One Local Summer 2007 - Week 2

A little late with my entry this week although I did actually cook this meal last Tuesday. And no photo as I loaded it onto my PC in work but am posting this from a (very stuffy, overheated) internet cafe. So, I went to the Temple Bar market last Saturday morning. It was a flying visit and the terrible weather we've been having was very obvious in the lack of selection of Irish produce. McNally's did have a large selection of herbs and salads though. I bought a very big bag of spinach, a smaller bag of watercress, a small packet of edible flowers, a half dozen eggs and some of their new potatoes. I also bought a cheese from Sheridans Cheesemongers which is from Fermoy (but I've forgotten the name of the cheese, doh!) and some not very nice-looking cheddar from Paddy Jacks, which is a farm in Portlaoise. It was extremely tasty though and despite its dry, cracked appearance, very easy to grate and tasted wonderful in my omelette.

Yes, so far I'm sticking with the basics and not trying any new and exciting recipes, although I've never cooked a lot with spinach before. Anyway, that was my local dish last week. Omelette with spinach. I also added a handful of herbs from my garden and had a few of the potatoes on the side. Here the herbs from my garden:


From my garden: oregano, scallions, parsley, rosemary
From McNallys: eggs, potatoes, spinach, edible flowers
From Paddy Jacks (about 55 miles away): cheddar cheese
Avonmore milk: here's an interesting one though, I've always just assumed that milk I buy is Irish but there's actually no reason to believe that. I'm going to write to them and find out. When I was growing up there were two main producers of milk available in Dublin, Avonmore and Premier. They merged some time ago although they still sell under both brands.
Salt, pepper, oil: as before

This was absolutely delicious and I can't wait to eat more of the spinach. Unfortunately I ended up not getting home at a reasonable hour most evenings last week so had to throw out the rest of the watercress yesterday without using much of it. The spinach has been in tupperware though and is okay so I'm going to make spinach soup later. The weather is still basically crap so it's more soup than salad weather anyway.

The bad wind continued last week and I've lost a courgette plant to it. Just snapped it clean off at the stalk and out of the pot - it took me a minute to figure out what was wrong with the picture when I went outside yesterday (the first sunny day we've had for weeks) and then realised it was because on of the pots had no plant in it. At least the potato plant which was bent over completely (the stalk is split) seems to be recovering and continuing to grow.