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Skerries Mills Farmers Market

• Location: Skerries Mills Farmers Market – Skerries, Co Dublin, Ireland
• Time: Saturdays 10am to 4pm – Outdoor
• What can you find: vegetables, pastries, meat, cakes, flowers, plants, crepes, preserves, fresh baked goods, crafts, and more!
• Note: Car Parking Facilities (FOC), picturesque surroundings, indoor coffee shop, 5 minutes walk from Skerries sea front, friendly atmosphere 🙂

Farmers markets are wonderful places to visit and shop for your local products. I love the friendly atmosphere, the homemade goods and the fresh vegetables that abound in them. People who love food, creating and sharing their skills and knowledge in a way supermarkets could only dream of.

We really should support these places of food worship more and buy more sensibly taking into account “Food Miles”.

Local artisans making great tasting cakes and sweets, preserves and pickles, cordials made from locally sourced ingredients. A circle of life that helps your community:

Grown Locally, Cooked Locally, Bought Locally = A Thriving Community

So find your Local Farmers Market and start to enjoy life, food and make new friends. Supermarkets don’t give a monkey’s about anyone but themselves, so spend some of your hard earned money with people who do care. I do, and feel happier for it.

The traders at Skerries Mills Farmers Market are a great bunch of people and I thank them all for letting me film them. It was great fun and if you would like to get it touch with anyone on this video send me an email at john@thedevilsmenu.com or leave a comment.

John

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Handy Links:

Farmers Markets in Ireland

Mussels, mussels and more mussels in Connemara

Beautiful view of Connemara

I showed you a week ago, a lovely place called Loughshinny, where you can get beautiful lobsters. It is amazing how many ingredients and food are available in nature in very surprising places.

As we like the odd adventure from week to week, we explored a beautiful part of Ireland: Connemara.
The visit to some close relatives end up into a mussel hunt on a glorious Sunday morning. When we say adventure, we really mean it… as it was more of a treasure hunt or mission impossible than a relaxing walk on the beach. Stuck in the mud with wellies one size smaller than usual is not what I call “a relaxing walk”.

We reached a very rocky area after a 20 minutes walk from the coast road and I must say, that we still are amazed by the huge quantity of mussels we found there. Which ended up feeding two families for a couple of days!

I would always encourage you to enjoy exploring nature, but also to respect such a wonderful gift, and disturb to a minimum the area so we can all enjoy it again. Leave the small mussels so they can grow into big mussels for next time  😉

Boiled Bacon and Cabbage (BBC)

Now my mum denies this, but me and my sisters all agree that mum served us Boiled Bacon and Cabbage at least 4 times a week as we grew up. I became sick of it!. As a child, to see ‘Hairy’ bacon on my plate was enough to give me nightmares.”Eat it” my dad would boom “It will give you hair’s on your chest”. Well, he was right as I have a hairy chest now but I still have issue’s with Bacon and Cabbage.

• Firstly hair on food is just wrong – Thankfully I haven’t seen that on the meat in years!
• Secondly mum cooked the cabbage in the bacon water (a good idea) till it could only be picked up with a spoon and all the goodness was gone!

A dark grey green coloured cabbage sludge is just wrong on all levels. When it is also served with boiled potatoes in their skins (now, maybe I’m strange but I hated potatoes in their skins) it was like finger nails been dragged across a blackboard to me.

The Irish brand of  ‘Chef ‘ sauce was always my saviour as huge dollops of this dark tangy condiment could hide all food abuse served to me. This meal was a culinary torture, an Irish Inquisition of Food.

Now I know that most of my friends and family love BBC and these are my personal opinions, but I’m the chef  and that makes me right! lol  😉

My goal is to make something wonderful with these ingredients, and keep the essence of the original dish. And fingers crossed, enjoy my cooking!

I want to believe that BBC is not a childhood trauma and an opportunity to challenge myself in the kitchen and cook something wonderful with these great ingredients:

• Boiled Bacon is stunning in flavour and texture.
• Cabbage, an amazing vegetable with so many varieties, textures, flavours and is high in vitamin A and C.
• Potatoes been the Holy Grail of Irish Food.

I would also like to apologise to my Mum for this tirade against her cooking of this particular dish but “you reap what you sow” 🙂 xx (she is going to kill me for this)

John
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The Secret of a Perfect BBQ – Poaching

We all love BBQ’s with lots of friends or just the family it always seems special.

But we all have at one time seen or heard of food that has been burnt on the outside and raw in the middle. And that is potentially lethal or at the very least inedible.

So I like to ‘Poach’ my chicken, sausages, ribs if big and some pork cuts basically any meat that has to have clear juices to be safe to eat.

Poaching also keeps the meat juicy and tender as it does not dry out meat like roasting can do. You can also serve more people quicker than ever before.

The poaching liquid should be full of flavour so it enhances what ever you put in it. A basic poaching liquid is water, some fresh herbs, onion, garlic cloves, bay leaf and black pepper corns and a pinch of sea salt. You can also add wine, carrot, celery, leek really anything you like the taste of.

To poach a whole chicken I like to flatten it out (butterfly) by cutting out the backbone with some kitchen scissors removing the wishbone and pushing it flat. Then I poach it in a large pan you can also do this in halves or quarters if you don’t have a big enough pan. Bring your poaching liquid just to the boil and reduce the heat till the bubbles are gently winking at you then cook for 20 mins or less for smaller pieces. But please make sure that it doesn’t boil!

Whole chicken butterflied ready to poach

Poached butterfly chicken

Bring your poaching liquid just to the boil and reduce the heat till the bubbles are gently winking at you then cook for 20 mins or less for smaller pieces.

Pink Ladies Shoulder (with Video)

Once again I am lucky enough to have some OldFarm Pork to use for this recipe. Its amazing meat, free range saddleback pigs that have a wonderful life in Tipperary and are lovingly cared for by Margaret and Alfie.
So my shoulder of pork deserved special treatment but not too much as to hide the sublime taste of the meat. I used some fresh rosemary and thyme from our garden and seasoned it with salt and pepper.
I also made a luxurious Pomme Puree a posh version of mash potato made with lots of butter. You can use less butter and salt by adding some warm milk to the processor to get the smooth velvet finish, but this is TheDevilsMenu.com so salt and butter it is for me 🙂
Pink Lady apples are one of my favourite apples, crisp and full of flavour. They compliment the rich pork wonderfully. The sauce is so easy to make you won’t bother with shop bought apple sauce again.
I love this dish, Roast pork carmelised on the outside, the wickedly indulgent ‘Pomme Puree’ and the Pink Lady apple sauce to die for. And after the amount of butter and salt I used making this you may just be saying “hello” to the Devil in person, tell him I said “hi”.
John
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The search for the best Kebabs in Ireland.

Where I grew up in London is one of the best places to buy a Kebab. A good Kebab is a wonderful experience, the flavour of grilled meat with freshly cut salad in pitta or Turkish flatbread and a large squeeze of lemon is just ‘beautiful’.

Haringey in North London was mainly a mix of Irish, Greek, Cypriot, Turkish and English families. I was lucky to have Greek Cypriot neighbours as a child, so I learnt about charcoal grilled foods long before I heard of a BBQ.

Greek 'village bread'

I learned to love fresh Greek bread ‘village style’, a large round loaf always hot out of the oven. Mum used to send me for a couple of them 2 or 3 times a week. The smell of freshly baked bread as I walked home has always stayed with me, as does the wonderful smells wafting from the Greek restaurants and take aways on Green Lanes.

Phyllis Coleston a friend of my mum and dads, bought me my first Doner Kebab. I was about 7 or 8 years old and I was round at her house playing with Martin her son who had (as I remember) a great mini golf set. I wasn’t sure if I wanted one, but Martin told me they were lovely so we had one each for lunch. I didn’t like spicy food, so I avoided the chilli sauce, I just had a big wedge of lemon that had warmed up sitting on top of the Doner Kebab wrapped in paper. It was a revelation. I loved it!. Hot slices of slightly spiced lamb with thinly sliced iceberg lettuce,onions and cucumber and a few wedges of tomato,all held together in a warm pitta bread, and it was huge!

So as you can tell I like the odd Kebab. It was the food of  choice for chefs in London. After working in a hot kitchen all day and night with the finest ingredients money could buy the last thing you wanted was to eat any of the stuff you cooked. A Kebab was always a winner  at 1 or 2 am 🙂 So as a chef I could tell a good one from a bad one.

Then I came to Ireland, and and occasionally didn’t feel like cooking and desired a Kebab. Imagine my ‘Horror’ to find that wonderfully simple dish turned into the stuff of nightmares. I have had at about 15 Kebabs in the last 3 years in Ireland each one an insult to food and to the customer! A tiny amount of meat (usually microwaved) served in a ‘small’ pitta bread with truly awful salad that is swamped by horrendous processed sauces that are slopped on a such huge quantities that I can only assume is to hide the ‘SHIT’ they have charged you for.  So I am very pleased to let you know I found a great Kebab in Ireland

The Best Kebab's in the West

The Charcoal Grill in Galway City is on Cross Street near the Quays. The staff are amazingly friendly and the food is outstanding. Layered chicken and lamb doner’s, Kofte’s, chicken and lamb shish kebabs cooked to order and at a very reasonable price. We shared the Charcoal Grill Special that came with some of all their styles of Kebabs salad chips and pitta bread. The cost was less than 20 euros with 2 cokes, An amazing place, a huge well done and thank you.

Yum Yum

John and Elora

Happy Staff with Great Food

Hells kitchen meets TheDevilsMenu.com (with video)

During a trip across Ireland to Galway we went through a town called Castlerea in Co. Roscommon and spotted this amazing little pub called Hells Kitchen. I had to investigate this place and found something inside that you wouldn’t find in any other pub in the world. The staff in the pub were lovely and friendly and it was so clean it put most hospitals to shame. Unfortunately I was driving and couldn’t have a real drink, alas coke was all I had. But I will be back to Hells Kitchen and recommend it to everyone else. lol wait and see whats in this pub you will not guess in a million years. 🙂

Spanish Pork and Rice (Paella Style) (with video)

Today Elora and Ciara were cooking a simple but delicious meal: Spanish Pork & Rice in a Paella style. Simple ingredients and easy to follow… it might take a bit of time (around 50 minutes) as you need to follow the different steps in sequence, but easy… very easy 🙂

This is home-cooking style and guarantees a happy belly and a big smile. You can use chicken instead of pork and spice up with oregano and lots of flat parsley or rosemary if you are into herbs.

The Magick touch… a little bit of chorizo to bring that authentic spanish flavour 😉

Que aproveche! – Enjoy your meal!
John

Loughshinny Lobsters

I love lobsters and happen to be lucky enough to live in a harbour where the most amazing lobsters live and get to watch the lobster boats sail in and out every day.

Loughshinny Harbour lobsters are probably the best in the world but I am biased.

When I first came to Ireland as a child we always travelled as a family by ferry and I never realised that there were such wonderful and beautiful creatures living just below our route from the UK. When I became a chef and started using Lobster most came from Canada which seemed strange to me as surely it was cheaper to get them from our own coastal waters.

But that’s what happens when you ignore the flavour and provenance for the cheapest price. Nearly all the best seafood goes from UK and Irish waters to the continent  as people will pay more for great tasting ingredients and have a love of the best . But fortunately our food habits are changing and more people are interested in good food than ever before and even better are cooking it themselves.

Ireland has amazing crustaceans and the local Lobster fisherman gets some of the best I have ever tasted. I can’t wait to get some more and show you a few things to do with them 🙂

This is a wonderful and amazing Lobster Paella made by my beautiful partner Elora being Spanish she has shown me the error of my ways with Spanish Cuisine