the bread and then , as I remember cleared my throat.

Madame then to my surprise asked me was I sick.
Vous avais maladie ? she ( I thought) said.

As I stutteringlsy tried to answer that no, I was fine, I was just clearing my throat she repearted her request.
I then realised she had said.
Vous avais m’a le dit ? which of course means What did you say to me ?

Thank the lord I understood before I pontificated to the poor woman on the state of my health.