Look a bit closer.

Hello dear readers, it’s been a while since we’ve gotten around to writing a proper post but I felt it was time to pipe up and talk about a case of mistaken identity.Consult any book on wild herbs or foraging in Ireland and you can bet on finding ‘Wild garlic’, also known as ramsons or rather pleasingly: ‘bear’s garlic’ from its Latin name Allium ursinum. This herb has in recent years been embraced as the foodie enthusiast’s first step into foraged foods, guaranteed once a year to turn your instagram feed into a month-long green wall of homemade wild garlic pesto. Wild garlic is not a generic term for anything remotely leek-y picked in the wild. Lately I’ve come across a number of instances where foodies seem to think wild garlic is a term applied loosely to any spring herb with long, singular leaves and white flowers. (This would be why scientific nomenclature is helpful. Here is the RHS guide to how plant names work.) This lack of knowledge, or at least lack of clarification for their less informed followers by a handful of food bloggers has been rather unhelpful; at best it fouls the paddling pool that is the Irish foodie community with confusion and ignorance, at worst it instills people with baseless confidence in identifying which bits of the countryside are edible which, needless to say is a potentially treacherous path to go down.

It’s nice to have authority, it’s nice to have people ask you your opinion. For these reasons some food bloggers, particularly if they have large followings sometimes seem to feel this makes them an expert on their topic. There isn’t necessarily a correlation between popularity and knowledge so it’s necessary to keep a critical eye on anything you read on a blog/instagram/tweet. How reliable is this source of information? Do they have any references to back up their claims? This is a problem I often have with resources on gardening- less telling me about how magical your mulching techniques are, more scientific data please.

Of course I would also appeal to bloggers to consider the responsibility they have to their readership to make sure any facts you share are accurate and verifiable. That’s not to say mistakes are totally unforgivable, just have the good grace to declare you made a mistake and now have more accurate information. Unless you are an expert, don’t act like you are. If someone asks you a question and you’re not 100% sure you know the right answer, either do the research or refer them to someone who would know for sure. It’s ok to be wrong, you might actually learn something, which is surely the point of being an enthusiast in the first place.

The Future of News of the Curd

So things are a bit different then they where only 1 year ago. In 2 days we'll celebrate a year worth of supper clubs,

we have hosted about 75 meals in the apartment and between bigger events and other such things we've fed about 1,500 people. 1,500 people have tasted food that has come straight from Irish producers, we've been lucky enough to meet these people and learn so much from them. So from today we retrun to how it was this time last year. Our 2 days a week will now go back to 1. Once a week we will host a meal for 14 people that showcases rthe best season offering from Temple Bar Food Market.

Robin will be coming onboard much more and for the month of August all of NOTC will be in her very capiable hands. I will be working in Café Paraidiso for a month. While I'm down in Cork we will hold a Pop-Up meal, there's more information to come on that! Menus for August and July are nearly finalised so start getting booking as we won't have as much wiggle room anymore.

Our little experiement in footfall has taken off big time recently, the Gruel Guerilla is now a beast all by itself and is set to appear in more of your favourite locations around the city, add him on twitter @GruelGuerilla. I'm very pleased to announce that we will be joining the Twisted Pepper in the Rum Bar with some bad ass Hot Dogs from this Friday. It'll run from Thursday to Sunday each week for the forseeable future.

There is a whole cache of NOTC blog posts to come your way once I get the finger out and get in to it! Some new information of people we will be working with this year and some of the things that they have thought us.

But for now I shall depart, thanks for reading, thanks for supporting us and thanks for supporting Irish producers!

Homemade Miso

Most of my cooking knowledge that I picked up when I started to cook was from my Japanese host family that I stayed with when I first visited Japan in 2007. Japanese home cooking is a different experience to what we see in the restaurants here. It's simple, healthy and satisfying even in small amounts. A normal Japanese meal is roughly 'ichi-ju, san-sai': one soup, three sides. Generally, the soup is a miso soup, and a properly made miso soup is a real pleasure. I came to appreciate this on that visit to Japan and maintained my love of miso since, so a few weeks ago I was very excited to attend a day course on making miso hosted by Junko Hamilton at her lovely home in Blackrock. Miso soup is by far the most common use of miso paste but it is used in salad dressings,and in many other Japanese dishes. I think there's a lot of parallels between cheese here and miso in Japan: there are many, many kinds and variations and the making of it is shrouded in a veil of mysticism. Despite being an essential item, not a lot of Japanese people even know how to make miso paste. Over here in Ireland we don't get much sense of the variety of miso products available, though some companies like Clearspring do stock rice miso and barley miso alongside red and white. I really love miso in any form so I was  very excited to take part in this course. Like cheese making, miso requires a small investment of equipment and the essential ingredient: Koji. Koji is fermentation culture that is at the heart of many quintessentially Japanese ingredients such as sake and soy sauce. You can read a little more about it here.

Besides Koji, we needed salt, good quality soy beans, slow-cooked soft overnight and steamed rice. This was inoculated with Koji for several hours at a consistent humidity to make rice-koji. Rice is only one option as a medium for Koji. Junko-san explained that where she comes from in the Kansai region white miso with a much higher concentration of Koji was made. This makes the miso mature faster, taking perhaps a month, where our rice-koji miso will take six. Having a medium like rice is handy though over here where koji isn't so easily obtained. You can buy it in powdered form in Japan which travels successfully.

First we had to mince our soybeans, then pound them into paste with Junko's Japanese pestle and mortar. Next, in the wooden dish (same as what is used to make sushi rice) the salt and rice-koji is mixed in with the beans and eventually shaped into balls which are then pressed into a sterilised container, making sure there is no air trapped within, this is covered with a weight of salt and that was it!

The whole process was very relaxing and satisfying. Once we had finished Junko-san laid out a simple and tasty vegetarian Japanese meal: Rice & miso soup (made with the last of her previous batch of home-made miso) along with kinpira renkon (lotus root), beans simmered with root vegetables and seaweed and kimchi. It was incredibly filling and satisfying. This was followed with a matcha milk pudding and hojicha – a tea made with the stalks of green tea leaves, roasted. It has a round, nutty taste and contains no caffeine. Junko-san told us that where she comes from, the Kyoto area, it's hojicha that is most commonly drank everyday rather than more famous green teas like sencha.

This was a fantastic learning experience in a warm and relaxed atmosphere. I hope to see more of Junko-san; she has a lot to teach about food and Japanese culture around eating and drinking. I'm very thankful to Junko-san and my fellow participants for a very pleasant day!

Junko-san will be hosting another day course on the 27th of April from 10:30-2:00. This will be a demonstration introducing Japanese cooking techniques and followed with a Japanese style lunch for all participants. It will be an introduction to the principles of Japanese cooking and more details can be seen here. For details contact junkohamilton@gmail.com.

*photos taken by Lolo Demoitie.

Solving Food Waste!

30% of all food produced globally is wasted; this catchy statistic began making the rounds though news media earlier this year.We can all do our best to buy only what we need and make the most of everything we buy but none of that will ever reduce the kind of waste food thrown away by supermarkets and other businesses that sell food everyday; most, if not all of it perfectly edible.

I've worked in cafes, delis, restaurants and factories where I witnessed the harrowing sight of black bags of  fresh food chucked in the bin.

Working in a factory that processed meat was one of my first summer jobs and to be fair, they had a good policy for distributing its surplus among the staff. That factory is now gone and as I moved on to other things I saw noticed a sort of hysteria developing around liability and disposing of surplus food. By the time I was nearly finished secondary school it was a sacking offence to eat any food at the Centra I worked in part time, never mind the sacks of sandwiches, freshly-made ready meals, cooked meat they were chucking in the bin. This madness is still practised everywhere that fears liability, should someone be sick from eating perfectly okay food. I suspected this was a flimsy excuse for laziness and for putting the responsibility of food waste in someone else's lap.

Fortunately here in Dublin at least a Trinity based group Food Glorious Food have come up with an simple and effective solution: They liaise between businesses with surplus food and charities. The business can sign off liability to FGF who arrange for the food to be shared with people who need it. It's something I would really encourage more businesses in Dublin to get involved in and I hope we will see this model replicated elsewhere. As of today FGF won Social Entrepreneurs Ireland's Mini-Innovation award fund for their work. As food and energy prices rise and harvests continue to suffer from bad weather conditions, it is imperative that we eliminate senseless dumping of such a valuable and energy-intensive resource.

Make sure to LIKE Food Glorious Food Dublin on Facebook and spread the word! You can also follow them on Twitter @F_Glorious_F

Posted by ROBIN