Supper

Supper Happened....kind of...August 1st /  by Kevin

Well...sometimes....things don't work. I think I was being stupid. I wasn't interested enough in the menu, it was half-hearted and because of that it was not a good supper.

I was embarrassed to serve it to people. I charged no one and I would never have paid for what I gave people. To begin I forgot to put the carageen in the panna cotta....I put in agar not thinking...then I just didn't set. So I whipped up a batch of raspberry sorbet. That was nice.

I could not find sea spinach...so I went with spinach. The mushrooms tasted of white wine....in a bad way. The crust on the pastry was pretty much a chestnut crumble under mushroom.

The fritters were fine. The batter was bland and uninteresting.

The salad was its usual self, I have made it before.

I sat at the table and couldn't bring myself to eat more than a bite of each item of food. This supper taught me a lesson, I can not word this lesson but it happened.

This is the end of this post. Not to positive, but I am looking forward. I'm terribly happy with this weeks coming up Secret Supper in the Joy of Cha. It has no meat in it and I am entirely happy to make it and know it'll taste amazing.

.....also...I may have put tarragon in the dip for the fritter instead of rosemary...this I realised at about 1am....for this I have no excuse....

Supper Happened! 25th July! /  by Kevin

Another supper! I'm sorry I'm so behind on these but I'm catching up!...I think. Moroccan food is probably one of my favourite foods. This was also my most prepared and professionally hosted suppers. I was really pleased with how it all came out. Great company as usual and lots of fun!

It was cherry season! I bought cherries. I ate far too many cherries. Took the stones from each....I need one of those stone popper things...but I quite enjoy taking the stones out. Cooked them down with some water and sugar and seived the batch. Left it to cool and made sorbet! Next was the mousse! I like mousse...I've noticed the large number of 'like' in this post. But I liked all of this. The mousse is made with a little spiced rum. It's wonderful and tasty. Lastly I baked the buteer biscuits. My favourite recipe for biscuits. This time I added saffron and lemon zest.

    

I wanted my cous cous to be cold for the supper, so I made it in advance as well. I roasted the squash and mixed in lemon and harissa.

3 hours before my dinner, I made my flatbread dough and left it to rise. Next I moved onto the chicken dish with 1 hour before people arrive. I got this chicken recipe of a wonderful Moroccan-American man by the name of Hassan.I'm very glad to have had the pleasure to have met him and the luck to have received such wonderful recipes from him. If you're ever in New York and happen to be frequenting Dean & Deluca find him and tell him I say hay! The thing I like about Moroccan food is that it is spicy but fresh, citrusy and wonderful all round. It's really a simple dish but has wonderful flavours. I used my own chicken stock to cook it in and it all worked really well.

I turned the oven up to 200°C and rolled out my dough. Flat breads began baking. Last but not least was the clams.....

Sadly I didn't end up with clams for this dinner, we were unlucky and ended up with a Red Tide. I ended up getting my hands on some wonderful mussels. So it was all ok! Panic over. I heated sherry, some water and my dry harissa spice mix. Cooked the mussels for a few minutes about a minute before the mussels were ready to come off the heat I mixed through the samphire. Put some chopped coriander on top. That was it ready to go!

Apologies for the hazy picture. **was organised, forgot to take photos..**

Everything served up. All at once. Bam. We ate, laughed and enjoyed everything.

The secret suppers continue! /  by Kevin

It's happening again!

This week I've tried to focus on the best fruit & veg (in my opinion) from Temple Bar Food Market! Hopefully the only things I'll need to go to the shop for will be polenta and flour! It's the usual, €25 for 3 courses, BYOW with a €5 corkage or have a chat to us about other options. Hope to see you there!

Supper Happened! July 18th! /  by Kevin

My first and one of my favourite dinners with my newest accomplice Danielle!

Danielle and I were in Galway at the Film Fleadh, when we came to the decision that it would be great to do a Japanese meal using Irish Seasonal ingredients. The best suggestion was that it would be great to tempura some courgette flowers. I made a quick phone call to the wonderful McNallys, I was informed they were available...provided I appear on the farm the day I was going to use them and hope it wasn't raining.

I wanted the pickled salad and mackerel to be strong and flavoursome. Mackerel only needs 24hrs to pickle safely. I wanted to intensify the flavour so I left it for 2 nights. The salad is a simple bento recipe on a larger scale.

 

Find your veg that you want, chop it into strips pour over a mixture of rice vinegar and sugar leave for up to 3 weeks in the fridge. With the mackerel I used a mixture of  cider vinegar from Llewellyns and white wine vinegar. Cooked it down with a fennel and orange mix. Covered the fish in onions, fennel and poured over the cooled liquid. I wrapped it well and put a heavy weight on top.

      

I wanted to do something different with the seaweed salad this time, I decided to use rhubarb, broccoli and wakame seaweed with a soy/lime dressing. I roasted the rhubarb for 15min at a high heat with ginger and soy. Seared the broccoli with chilli. Mixed everything with the rehydrated seaweed. Dressed it all in the soy and lime and it tasted great.

The plan was to make soba noodles and it almost worked. It got to 8:00pm, went to roll them...dust. Not good. It's life I guess I had done a test batch earlier that day, with some success. I had decided to add more white flour to the mixture. It just didn't come together. These things do happen and I plan to return to them soon. Out I ran to F&B and ran home.

The joy of pickling was it was done ahead of time, sadly I am sometimes a little distracted..D appeared just after 8:30 to see me running around like a headless chicken. None of the tempura stuff ready to go. Within the next few minutes she was in chopping like a pro while I complained about noodles and gluten. But we were back on track. We began by cooking the flowers which worked amazingly well! The rest followed and we were ready to go! The noodles chilled, their dipping sauce waiting them. Salad and fish on the table. We all set down with small plates, bowl and chop stick. Hungry and warm*

*I was mainly warm....I had also put my finger in the hot oil at least twice.

Last but not least was the matcha tea ice-cream. I love making ice-cream I've been making lots of it lately and my confidence has risen. I made brittle to go along with it. Cooked down the red beans to a nice consistency and passed them through a sieve.

Supper Happened! July 11th /  by Kevin

Apologies about that massive delay! It's been all go here lately. There are many plans in the works!

So I decided on this supper around the same time that i had decided to do te July 4th dinner. I had been in Galway and met James McGeogh. Who kindly gave me some of his AMAZING smoked black pudding. James studied butchering for seven years in Germany, where he gained his interests in air dried meats and smoked meat.....anyway, he gave me some of his black pudding and the idea popped into my head that it would go wonderfully with really well with some kind of sweet compote. So I needed a platform to deliver it. I decided that scotch quail eggs would be the answer.

The dinner was well and truly booked out when  found out one of the attendees was wheat and cows-milk intolerant. She offered to eat around anything that contained wheat (she had not looked at the menu) once I explained there was no escaping wheat she offered to not attend, but I insisted that I could make everything to suit her diet. With a few substitutions I soon had a wheat/gluten/cows-milk free meal under way.

I prepared the quail eggs by soft boiling them, letting them cool then wrapping them in the black pudding that I minced further down and added some cream. For the alternative I made  smoked mix of sausage meat and treated them the same. Rolled everything in polenta and left to stiffen up in the fridge.

The yorkshire puddings were a bit more of a challenge in the intolerant department..I used a mix of self raising flour, xanthan gum, egg and goats milk....they were more Yorkshire muffins in the long run, but I was informed were rather tasty. Everyone had steak the one way (no substitutes there) I deglazed the pan with some madeira wine and my salsa verde mix.

Finally came the wonderful challenge of a tolerable pasta. There was a huge amount of ideas, recipes and tips (which always worries me...no has really got a simple working idea for it) I knew I didn't need it to be overly elasticy, so I just needed to make sure there was lots of protein to bind it all together so I decided on fresh duck eggs, with an extra yolk throw in on top for good meusure..

and it worked! Success. I filled all the ravioli and that was that! I was done. Ready to serve and everybody could eat and enjoy.

Here are photo compliments of Liz, who was one of my intolerant people!

Supper 18th July! /  by Kevin

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So this post is a bit ahead of other ones but I'm going to put it up, the suppers have been booked out before I've gotten a chance to design the menus.

We had a wonderful supper on the 11th and that will soon be posted, this supper is also booked out, I've upped the numbers to 8 for supper. It means I get everyone in. So this will be the supper for this week. Also this week a have a wonderful kitchen accomplice by the name of Danielle cooking alongside me. We can also thank her for the translation and the majority of this Japanese Inspired dishes.

Supper Happened July 4th! /  by Kevin

Sorry about how far behind I am on these supper posts. It's been a bit hectic lately. So today, I hope to tell you about two supper that have happened! This was somewhat of a hurried supper, I had been working Galway at the Ocean Race and came back on the train to Dublin the night beforehand and was on a train back to Galway in the early hours of the morning the Thursday morning.

ImageThe idea for the dinner came to me while I was at Corleggy Cheese's farm preparing to go to Galway. I decided if I was going to be on the West Coast of Ireland I should mainly use what I could get my hands on there. I thought to myself that I'd just ask around the market and see who had the best mussels BUT everyone was talking about Marty's Mussels. So I went and found the number for them called and voilà, mussels. I talked to Catherine Nee (Marty's wife) she informed me all about their mussels, she also brought them to Dublin for me, which was very,very appreciated. They're rope grown, they've got a thinner shell and cook quicker than most mussels I've used in the past. I arrive in Dublin to find these waiting for me:

I got home Tuesday and began to prep, decided I was tired. So relaxed. I had my little sister over the next morning, so the Wednesday turned out to be a very busy day. The supper was easy and very manageable, the main prep came with the making of the ice-cream. The idea to infuse it with elderflower came when I was on the farm, the only problem was getting it to Dublin five days later. We had been infusing vodka with elderflower for some other fun projects so I decided to borrow some of it and make a syrup. I cooked down the vodka with some extra elderflower in it with 4 tablespoons of sugar, boiled off the alcohol. So I used the syrup as the sugar in the custard. Job done, I had elderflower custard. Left it to chill in the fridge for 8 hours or so. I got gooseberries from the McNallys and cooked them down with lemon juice and sugar. We served it with gingerbread people.

Cooking the mussels was simple, at Marty's they debeard nd clean all the mussels. I made my harissa and got a huge amount of coriander. In the bottom of my largest post I heated oil with chopped garlic and shallots.  When te oil was hot enough I added the mussels with a glass of dry white wine.  I didn't necessarily need the wine, but I want to get a good bit of steam to make sure I could get all the mussels cooked properly...I hadn't gotten around to cooking 5kg of mussels before..it went ok. There was a bit of pot shaking, but I just left them to it. IT was great with the thinner shells they cooked great. I put about 2/3 of the batch  into a large hot pot and lay it out on the table, sprinkled chopped coriander over the top and it was ready to go.

As we worked our way through the mussels I served slices of sourdough bread to start to soak up the wonderful spicy juice in the bottom of the pot. With this meal we also had battered aubergines covered in honey infused with rosemary. With Aubergines I always try to get as much liquid out of them as possible before cooking with them. Battered aubergines are not the prettiest things in the world but that taste great. I also made a seaweed salad, with this salad, I rehydrated a mix of seaweeds and washed out a good bit of the saltiness. I then mixed the seaweed with spinach and some seared broadbeans, dressed it in a honey, lemon and dijon mustard dressing.

It all went well. The ice-cream was fresh and light, it was refreshing after a spicy and salty dinner.