Simple summer dishes using in-season ingredients feel so right they just can’t be wrong! This wonderful little dinner came about when I had very little in the kitchen to cook with apart from a few potatoes, some baby gem and some beetroot. If I’m left with a glut of tomatoes I always roast them in the oven, it’s a great way to make them go further. You can use them straight away while they’re still warm from the oven or store them in a jar with olive oil to be added to pasta or in sandwiches.

I get very excited about cooking, especially in the summer where I can shimmy, (yes shimmy!) into the garden to collect things like chive flowers, pea shoots and nasturtiums to make dishes really look amazing. The ultimate highlight of this particular dish is the griddled baby gem lettuce, a trick I’ve fallen in love with since coming back from the US, where it seems to be quite common. It gives the lettuce a deep smoky flavour and really makes them star of the show. You want to griddle them just until they have some nice charred marks but haven’t lost their shape and gone all soft. Give this little summer salad a try this weekend, it’s simple but wonderful flavours will really brighten up your day!

Continue to the recipe for Griddled Baby Gem Lettuce with Beetroot, Roast Tomatoes and a Buttermilk Dressing…

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My garden at home is finally bursting with colour and lots of things to keep me interested. This year my main aim was to have an abundance of different varieties of salad leaves. I have staples like rocket and cos but the most exciting leaf this year has been grown from a packet I bought from Brown Envelope Seeds (brownenvelopeseeds.com) in Skibbereen. The very dramatically named Oak Fire Mustard leaves look wonderful and have a deep purple colour with a fiery coloured stem and an incredibly strong mustard taste!

I love being able to wander out into the garden and pick some salad leaves for dinner. I never ever thought I would be so excited about edible flowers but they are instant summer on a plate and actually have quite strong flavours too. I planted a few nastiursiums last year and this year, my garden has been taken over! More of an assembly job than a recipe, this is a meal I prepared for guests who were staying with us last week; a perfect little summer feast!

Continue to the recipe for my Simple Summer Feast…

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This week we were in dire need of a serious food shop, to stock up the fridge, freezer and kitchen presses. It’s probably one of the most important things a home cook can do because with a little bit of imagination and some simple ingredients on hand, wonders can be created! For me it’s the little star ingredients that will sit happily waiting for until you’re inspired. Things like halloumi, feta and goats cheese, different cuts of pasta, tinned beans, tomatoes, chickpeas and store cupboard stars like anchovies, olives, and capers, can really make a dish sing.

Knowing I can turn to them into a quick supper in under 20 minutes makes life a little easier. As much as I like to buy mostly fresh produce, it’s important to keep a few little winners up your sleeve for when you are completely at a loose end, which is why I often have a few nice cuts of meat, and chicken sitting in the freezer, which can easily popped in the fridge to defrost overnight, ready for cooking by the time dinner rolls around the next day. This week was one of those weeks; fast, fresh and simple were the key words, and this beautiful dish ticks all the boxes. It’s filling and healthy and doesn’t skimp on punchy flavours to keep you interested. If you can’t get orecchiette (pasta shapes that look like tiny ears) just use another type of pasta, it’s all easily adaptable.

Continue to the recipe for Zesty Brocolli and Goats Cheese Orecchiette…

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At the moment life is sitting quite happily in limbo, as we fall between the seasons of late Summer and early Autumn.  There is still warmth in the air, yet I’m beginning to be drawn back to the more heavy and slow cooked dishes.  While it can easily be argued that Ireland got a fairly awful Summer this year, I haven’t been left short on Summer produce.  My tomatoes, while slightly late are starting to turn a rich red and my proud pumpkin patch which has long been developing a personality of its own, now sits watching our living room overlooking slightly ominously, ready to engulf the house with ever expanding tendrils, the moment we turn our backs.  While everything is in full bloom and plants are still growing, said pumpkin patch is a great reminder that, it won’t be more that a month or two, before I will be cutting the stalks of what I hope will be heavy orange fruits, reminding me further of the fact that the days are getting shorter and colder.

I do hope I’m not filling you with too much doom and gloom, but at the moment everyday is feeling a bit like that horrible Sunday before the first day back at school, leaving the summer behind for the long winter months.  It’s inevitable and unavoidable but rather than wince at the thought of it, there are lots of foodie treats to look forward to with fantastic harvest feasts to embrace and enjoy.  However before all that, and while they are still very much in season, I have been making the most of summer berries with this, what I like to think of as a fairly exciting recipe, which makes the most amazing dessert to wow your guests with.  Like most recipes I write, this one is of course adaptable and you could add a little bit of ricotta cheese if you really wanted to add to the authenticity of it being a pizza recipe, or the addition of some chopped hazelnuts would sit quite happily on top.  Whatever additions you decide on, it’s the balance of white chocolate and berries that always get me excited and you’ve never tried it, this is definitely a nice first way to give it a go.

Continue to the recipe for Summer Berry Sweet Pizza…

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I’ve always had a love of salads ever since I was in my teens.  I spent a summer in the south of France with French family friends who made it obligatory to eat a big bowl of fresh, crisp salad leaves tossed gently in a light dressing.  I remember avoiding it for the first two days being there until the lack of greenery on my plate was made the main topic of conversation, which forced me into salad submission!  Not completely sold on it after my first few trys, helping out in the kitchen to prepare it was what actually converted me!  I loved the process of washing and drying the leaves and then making the dressing by mixing a few drops of white wine vinegar, with a little Dijon mustard, crushed garlic and whisked together with some extra virgin olive oil.

Salads for me really go with any meal and the idea of having a bowl on the table regardless of what you serve up really drives home an element of healthy eating.  One of the greatest kitchen skills I picked up was to wash and dry my own salad leaves.  It’s a process which is far cheaper that picking up prepacked salads which have been sitting in plastic bags.  Wash and dry your own salad leaves on a Monday and they will sit happily in the crisper drawer of your fridge for 3-5 days.  Break a selection of lettuce heads into leaves and submerge in a sink of cold water, slosh around for a few minutes until any dirt has sunk to the bottom and then use the essential piece of kitchen equipment you need for this, a salad spinner, to whizz away the water until the leaves are dry.  Wrap them in a kitchen towel, pop them in the fridge and you will have leaves, perfect for salads most of the week.  Don’t forget to save the water you washed the leaves in to water your plants!

While not all my salads are made up of leaves specifically, I like to mix it up with chunkier options from time to time.  Ingredients like tomatoes, onion, avocado, and radishes, are all prime components to my perfect salad.  I am in love with this little recipe for a deconstructed guacamole salad, which takes all the key ingredients for the Mexican classic and strips them down to a highly appealing, vibrant and chunky salad dressed with zingy flavours.

Continue to the recipe for Deconstructed Guacamole Salad…

The post There’s Something About Salads… first appeared on Donal Skehan | EAT LIVE GO.

As I have probably mentioned a million times before, I grew up eating a roast chicken every Sunday and it has since become my favourite way to cook the bird! However during the summer months, when I just feel I can’t bring myself to eating it alongside roast potatoes I like to mix it up and cook it just a little bit differently. Technically speaking I think the term spatchcocking specifically refers to flatten poussins but basically for me it’s the process in which you remove the back bone of a chicken and flatten it out, which makes it easy to cook on the BBQ and to cut into portions once it’s cooked.

It does all sound a little bit graphic but this one little technique is what makes the difference for my backyard BBQ’s. Hot grilled spatchcocked chicken straight off the heat served with a fresh, zingy summer salad will change the way you BBQ forever! If you really feel you can’t tackle the bonecracking fun, ask your butcher to do it for you, it literally takes a few seconds and he won’t mind doing it for you at all.

Give this recipe a go the next time the sun shines!

Continue to the recipe for Mediterranean Spatchcock Chicken…

The post To Spatchcock Or Not To Spatchcock That Is The Question! first appeared on Donal Skehan | EAT LIVE GO.

The Irish summer is well underway, and despite the rain-cloud dodging most of us are forced to do, we still tend to get a nice stretch of sun that shows our fine country in its most beautiful light. Which leads me quite nicely to the subject of al fresco eating. While the opportunities might be limited, when the sun eventually decides to shine an Irish summer can be magical.

I love outdoor eating, and some of my favourite experiences come from holidays in Italy and the south of France, where they really do it right. It’s about light, zingy and refreshing salads using fresh, in-season produce that still has enough bite to fill you up, combined with flame-grilled meat.

This week I’m going to be sharing some of my favourite summer recipes. Mackerel is my ultimate fish for the season because I grew up catching them with my grandad. I love to fry it or cook it on the barbecue with lots of Mediterranean flavours, such as lemon and oregano. I serve it with an Italian bread salad called panzanella, which is refreshing and a great way to show off the best of summer tomatoes.

There’s lots of al fresco eating inspiration going on this week, so pull up a chair and tuck in!

Continue to the recipe for Mediterranean Mackerel with a Tomato Panzanella Salad…

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It’s not often you get to feel like a tourist in your own town, following a tour guide blindly, but that’s what I was last weekend and I loved every minute of it.  A few weeks ago I got a lovely email from the ladies who run Dublin’s Fab Food Trails asking if I might join them on one of their guided food tours around Dublin.  Intrigued by the idea, I gladly accepted with the promise of lots of foodie treats and tasters along the way.  So early on Saturday we marched along to the top secret meeting place from where the tour would begin.  We were greeted by the extremely welcoming Eveleen who has an extensive background in food and has even written her own cookbook, The Irish Potato Cookbook.

Along with about 10 other food tourists, we were informed that the one rule of the tour was that we had to wait for the green man when crossing!  To be completely honest I really wasn’t expecting to learn much along the tour, naively presuming I would I have know a lot that was going to be covered and most of places that were to be visited, boy was I wrong.  Eveleen is a wonder woman and has a wealth of knowledge on the topic of the history of food in Dublin, she started by giving us a fascinating history going all the way back to the famine.  Did you know that cattle used to graze north of the river Liffey?  I didn’t!

Already ensconced by Eveleen’s food stories, we dutifully followed her through Dublin’s winding streets to a series of different stops, shops, café’s and restaurants which were hand picked for their quirkiness and quality produce.  All 12 of us piled into cheese mongers, coffee shops, café’s, historical pubs, restaurants and specialist food shops to be given a taster of just what makes each place tick.  The best thing for me as a Dubliner, was that each stop had been pre-warned that we were coming and so happily chatted about their passion and generously handed out tasters for everyone to try.  While I had been to a good few of the places on the trail, I had never heard the owners or staff speak passionately about what they do, so that in itself was quite special and a really refreshing experience.  Along with the places I had been, there were some major revelations, places that I have just simply missed by keeping my head down and sticking with my old favourites.

One of the big revelations for me was Nelly’s Café, a beautiful little café reminiscent of some of the fantastic little hangouts we came across last summer in London, if I ever grow up and own a café it will be just like Nelly’s!  It has a cosy homely feel to it and serves up some of the best brownies you will ever taste, along with a great selection of soups and sambos to eat in or take away.  The decor is made up of a great selection of vintage pieces and the place was decked out in bunting when we dropped by! Yes, Bunting!

The other highlight for me was a stop at The Bald Barrista, a place I would never drop have dropped into by myself, mainly because I don’t drink coffee on a regular basis, but what sold this place to me more than anything else was the owner, a no shit New Zealander who insists he makes THE best coffee in the world.  Buzz talked us through how he makes coffee and the process the coffee bean goes through to make the perfect coffee.  Even if you had absolutely no interest in the topic Buzz had the ability to draw you in and become fascinated with everything about it.

If you fancy heading out on Dublin Food Trail, head over to fabfoodtrails.ie for full information, I promise you will enjoy it!

The post Ever Been A Tourist In Your Own Town? first appeared on Donal Skehan | EAT LIVE GO.

Preheat the oven to 175oC. Grease and flour a cake tin 24cm in diameter with a removable base and set aside.

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Remove the saucepan from the heat. Add the sugar and the egg and mix well.

Add in the rest of the ingredients and mix until combined. Pour into the greased cake tin and place in the oven for 20 minutes. The cake won’t rise dramatically but you should be left with a set top and gooey middle! Allow to cool while you whip the cream until it becomes stiff.

When you’re ready to serve, spoon generous dollops of whipped cream on top and then decorate with blueberries and raspberries.

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