I’ve been thinking about the redesign of EuropeanCuisines.com for a while now: while there’s a lot of data there, the site’s started to seem very static in terms of what other food sites have to offer. So we’re starting to make some changes.
Thanks!
[tags]EuropeanCuisines.com, European food, European cuisine, Drupal[/tags]
It’s about to start happening — that most gloriously seasonal of desserts. The tree in the paddock is so loaded down with Bramleys, the branches are bending halfway to the ground. Gotta do something about that while other work is going on.
The tart dough comes first. The basic recipe is Swiss: they do the best fruit tarts I know of. This makes enough for a 10-to-11 inch (25-28cm) flat tart pan / tin.
Basic Sweet Rich Pastry (Süsser Mürbeteig)
Sift the flour and sugar together into a large mixing bowl. Coat the butter with flour from the bowl to make it easier to handle, and grate it directly onto the flour, using the coarse blade of a cheese grater. As you grate the butter, mix the flakes together with the flour occasionally, using your fingertips, before grating more.
Add the sugar and lemon rind. Using two round-bladed knives, cut the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles cornmeal.
Mix the egg lightly with a fork and pour over the flour mixture. Using the fork, mix the egg into the flour mixture until well distributed. Then, using your hand, pull the dough gently together into a bal. Knead lightly and briefly on a floured board until the dough forms a cohesive mass. Pat into a flat round and wrap tightly in Saran wrap / plastic wrap / clingflim. Refrigerate for at least an hour before using.
If you’re doing this with a food processor (which is how I do it): Dump in the flour and salt first: pulse to aerate / sift. Add the sugar and lemon rind: pulse again. Add the butter, in pats / lumps of about a teaspoon each: pulse once or twice to get them covered with flour, then process briefly to the cornmeal texture. Add the egg. Pulse sparingly until the whole business forms a ball. Empty the container out onto a floured surface, knead briefly, pat the dough flat and wrap as above.
Apple-tart contents in the next posting…
(Greetings to all our visitors from BoingBoing, StumbleUpon and Digg!)
You may have seen the cool posting in BoingBoing some weeks ago about the hummingbird hawkmoth. If you did, this short video YouTube version of a short video from our garden might amuse you. Before we went away to CopperCon, Peter caught a few seconds of one of the local hawkmoths “tanking up” while the white buddleia bush in the front rockery was in bloom.
The species is Macroglossum stellatarum. Apparently (according to the Reader’s Digest Field Guide to the Butterflies and Other Insects of Britain) hawkmoths of this species migrate to the UK and Ireland from France each year. (Some may also overwinter in the southern counties of each island). They were fairly rare in the UK when the book was written in 1984 — it states that normally about fifty per year would be spotted: though there were very occasional years (as in 1947) when thousands might be seen.
When Peter took this video in our garden, there were easily ten of them hanging around and working the buddleia — which is a favorite with all the butterflies because it’s so fragrant and produces so much nectar in the long flower-spikes. I find myself wondering whether the lengthening of our local summers over the last couple of decades — and their earlier onset — is making it easier for increased numbers of the hawkmoths to get here from France: or whether maybe we now have a breeding population of our own in Ireland….
(Amusing sidelight: note the tiny spark of “blue-eye” that the flash from Peter’s camera inflicted on the moth.)
(Edit: video link changed to YouTube due to something like $300 worth of bandwidth-overage charges since yesterday…)
[tags]moth, insect, hummingbird, hawk moth, hawkmoth, garden, Ireland, buddleia[/tags]
The Independent has turned Comet Swift-Tuttle into Comet Swift-Turtle. Twice.
(Not only a typo, but an oxymoron…! Nice going, guys and gals.)
Oh well. Hope it clears up a little so that we can see the Perseids…
[tags]astronomy, science, Perseid, meteor shower[/tags]
The branch of Domino’s Pizza in Tallaght, Co. Dublin, sells more pizzas than any other Domino’s branch on Earth.
(And this in a city which contains both the Gotham Cafe and its sibling spot Independent Pizza, joint homes to the best thin-crust pizza in these two islands? Feh.)
(It’s late, and strange quotes drift up from the hindbrain as regards Domino’s. “A curse on the Dwarves and their punk grub.” “And on the Elves, whose taste is in their mouths.”)
[tags]Domino’s, pizza, Tallaght, County Dublin, Co. Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, how can anyone eat that stuff, Independent Pizza Co., Gotham Cafe, now there’s the real thing[/tags]
I can’t believe I’m watching “Krypto the Super-Dog” dubbed into Irish. (As gaeilge: Krypto, an Madra Iontach.)
Thank you, TG4…
[tags]Krypto, Krypto the Super-Dog, DC Comics, Irish, Irish language, TG4, as gaeilge[/tags]
For those of you who may be interested:
The Irish recipe pages at our European Cuisines website are constantly getting search-engine hits from people asking “What do Irish people eat?”. With that in mind, we’ve put a new page up that talks about the subject — in very broad strokes — and links to a Flickr photoset of images from our local supermarket, Gillespies’ SuperValu of Baltinglass, County Wicklow. (You can also view the images as a slideshow, if you like.) Anyway, if you’ve been wondering what a small-town supermarket in Ireland might offer, here’s your chance to find out.
There are also links on the “What do Irish people eat?” page to our Irish recipe collections, if you’re interested.
[tags]food, cooking, recipe, Ireland, Irish, Irish food, Irish cooking, supermarket, shopping, grocery, groceries, Europe, European cuisines, European food[/tags]
We’ve already had several days of truly gorgeous weather — temperatures in the 80’s Fahrenheit, not too humid, blazing sun — and at least a couple more are expected. For Ireland, this is most welcome: too often summer here is mostly gray and in the 60’s. 
…Down at the pub, I heard one of the neighbors saying, “If this is global warming, bring it on! Let’s all go out and run our cars!”
Uh, yeah. Well, it seems some researchers estimated what the sea levels would be in two hundred years if global warming went unchecked, and then consulted Space Shuttle-based topographic data and generated a map of what Ireland would look like at that point.
Hmm. I always wanted to live in Earthsea… (But somehow I have trouble imagining Athlone as the location of Roke.)
(The research was reported in the July 28th edition of the tabloid Irish Daily Star as being part of a documentary done for the UKTv History cable/satellite network; but I can’t find an online link to the show itself, or the article in the paper. Apparently the Star doesn’t archive, and the UKTv site is kind of hard to dig things out of…)
[tags]Ireland, global warming, ocean, sea, rise[/tags]
Ireland Is Lost Island of Atlantis, Says Scientist
And he’s serious, it looks like.
(headclutch)
[tags]Ireland, Atlantis[/tags]
Just across the road from our house lies a big country estate with all the “country estate” trimmings — a Big House, a lake, gigantic trees, private roads, you name it. The people there are into horse breeding, as are many people in this neck of the woods.
Now, this Vast Tract of Land has in the recent past mostly been important to our lives because our littlest and youngest cat, Bubble, would vanish into it, over the high stone wall across the road, nearly every night. She would normally be back in the morning, though sometimes she’d be missing for longer.
About two weeks ago I flew back into Dublin from the Continent, and Peter joined me in town for an overnight stay before we came home again. When he left the house, Bubble was sleeping in one of her usual places, in his office window under the stand where his computer monitor sits. When we got home, she was nowhere to be seen. Well, that was no big deal. We both figured she’d be back in the morning.
But she wasn’t. Nor the next morning, nor the morning after that. The other cats were becoming concerned: Beemer, in particular, started searching for her.
Her record to date had been seventy-two hours missing, after which she’d turned up perfectly all right: so we waited that long. And still no Bubble. 
At that point we began leafleting the neighborhood (which isn’t much of a neighborhood at all: the three houses a quarter-mile west of us, the two houses a quarter-mile east (both of them on the estate’s lands) and the Big House in the middle of the estate. Everyone said they’d look out for the kitty: there was always the possibility that she’d gotten herself shut into an outbuilding.
We also leafleted the local pub. And a couple of anxious days later we got a phone call from one of the estate staff who’d seen the leaflet there. “Sure she’s fine, your little cat,” he said. “She’s been down among the barns since last Monday. Come on down and you can collect her.”
The same kindly man lured Bubble into an empty garage, shut her in, and then drove up to the house to get me and the cat carrier. It seems that Bubs had gone somewhat farther into the estate than usual and had been chased by a couple of the farmyard dogs there, and as a result had become disoriented enough that she couldn’t figure out how to get home. Once returned home, she ate prodigiously, slept a lot…and then, a day and a half later, went right out again: over the wall and away…
Late that afternoon someone else, a more senior staff member at the estate, stopped by. “Are you missing your little cat again?”
“Only since this morning,” I said.
“She’s down checking out the new barn we built for the mares,” he said. “She seems to like the horses. And she’s death on the mice, that one.”
We chatted for a while, and the story came out. Apparently, for at least the past six months, Bubble has been patrolling the estate’s main barn daily for rats and mice. At that point no one was sure who she belonged to — apparently she wouldn’t let anyone get close enough to see that her collar had her name and “her” phone number written on it. But they were glad to have her, since she is, indeed, “death on the mice.” And rats, and anything else small and edible that crosses her path…or, indeed, not so small. Peter and I are still bemused by the memory of the evening she brought in, through the electric cat door, a live and very annoyed rat nearly a third her size, and turned it loose in the kitchen to play with. The other cats, all of them much bigger and stronger than Bubble, when brought in and shown this situation, unanimously backed away with expressions that plainly said, “Uh-uh, no way, nothing to do with us.” We finally had to open the kitchen door and chase the rat outside — at which point Bubble ran out to deal with it more conclusively, and the other cats all ran after her to watch.
We had always been curious about what Miss Bubs did over in the estate. And now, at last, we know. She’s been punching the clock on her day job…
Peter was up all night waiting for her. Now he’s asleep on the couch, more or less exhausted from pushing forty hours’ wakefulness, and I can write this.
Bubble went out yesterday afternoon, before we went down to Baltinglass to do some food shopping and a couple of errands. She wasn’t at home when we came back.
This by itself wouldn’t have been a cause for concern. But she’s always prompt about mealtimes. She didn’t come in for dinner. She didn’t come in later. She didn’t come in in the middle of the night, as she sometimes does, with something freshly killed.
The night before last, Peter heard a fox yipping in the pasture behind the house. It’s not a place Bubble normally would go. She prefers to cross the road and jump up and over the eight-foot wall into the Big Estate to hang out there. But was she out frogging, last night? She goes down to the pond for that…and that’s where the fox was.
This morning Peter went out with cellphone and spear to see what he could see in the back field. He found, not Bubble, but the body of one of the young swans which had been coming into their adult feathers. When we got back from P-Con in Dublin, there had still been two of them (out of a total of six, three killed earlier in the season in uncertain circumstances, the fourth gone we weren’t sure where). Monday afternoon we saw two cygnets walking up the slight hill from the pond with their parents. Tuesday we saw only one. Today there are none, and Peter found the ripped-up body of one of them. That was a big bird, even immature. Whatever killed it could have made two bites of a little cat Bubble’s size.
We hope all the normal things: that she wandered into a neighbor’s yard and got shut into a shed, that she’s lost and confused somewhere. But our hopes, to be realistic, are not high. Not that I wouldn’t laugh and feed her without complaint when she came in, shouting as usual, in the middle of the night. She is a goofy, valiant, loud-mouthed kitty who can be forgiven much even when killing things messily in the kitchen.
Goddess grant she’s still on life. If not…may her passing have been swift.
The worst of it will be the not knowing.
ETA: She was fine. She got lost after going over to the neighboring stud to kill rats.
How on Earth could I have missed this story the other day?
“The celebrated fairy bush of Latoon, Co Clare has confounded all expectations to sprout leaves again – eight months after a vandal’s chain-saw was believed to have ended its life.
“In recent days, green leaves on the white thorn bush have been visible to motorists travelling along the �90 million Newmarket-on-Fergus bypass. Folklorist Mr Eddie Lenihan said yesterday he was ‘delighted and relieved’ that the fairy tree or ‘sceach’ was growing once more.
“The sceach received international attention four years ago when it was saved from destruction at the start of the roadworks scheme after a successful campaign by Mr Lenihan.
“He warned of a curse on the roadway if the fairy bush was destroyed and related how the sceach was a rendezvous point for Kerry fairies to discuss tactics on their way to do battle with the Connacht fairies.
“Clare County Council placed a wooden fence around the bush, however last August a vandal armed with a chain-saw reduced the tree to a stump after cutting down all the branches.
“County engineer Mr Tom Carey described the act as “deplorable” and the council reported the matter to the Garda�. However no one was apprehended for the attack. Now, with growth returning to the damaged sceach, Mr Lenihan remarked yesterday: ‘The fairies are able to look after their own property.’ He said the sceach offers a window to the ‘other world’.
“Asked what he believes has become of the vandal, Mr Lenihan said: ‘Well, after the despicable act was carried out on the tree, I rang an old man who was very familiar with the sceach and had told me stories about it. After telling him about the attack, there was a long pause before he asked, “Is he still alive?”, referring to the vandal who had chopped down the branches. I won’t say anything more but I would not like to be him.'”
…The bush is indeed moderately celebrated: see this story which appeared in the New York Times in 1999. Lenihan himself is a seanachai, a semi-professional storyteller who is also a moderately well-known folklorist.
It should be said that the hawthorn is a very tough tree. There’s one behind our house which fell down in some storms late last autumn. However, since only about three-quarters of its roots were pulled out, it has gracefully declined to die and is now in flower as well. (It also allows Peter to come in and say things like, “The cat’s up the tree with the sheep.”)
In the NYT story, I’m also interested by the comment of the UCD folklore archivist about the widespread “passive belief” in Old Things. After you’ve been here for a while, you get a sense that there’s a lot of it scattered around this country. But mostly people won’t discuss it too openly even among other natives…and only ever so rarely when someone with a non-local accent (like mine) is standing there. The neighbors are concerned about looking or sounding as if they’re stuck in a previous century. But get them alone, and sometimes you hear interesting things. The hill near our house is supposed to be haunted, for example, though by what isn’t clear. I’ve never had any problems with it…but one of the neighbors, when her car broke down outside our house late at night, was so nervous about walking near that hill in the dark that she knocked on the door and asked to be given a ride home.
That said, walking a mile or so on a dark night near our house would not be fun. There are no streetlights. There are no sidewalks. There are very, very few houses, and their lights are mostly far away. If there’s no starlight or moonlight, it’s dark around here…and once or twice in such circumstances, walking home late from the pub, I’ve remembered Yeats’s story about the man who was nearly scared to death by a ghost that was following him down a dark windy road…and which turned out to be some pages from the Irish Times. (A problem no longer possible with the online edition…)
It’ll be interesting to see if anything further is heard about the sceach as we get closer to June 21st, St. John’s Eve, the night when (it’s said) the doors between the worlds stand open (and when they play softball in Reykjavik for 24 hours without stopping. Why stop when the Sun won’t go down?)…