Newgrange Passage Tomb Ireland Older Than The Pyramids

I have been back in New York for a week and trying to back into my work routine. I hope to be back to my food blogging self shortly.I wanted to share a few of my experiences from my trip back to Ireland.
Newgrange on the banks of the River Boyne is thought to have been constructed around 3200 BC. To put this in perspective that would make it 600 years older than the Pyramids of Giza and 1000 years older than Stonehenge. Given the time frame there is only conjecture as to why it was built. It is assumed it was a burial site for an ancient people.During the winter solstice the inner part of the “tomb” by light entering through a gap in the top of the doorway and traveling along the passage. It is quite amazing that such an ancient people were able to figure out the astronomy to make this work.

This is not a very good shot of the doorway but it will give you some idea of what I am taking about.

There is some abstract cave art and again the meaning is lost to history..

Here is an aerial satellite view from Google maps to give you an idea of the scale of the site.


View Newgrange Burial Mound Older Than The Pyramids in a larger map




I stitched some photos I took into a 360 degree view. The People in the shot give you an idea of the scale of the mound. The  inner chamber is surprisingly small.


Here is a video giving you an idea of how the light enters the tomb.

Howth and The Dublin Bay Prawn Festival

My recent visit to Ireland to see family was a bit of a washout weather wise but you have the make the most of any trip. Howth is a great little fishing village in the outskirts of Dublin and is a very easy ride by public transportation on The Dart, the suburban rail service serving the coastal communities from Bray in the Co. Wicklow to Howth in North Co. Dublin  . I decided on a visit  with every intention of enjoying the offerings in the the tent at The Dublin Bay Prawn Festival but the cold wind forced my family and I into one of the local watering holes for lunch. The Abbey Tavern had some really nice comfort food to take the chill away . I did get a chance to check out the festival and drop in on Dorans On The Pier  to check out the selection of seafood.

Click below to explore one of the piers..

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Old and Older Jameson Distillery Tour and The Brazen Head Ireland’s Oldest Inn

Although production has long since been moved from the original distillery in Dublin you can still take a tour of the original facility. You even get to do a tasting at the end of the tour.

The tour starts with a short movie explaining the history of Jameson Whiskey and is followed by being walked through the production from malting the barley to the triple distilling and aging process. All in all it makes for a very interesting tour.

At the end of the tour you get to taste a Jameson. A few  volunteers get to do a comparative tasting. It was a tough choice but I volunteered just so I could report back. You get to taste each while drinking water in between. I have to say the Irish did taste much smoother. But one of the volunteers preferred the Scotch. No he was not forcibly removed from the premises.

My hard work was rewarded with a certificate. I am now an Official Qualified Irish Whiskey Taster.

This is one cool chandelier . I think you could probably make this with any kind of bottle.

A short walk from the distillery over the River Liffey  steps from Christchurch Cathedral in the heart of what was once Viking Dublin  is Ireland’s oldest inn. The Brazen Head has been in operation since 1198. This place is really worth a visit.

I created a couple of 360 degree Photosynths. I love the coffin leaning against the fireplace in the library.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day and My Irish Roundup

I hope everybody has a wonderful day and remember the idea is FLOAT THE SHAMROCK DON’T DROWN IT. I have had an interesting start to the Irish themed month so far and have had more posts in a short period of time than at any time in the past. I thought I would take this opportunity to share a few links in my Irish food series and a couple of older Irish themed posts for you to check out. 

While St. Patrick’s day is a great day for me to celebrate everything Irish coincidentally it was on March 17th 2005 that I was sworn in as a US citizen so I can never remember if I am American-Irish or Irish-American.

Individual Shepherd’s Pie	Beef and Guinness Casserole	Potato, Leek and Mussel Soup
Irish Soda Bread and Rhubarb Jam	Irish Soda Farls The Quickest of Quick Breads	Smoked Salmon and Dubliner Cheese Muffin
Some Of My Irish Photos	Not Your Mother’s Dublin Coddle	Meatballs With Guinness Gravy

Please remember I am keeping my Irish food link up open and would love to see your favorite Irish Themed Food Posts. Pop over and see what everyone has being sharing.

http://www.theculinarylens.com/2012/03/mikes-miscellaneous-mondays-irish-food.html

I do not go to the NYC parade every year, in fact I have been out of town the past few years. But a year I will never forget was the parade following  9-11. As you can imagine emotion was running very high. I would consider this photo one of my best ever when it comes to capturing how a lot of people were feeling at a single moment in time. I was able to find this guy using his collar pins and get copies of this to him

The picture above is create from some photos I took in Chicago at the Smith Museum of Stained Glass quite a few years back.

Potato, Leek and Mussel Soup and My Beginnings In Food

Here is another installment in my Irish themed foods for the month of March. This would be a great soup for a Friday in Lent.

According to Wikipedia  The Kish Bank (Irish: Banc na Cise)^[1] is a shallow sand bank about seven miles (11 km) off the coast of Dublin, in Ireland. It is marked by the Kish Lighthouse,^[2] a landmark well known to sailors and ferry passengers passing through Dublin Bay and Dún Laoghaire harbour.
At one time it was very abundant in seafood and was an appropriate name for a seafood restaurant. “The Kish” was one of the restaurants in Jury’s Hotel, Dublin were I started my training at the ripe age of sixteen. There was always a bit of competition to work there as it was where you could learn the most in the least amount of time. It also had the added advantage of having four ten hour shifts in a week and as I was in school one day a week I could still have two days off.

This was one of the soups they served and was probably the first seafood soup I ever made and I will always remember how delicious it was. This was made as best I could remember as it was a long time ago.

Essentially you can use any Leek and Potato soup recipe and steam your mussels in a little white wine and strain the cooking liquor through a fine sieve into your soup. Take mussels from shells and use the to garnish your soup. I used a small amount of hot sauce on top just for a splash of color.

Potato, Leek and Mussel Soup

• 8 Medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
  
• 2 Tablespoons Butter
  
• 3 leeks, sliced
  
• 3 cups seafood broth/stock (substitute clam juice if easier to find)
  
• 1 cup heavy cream

Melt butter in large pan and cook leeks in butter over low heat till soften.
Add potatoes and liquid to pot and bring to simmer. Cover and cook till potatoes are fully cooked.

• 2lbs Mussels
  
• 1 cup of White Wine

Place Mussels and Wine in pot cover and cook over a medium heat till all Mussels have fully opened. Strain liquid through a fine strainer and add into potatoes. Add heavy cream bring mixture back to slow boil. Place into blender and blend till smooth. At this stage taste and add salt and pepper. Be sure to taste before adding salt as it may not need any.
Meanwhile remove mussels from there shells being sure to discard any that have not fully opened. Divide mussels between warmed soup bowls and ladle in soup.



If you are ever in Ireland I have to recommend a Dublin Food Tour I took on a recent visit. Click the image below to see more photos and info from that fun trip.

                                        http://www.theculinarylens.com/2011/05/fabulous-food-trails-dublin.html

I Have The Location Will You Bring The Food?

In a previous post I asked people to choose a menu item and link to the relevant post that best represented the picture I had posted. As of today more than twenty people had posted links for "what's on her menu"  The Lady In The Window. I could not have been more pleased with the response. I want to try a similar idea here. I have chosen this pretty little location for a picnic.Please post links to items both savory and sweet you might bring along to this virtual pot luck picnic.

There is no need to post a link back but do please share with your Facebook or Twitter friends and followers.

By the way the location is The Powerscourt Estate, Wicklow, Ireland which is a short hop from Dublin. So lets lay a blanket on the ground and enjoy.Rain prone Ireland may not always be the best place for a picnic but the beauty makes up for it.

Irish Brown Bread and Rhubarb Jam

I seem to be on a bit of an Irish kick at the moment.I guess I have not recovered from my trip to Dublin.

One of my favorite Irish foods is Brown Bread.  “Brown Bread” in Ireland is just a baking soda quick bread in the same style as Irish Soda Bread. When making soda breads you want to minimize the mixing or kneading as you do not want to activate the glutens in the flour.

I have to give Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks credit for most of the Brown Bread recipe although I did sprinkle oatmeal and wheat germ on top of the bread before baking it. My brother has worked for thirty years as a professional baker in a Dublin bakery where this is a extremely popular  item may not be happy I did not ask him for a recipe.

• 3 Cups of Whole wheat Flour
• 1 cup all purpose flour with pinch of salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 3/4 Cups of Buttermilk
• 2os Butter (Kerrygold if Possible)
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon of Wheatgerm and 1 tablespoon of  Oatmeal to top

Melt the butter and mix with milk and egg. Separately whisk together dry ingredients and then stir in dry ingredients. This can be cooked in a well buttered loaf tin or you can make it a little drier  by gently kneading in a little more flour and shaping it into a circle. Slash an x on top. Bake at around 400F for 50 minutes or so. 

This is great served warm with butter and preserves or with eggs for breakfast. I love it with smoked salmon.

And I made a very basic Rhubarb Jam from a recipe  I found on Allrecipes.com.

 

I was reading Heidi’s discussion of Kerrygold butter and it reminded me how surprised  I  was when I moved to the US at how white the butter was. I had only ever seen golden yellow butter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_bread

Drinking As A Religion

If the church Arthur Guinness was married in falls into disrepair what should you do with it? Turn it into a pub/ restaurant of course. Only in Dublin.
I was out for a walk with my mother while in Dublin and she told me she loved the chowder at The Church. We dropped in and I had fish and chips with a pint of Guinness and my mother enjoyed her chowder. Typical pub food but very tasty.
They also have a restaurant called The Gallery which opens for dinner which I want to try on a return trip. A lot of the fixtures are still in place and you can spend some time just looking around.The history of The Church is fascinating from Arthur Guinness’ wedding to Handel using the organ to practice his Messiah and Jonathon Swift attending services. Take a look at their website for more.

http://thechurch.ie/
 

Here are a few of my photos both old and new  from my walks around Dublin.


View Larger Map

Fabulous Food Trails Dublin,Ireland

Time was a little tight for my trip to Dublin and the weather did not play in my favor.I decided that being a tourist in the city where I grew up might be interesting. After a little research I chose Fabulous Food Tours. I have been out of the culinary loop in Dublin for quite sometime and was quite impressed at how the scene has changed.
Growing up in Dublin it certainly wasn’t a destination city for food. There were a limited number of fine dining restaurants and quality ingredients were hard to come by.
The food scene has changed radically over the last few years and even with the economic downturn people seem not to have lost there taste for quality food.
The tour does not focus on fine dining  but rather introduces some of the fun food trends.

Fabulous food tours will give you a taste both figurative and literal of some of what Dublin has to offer. We did a walking tour of some nice little food spots that have opened in Dublin in the past few years and also got a peek inside an old Victorian era bar and a traditional butcher shop.

As much as I enjoyed seeing what new stuff Dublin has to offer some of the things in old Dublin were interesting. When we visited the  butcher shop we were shown an old photo which showed how the place operated before supermarkets took an enormous toll on local butchers.
You will notice the number of employees and with all the meat lying on the ground the complete lack of sanitation. I took a photo of the old photo so excuse the quality.


The butcher took some time to show us some of the less common cuts to us. Tongue, oxtails and hearts were all on display. I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.



Another one of  our stops was an excellent cheese shop called Sheridan’s where the selection of fine cheeses was excellent. We go to taste a couple of fine Irish cheeses which I have to say could compete with the best cheeses in the world. It  was wonderful to see such a knowledgeable staff working in an operation that clearly cares about what it sells. They are able to keep the cheeses out on shelves as they maintain an optimum for cheese storage temperature throughout the whole store.  The store also has some very fine cured meats.
http://www.sheridanscheesemongers.com/





We got to taste some great home made desserts at a nice little courtyard restaurant called The Cake Café at the rear of The Daintree Building on Camden Street. This place has a eco friendly ethos and tries to use as many sustainable processes as possible which actually includes all the staff bicycling to work. While both items were very good the lemon slice was superb.
http://www.thecakecafe.ie/homepage.html

We got to drop in and have a little taste of whiskey in an old Dublin pub and were regaled by the bar man about the history of the place and how the place of the pub is changing in Irish society.


Cocoa Atelier is a very fine Chocolatier with excellent chocolates a couple of which we got to taste. We did not get to taste their French macaroons but I made a return trip after the tour and the macaroons are on par to the ones I have tried from Payard. The store is almost worth a visit just to check out the chandeliers made from kitchen whisks.
Their website is currently under construction so here is their info on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/cocoaatelier?sk=info



I had forgotten when you called something “savage” in Dublin it was a complement.After I tasted the “Savage Sausage Rolls” at Lolly and Cooks in the Georges Arcade market I had no doubt it was a compliment. Sausage meat wrapped in puff pastry and served piping hot,delicious.
They also some very nice looking cupcakes.
http://lollyandcooks.com/
The Georges Arcade is an interesting little market with stalls selling amongst other things old coins, Tibetan art and vintage clothing. There is even a place to get a fish pedicure, where you put your feet in a tank and tiny fish eat the dead skin (I was  very creeped out by this).





We also visited a small but extremely the small but well stocked gourmet food store, Liston’s, where we tasted a  a very nice tomato basil tart. I was so busy looking around the place I took very few photos so this little set does not do the place justice.
http://www.listonsfoodstore.ie/location/



Our last stop on the tour was Murphy's Ice Cream. Last but by no means least. The selection of ice cream was incredible with my favorites being the sea salt and brown bread. These ice creams are made in small batches from the cream of Kerry cows.
http://www.murphysicecream.ie/Murphys_Ice_Cream_Home_Page.html



And just around the corner from our last stop nd not on the tour  but no food tour could be complete without a visit to Molly Malone’s statue affectionately known as The Tart With The Cart.


‘’As she wheeled he wheelbarrow
Through Streets Broad and Narrow
Cryin’ Cockles and Mussels Alive Alive..O’’

All in all I found the walk to be enjoyable and you will see some nice places hear a little history meet some real Dubliners along  the way. If you plan on doing this I would recommend doing early on in your visit because you will want to visit some of the places independently also I am sure you can get some pointers from the guide.Our guide Pamela was knowledgeable and friendly.
 I would say this would be difficult if not impossible to do independently as you'd miss out in the tastings and the little talks the various owners give you.
Take a look at their website below.
http://www.fabfoodtrails.com/