Before I had a child I imagined (naively) that any I did have in the future would eat everything, none of this fussy nonsense in my kids thank you very much. Especially they would eat veg, because I’d just give it to them when they were too small to care and never stop so they wouldn’t think not to eat it.

I’ve had to revise my thinking a bit in the light of actual experience.

It turns out that children very quickly make their own minds up about what they’ll eat and try as you might it won’t always be what you think they should. And I ended up with one who, though cooperative and easy going in almost every other respect, thinks vegetables are akin to rat poison and to be avoided at all costs.

So of necessity I have become something of a whizz at sneaking in veg or dressing it up in a way that means at least a little goes down. My favourite ploy is tomato sauce, in which, if you simmer it for long enough, you can dissolve pretty much any grated vegetables.

These turnip chips pass muster too and are at least nibbled at whereas ordinary turnip would be spurned completely. They are also an excellent replacement for potato chips for anyone watching their carbs. Lidl often have HUGE turnips for anything from 69c to 89c, so they are very good value too.

They are very simply made, but a little care and attention is required or they can just be soggy and greasy. The secret is browning them fast in very hot oil. This amount is enough for three or four people, depending on their age and how hungry they are.

• 1/2 a large turnip
• Dessert spoon of soy flour
• generous shake of black pepper
• Pinch of salt
• Grated nutmeg (I use about half a nutmeg)
• Olive oil

Cut the raw turnip into chip shaped pieces and boil in lightly salted water for about 30 minutes. The actual time varies a bit from turnip to turnip, so it can take as little as 20 mins or as long as 40. You want them cooked, but not too soft.

Drain well and return to the saucepan over the heat for a minute or do to steam off any excess water, then leave aside to cool for about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile put the olive oil in a large metal baking tray. If you happen to have chicken, goose or turkey fat using this mixed with the oil gives a great flavour. You need enough oil to cover the base of the tray to a couple of millimeter depth. Put this into a hot oven - about 200°C.

Mix the soy flour, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Sprinkle over the turnip. Put a lid on the saucepan and shake it gently, turning it upside down and sideways as you do. This will slightly roughen the outside of the turnip and make sure it’s fairly evenly coated with the flour mix.

Tip into the baking tray and toss around to coat in the hot oil (it needs to be really hot at this point). They take about 10-15 minutes to cook - toss again half way though to turn the chips over.

Drain on a little kitchen paper and serve immediately - they get a bit soggy if left hanging around.

The soy flour browns very well and gives a slight extra crispness, you can of course vary the flavouring to suit yourself.

I don’t have a deep fat fryer, but I imagine these would cook very well in one and would probably be even crisper.

Tags: Recipes, Turnip, Vegetables
Posted in Low carb, Recipes | 5 Comments »

Anyone who has cats will verify the truth of the saying “Dogs have owners, cats have staff”, and they can be pretty particular about how their staff behave into the bargain. I am servant to two cats, a bad tempered and grouchy, but still somehow lovable, mother, known simply as Mamacat, and her sweet natured, shy and incredibly dim daughter, Mau.

This weekend they took part in a trial, with three cat foods lined up for their delectation.

From left they are:

1. Burgess Supa Cat (Rabbit & Chicken Flavour) - a good value premium cat food we occasionally buy in Newry, which happened to be around. I don’t think its available in the Republic of Ireland.

2. Lidl’s Opticat (Flavour not stated) - the premium cat food from Lidl, since I know from experience they won’t touch Coshida, the cheaper option, at all.

3. Whiskas (Tuna Flavour) - Probably the market leader and easily the most expensive of the three.

First up to taste was Mau, who seemed surprised to see three bowls and had a sniff at them all before choosing where to start. Supa Cat it was.

Later she was joined by Mamacat, who always gets first pick and again went for Supa Cat, so like the dutiful daughter she is, Mau moved aside and went to the Whiskas bowl instead.

At that point I left to go to Podcamp Kilkenny (of which more later). By the time I returned in the late night it was pretty clear what the their opinion of Opticat was:

They had eaten some though, so it’s not like they found it entirely inedible, and by morning it too was almost gone.

So will I buy Opticat again? Yes, I will. It may not be the favoured food of my cats but they ate it. It’s very well priced and looking at the ingredients and nutritional information on the packs is easily on a par with the others and may actually be slightly better.

Notice the Whiskas bowl - most of those left behind are the green pieces. They always leave a lot of these. According to the pack these contain 4% peas. I don’t have any idea why you’d want to feed peas or any other veg to cats - they are carnivores, don’t need them and generally speaking don’t like them. But then they don’t buy the food, the packs are designed to appeal to their devoted servents.

Back to Podcamp, which was where I spent Saturday. This was a really great event, lots of interesting talks and even more interesting people to meet. John Keyes did a very thorough round up of the day and seems to have attended most of the same talks as I did, so I won’t repeat that all here.

Darragh caught me on the hop in his talk about blogging when he brought this humble blog up for discussion, but it was all good and in fact a few people there, and in conversations later, had very interesting ideas about where this blog should (or could) go in the future. Mmm.

Later had a very pleasant evening on the town in Paris Texas and Tynans pubs in Kilkenny, with most convivial company and lots of lively chat. Hats off to Ken, Bernie, Krishna and all others involved in organising the event, they did a great job.

Tags: Cat food, Kilkenny, Podcamp
Posted in Taste Test | 4 Comments »

Spring was wet and grey, the dull miserableness continued through June, July and August and it’s not looking like there is much chance of an Indian summer. It’s mightily depressing.  So now and again I try to create summer inside by making food that is redolent of sunny days.

At the Farmer’s market on Thursday I bought some sweet and tangy pink grapefruit, the kind to which the addition of sugar would be a travesty. Combined with avocado and prawns from Lidl this made a salad that looked, and tasted, just like summer.

To make enough for two you need:

1 pink grapefruit
1 soft, ripe avocado
About a cup full of frozen prawns, defrosted

1 dessertspoon olive oil
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
Small piece of chili
Squeeze of lime

Salad leaves
2 scallions
Black pepper

The dressing on this is scant and light, it doesn’t need much and certainly needs nothing heavy. It’s simply made with very finely chopped chili, mixed with the olive oil, vinegar and lime.

Peel the grapefruit with a sharp knife, removing all the white pith. Cut into segments. Cut the avocado into chunks. Mix these with the prawns and stir in the dressing.

Serve on a bed of leaves, sprinkled with finely chopped scallion and a good shake of black pepper.

I used Lidl’s Mediterranian salad, which has a nice mix of leaves (Escarole, Frisée, Radicchio and Lollo Rosso) and which I think is good value at €1.29 for a 170g bag.

I know some people tut-tut about ready prepared bags of leaves and in a way it is ludicrously expensive compared to tearing it up yourself. But I like the variety of both colour and flavour in the mixed bags and if I bought three or four different lettuces most of it would end up being thrown away.

We ate this salad looking out on rain teeming down on the garden (which I suppose should be full of lettuce, but isn’t). It may not have been a good summer for people, but the flowers and plants just loved it and are still blooming in rampant profusion.

See all those apples? We have three trees positively groaning with fruit, all of it delicious. There isn’t a hope in hell of us eating all of them, so if anyone is in or around Kilkenny and wants some, let me know.

Tags: Apples, Avocado, Grapefruit, Prawns, Recipes, Salad
Posted in Farmer's Market, Recipes | 5 Comments »

I’ve been reading about the threatened closure of Cappoquin Chickens and one figure leapt out at me - they process 220,000 chickens a week. Just that one factory.

So I dug a bit deeper, and it turns out that about 1.3 million chickens a week are produced in Ireland and over a million more are imported - mostly from Northern Ireland. That means 120 million chickens or more a year. That’s a lot of chicken.

Few of these chickens live anything like a natural existence and if there is one product where I prefer to pay more than I have to, chicken is it. The farmer’s market is my preferred place to buy it, but I’d really love to see free range stocked everywhere, even places like Lidl and Aldi, to make it an easier option.

Yes, free range chicken is a lot more expensive but it definitely tastes better as well as leaving a better taste in your mouth from an animal welfare point of view. In an ideal world I’d buy nothing else - actually in an ideal world I’d have a flock of happy chickens scratching about outside the back door.

But in my less than ideal world I admit that I quite often just pick up a packet of ordinary supermarket chicken breasts - it’s easy, they are there and I’m in a rush.

They are not, compared to their better reared cousins, the most interesting or tasty and a certain amount of guilt about how they lived is always there in the back of my mind.

Still,  no matter what sort of chicken you buy, you may as well cook it nicely once it’s bought.

This Sesame Peanut Chicken is a great recipe based on one a friend gave me a while back, and although it takes a little time because the chicken is cooked twice - first poached, later fried - and there is marinading involved, it fully repays the effort.

To serve 4 people you need:

4 chicken breasts
1 pint chicken stock
1 teaspoon sugar (or splenda)*
1 tablespoon unsweetened peanut butter*
1 tablespoon Tahini
2 tablespoons rice vinegar (or red wine vinegar)
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 cloves garlic
1 inch ginger, peeled

Olive and sesame oils for frying
Toasted sesame seeds to garnish

* If you are using sweetened peanut butter leave the sugar out. If you don’t have tahini, just add a little more peanut butter to the recipe.

Put the chicken stock in a suacepan and bring to the boil. Put in the chicken breasts and simmer for 5-6 minutes. Test one at this point - they should be white all the way through. Remove from the stock.

While the chicken is cooking make the marinade by putting all the remaining ingredients into a blender and whizzing until smooth. The result is thick and gloopy and looks horrible, a bit like poo mud, but don’t be put off!

Slice the chicken breasts crossways into pieces about half an inch thick and put into the marinade. Stir to fully coat the chicken.

You’ll need to marinade them for at least 30 minutes, longer is better, I sometimes go to this point in the morning and leave them marinading all day.

Because the chicken is already cooked, frying the chicken pieces is very quick.

Heat a mix of half and half olive oil and sesame oil in a pan. Put in the chicken pieces, with a good coat of marinade still on them, and fry for about a minute (or less) on each side.

The marinade will brown quite fast, be careful not to let it burn.

Sprinkle the toasted sesame seeds over the chicken before serving.

I served these on a bed of sautéed onion and mange tout peas with roast cauliflower alongside. Rice is a also a good accompaniment.

Save the stock - make soup or something, it’s too good to throw away. I often just refreeze it, if anything all you have done is add flavour.

Heads Up on a Bargain

Mascarpone is something I use a lot, especially since I started shopping in Lidl. It’s always been a good buy, €1.49 as against almost €3 pretty much everywhere else, but yesterday it was reduced by 30%, to €1.04.

I don’t see this on the Lidl site, so perhaps it was just a one off or a single store thing, but it’s well worth looking out for at that price.

Tags: Chicken, Peanut Butter, Poll
Posted in Farmer's Market, Recipes | 12 Comments »

The vast money that companies spend on establishing their brands really works. We come to believe that a certain brand is the gold standard and everything else falls in behind it, usable or edible perhaps, but simply not as good. More often than not this has nothing to do with our experience of the alternatives, but because that idea has been so effectively fixed in our minds.

I’m very, very fussy about sausages. I love Superquinn’s sausages and they’ve been one of the things that keep me going back there.

So for all the time I’ve been shopping in Lidl, two years and counting, I never even tried their Irish sausages. I just assumed they’d be awful. Until Saturday.

I bought 9 premium pork sausages, which are 86% pork, for €1.99. They were absolutely gorgeous. I’d go as far as saying they might even be nicer than Superquinn’s.

I feel like a complete idiot for not trying them before now, but I’m not alone.

Ireland: Officially Brand Addicted

A report published in 2007 confirmed what has long been known by marketers - that Irish consumers are far more loyal to brands than their counterparts in Europe, with well over half of shoppers sticking to the brands they know and not shopping around.

To put this in context, only 8% of Norwegians were found to stick consistently to known products.

It may not be the only reason, but there is some justification for the comment from the survey’s author that: “this loyalty may help to explain why Irish people pay higher grocery bills than their European neighbours, as branded products are not being replaced with cheaper alternatives.”

Change is happening already. For one thing the clear trend in the survey is that the younger the consumer the more fragile the brand loyalty. And of course the coming to the market of Lidl and Aldi has definitely caused a drift away from better known brands. But it’s still a slow change.

Try Something Different

The other day I watched two women in succession pause in front of a display of dishwasher tablets, consider their options, and choose a box of Finish All in One at €8.99 for 30 tablets over a box of Lidl’s own brand W5 Perfect 5 tabs at €4.29 for 10 tablets more.

Now I’ve been using the Lidl ones for a long time, as have many people I know, and they totally do the job and do it very well indeed. You could see the women struggle to believe this, perhaps even because of the huge price difference. It’s quite hard to believe that something costing about a third of the price could be anything like as good as something you just ‘know’ is the best.

But if you use your dishwasher once a day, making this simple switch could save you almost €70 in a year - just on washing up! It may not seem like a fortune, but repeat a similar saving with 3 more items and it would be the equivalent of about a 1% rise in take home pay for someone on the average industrial wage. As the old adage goes, a penny saved is a penny earned.

So, here is a challenge for you: this week step outside your comfort zone, jettison one of the brands you have steadfastly stuck to and buy a cheaper alternative, not necessarily in Lidl, anywhere you like.

Sure, it may be a disaster. On Saturday, as well as the sausages, I also tried Lidl’s Toppers Diet Coke and I won’t be doing that again. But there are bound to be some revelations also.

Come back and share your experience - pooling our knowledge will make cannier shoppers of us all.

Tags: Brands, Diswasher Tablets, Prices, Sausages
Posted in Wasting Money | 21 Comments »