Category: Side Dishes
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Recipe: Spicy duck pie with carrot and pea veloute
More pie, please. This one is called “Romany’s Lucky Ducky Pie” and is my favourite recipe is from the Pieminister Cookbook by Tristan Hogg and Jon Simon. If you have sampled their wares, or just like a good pie, I highly recommend it. The recipes are quite tricky, but just clear the decks, open a…
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Recipe: Moroccan couscous
This is a good accompaniment to barbecued meat, tagines, or a chicken that you’ve cut up and grilled. Most of these ingredients will be resident in your kitchen. Take them out, dust them off and lash them in. Ingredients: Pine nuts 1 or 2 onions (chopped) Handful of dried apricots (chopped) Handful of sultanas (chopped)…
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Recipe: Patatas Bravas
I was in The Port House on South William Street over the weekend which is one of my favourite tapas places in the city. They do a delicious dish of Deep fried cubed potatoes served with a selection of sauces for €3.95 each. My favourite is the Patatas Mojo which is potatoes served with a…
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Recipes: Beef up a summer salad with bread
Bread doesn’t have to mean sandwiches and breakfast toast. As these Nigel Slater recipes show, bread can make a summer salad more substantial or make a side dish more filling. His ‘Salad of peas, beans and bread’ is an unusual combination and the perfect dish if the usual leafy salad doesn’t quite satisfy or fill…
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Recipe: Perfect garlic bread
Sometimes the simplest of dishes can be the trickiest. I have always found homemade garlic bread a difficult one to get right. It always tastes nice but not perfect. It either has too much garlic or too little, drenched in butter or lacking and dry or just too herby. The margin for error is surprisingly…
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Recipes: Posh picnic on a budget
I experienced an extremely pleasant picnic recently. This wasn’t a ‘hang’ sandwich affair but a proper picnic on a river bank with lots of lovely food and company. It got me thinking about interesting picnic ideas and the best way to serve them up. A good picnic should be on the fancy side and include a variety…
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Dandelions: Can you really eat them?
Has anyone noticed how the country is carpeted with dandelions at the moment – it’s totally nuts. They are a controversial weed that bring disdain to those longing for the perfect green lawn and also conjure up strange childhood memories of bedwetting if left under a pillow – that was my excuse anyway. I have…
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Ashen faced
I was one of the plebs caught up in the travel chaos the other week and marooned abroad because of the plume of ash. An extra week in the sun sounds rather nice doesn’t it? Well it was complete hell and there was no sun in the south of Spain because it was busy shining…
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Recipe: Heston Blumenthal’s Roast Potatoes
Getting the roast potatoes right on Christmas day is always a challenge because there are a million and one other things to do. I have the answer – or at least Heston does. From his book ‘In Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics’, Heston Blumenthal’s recipe for roast potatoes is the best I have come…
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Steak, Chips, Onion Rings
I limit my meat consumption for financial and environmental reasons, but I can’t resist Aldi’s Specially Selected steaks, which I first tried earlier this year. Last week, I treated myself: steak with pepper sauce and home-made chips and onion rings. The rib-eye steak is more than enough for two big pigs. It’s only €11.99 and…