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 »

One of the greatest myths about shopping in Lidl, or Aldi for that matter, is that it’s for people who don’t really care much about food. Food and its quality matters very much to me. I enjoy buying it, cooking it, eating it and, especially, feeding it to other people.

Where good food is available at cheap prices, taking advantage of that it is just common sense - buying what’s good in Lidl means I can then without any guilt spend more than I otherwise might on food elsewhere.

And one of the places I most like to buy food is at Thursday’s weekly Farmer’s Market, which is where I went this morning.

Normally I’d buy more than I did today, certainly fish and possible some of the pricey, but worth it, organic meat from Coolanowle Farm. But with a dwindling budget to think of I just spent €1 on a cauliflower and 45c on a bunch of scallions - both organic and both also, incidentally, cheaper than the same products in Lidl or anywhere else.

Well, ok then, that’s not all I bought. I mean could you have photographed these and then just walked on without a little something?

See that bowl on the bottom right? That’s Chili and Lime Dark Fudge. It costs 40c a piece. I only bought one piece and I savoured every decadent nibble. It may be the best 40c I’ve spent all week.

Back later with Day Four’s meals and recipes.

Tags: Farmer's Market, Fudge
Posted in Farmer's Market | 7 Comments »