Irish Mastication

I struggled to keep this post short and interesting because I could go on about food in Ireland for ages. Here are two highlights:

Ireland, not surprisingly, has an outlandish variety of fresh seafood. We visited a restaurant called Aherne’s in Youghal (pronounced “you’ll”), a village in the south of Ireland. Between three of us we ate various crab, cod, salmon, mussel, oyster and scallop dishes. It was a seafood banquet like I have never experienced before.

At Ballymaloe Cookery School, we watched a traditional Irish cooking demonstration by the one and only Darina Allen (famous in Ireland for traditional Irish cooking, her Irish cooking school, numerous Irish cook books and for saying, “Well, that was a gas,” after completing an Irish dish). One could say the Irish are quite patriotic. She also subtly hinted that she wouldn’t be around the next day so if anyone wanted cook books signed; it’d better be that day. Half the stock of her books in the shop was promptly sold during the tea break (the Irish are be very sneaky money makers). I succumbed to the sneakiness.