Epicurean

One of the most frustrating things about Ireland’s schizophrenic weather is the inability to plan a good barbecue. There are few things better than meat cooked on open coals, accompanied by a cold drink enjoyed outdoors in the sunshine. Unfortunately with our climates proclivity to rain planning such an event can be as rewarding as picking the long shot in the Grand National. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Quality steaks are the first key ingredient. These should be picked up at a butcher, not prepacked from a supermarket. I recently bought some fine cuts of sirloin from a butcher off Aungier St. He was able to recommend and advise on which type of meat suited my needs, how long the meat had been hung, which farm it came from and the cow’s star sign. Maybe not that one.

Prepped with a rub of olive oil, salt and pepper, it should be cooked on the rare side of medium rare. When cutting into it the meat, you should be greeted with a beautiful pink color. My dad always wants his steak cooked well done. I try to tell him he is missing out.

When the meat is cooked it should be allowed to sit for a bit to let the flavours settle. It should then be enjoyed with a side salad, cold beer or a nice glass of red wine. 60’s and 70’s soul music (Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Motown) should be playing in the background to give it the perfect summer feel.

Does that make you feel hungry? Do want to run out the back and spark up the steel drum full of charcoal? Are you lusting for food? If the answer to these questions is yes, well then I’m afraid you may be among the thousands of those afflicted with a food porn addiction.

Food porn is a relatively new phenomena but it has spread quicker than facebook and is more addictive than crack. Around the world people cannot get enough of watching celebrity and amateur chefs as they slice, dice, chop and prepare food on TV. Programmes like Masterchef, Come Dine With Me and Hell’s Kitchen regularly have millions of viewers.

They don’t get any actual fulfilment from these programmes. They see beautiful dishes thrown together and are made to feel that they could have it if they wanted. Exotic food, bringing pleasure to people on the screen and making the viewer salivate and desire. It also gives people unrealistic expectations of what food really is.

Most of the time it’s not real. Just like the threesome with top heavy Swedish supermodels from that link you clicked by ‘accident’ is not real. Nobody actually cooks red mullet soup with toasted almonds and basil, or pheasant leg with rabbit saddle and mustard sauce. It’s usually pork chops and chips or a Goodfellas pizza.

The very concept of a chef as a sex symbol or celebrity is something which, ironically, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Anybody who can think that a foul mouthed arrogant egomaniac such as Gordon Ramsey is attractive clearly needs their head examined and probably has serious daddy issues. They can argue that he is a powerful man in control of a huge empire but he’s still obnoxious.

Anyone who is any doubt that cookery programmes are borderline pornography need look no further than Nigella Lawson. Everything is laced with innuendo and is teased out so seductively that it’s easy to forget she is talking about sticky toffee pudding. Although nothing I can write about Nigella can match this clip.

Dublin played host to the Taste festival this weekend. A gathering of chefs and foodies in the Iveagh Gardens, where people were encouraged to wear their food porn addiction with pride. One of my friends who went said she really wanted to see Gino D’acampo live. He’s a chef. Not a musician or comedian. He’s not even a ventriloquist. You don’t go to see chefs ‘live’ because they cook food they don’t play Smoke on the Water.

The whole event strikes me as being left over from a time when Irish people thought they had money and would happily plonk 90 euro on the table for fancy chips and burgers on a Tuesday night in some restaurant because a spiky haired TV chef stirred a pot of bouillabaisse there once.

Maybe that’s why these programmes are so popular. People can’t afford to dine out so often so there is an increase in dinner parties where the hosts get to pretend they are Jamie Oliver or Hugh Fernley Whittingstall. It’s a cool thing to have your friends over and impress them with your culinary technique.

But you can keep your flash fried goose, sautéed in a unicorns tear (to paraphrase Dylan Moran.) I remember the first time a friend cooked for me. We were both students and the menu was very simple. It was bean and sausage surprise. A bowl of baked beans with two supermarket brand pork sausages sticking out like birthday candles.

The surprise? Hidden in the beans was another sausage.

Locomotion

How was everyone’s St Patricks day? Did we all have good time and celebrate appropriately? Thanks to my good friends Sean and Shona, I had a great day down in Kilkenny City. Let me say, you haven’t lived until you experience the Kilkenny St Patricks Parade. Awe inspiring stuff...

I’m not particularly nationalistic as I’ve said before. If you think Ireland is crap, that’s your opinion and I’m not offended. Personally I think it’s pretty cool, Dublin in particular has the potential to be a great place to visit. Like any other city it has its problems but generally I think the good outweighs the bad.

I recently signed up for the City of a Thousand Welcomes initiative. It is a programme which pairs up first time visitors to our capital city and willing ‘Ambassadors.’ The Ambassador is somebody who is willing to meet up with the tourist and have a chat with them about Dublin over a pint or a cup of tea.

Having been on the receiving end of some spectacular hospitality while in Spain, I always said if I had the opportunity to make someone’s visit to my hometown a bit more interesting, I would.
When you sign up you need to answer some questions about yourself and they test your knowledge of Dublin. No point in having someone talk about Dublin if they don’t know the difference between manure and Moore St.

One of the things they ask you is where you most like to visit in Dublin. I’ve always thought it was St Stephens Green, the fenced park at the top of Grafton St. I always just loved how in the middle of a busy city I could escape to shade of a tree and read a book in silence or just watch the world go by.

However, when I was filling out this section, I actually chose Kilmainham Gaol. Having visited there in the last six months or so, it is fresh in my memory. The former prison is a haunting place to visit with tales of torture, cruelty and injustice, from our not too distant past, resonating in every hallway. Probably not the cheeriest place to send a tourist but definitely worth a visit.

Upon reflection, I don’t think either of these qualify as my favourite place in Dublin. The actual answer is not something I’d ever really considered before my latest trip there last week.

And I’m not sure it’s a suitable recommendation for someone looking to see what the fair city has to offer. In fact it’s a gateway to leaving Dublin. It’s Heuston Station.
Now, I’m not a train spotter. Let’s get that clear from the start. I have no interest in recording the serial number of locomotives or collecting ticket stubs for the 6:45 Mallow to Dublin express.

It’s just some of my favourite memories are tied into the station. When I was twelve I remember meeting there with the rest of my scout troop at seven o clock in the morning to head off for a five day camp on Fota Island. I’d never been away from home for so long and I was as excited as a puppy with a new slipper. Living in a tent, cooking our own meals, it’s unlikely I’ve ever felt as grown up as I did that day.


When I was in college in Waterford it was the first stop on my way back home. Travelling by train was too expensive for a humble commercial computing student but my dad would pick me up at the bus stop outside every Friday. He’d drive me home where I’d have mammy dinner and then he’d take me to the pub for a pint.

Now when I’m in the station it usually means I’m going to visit my friends around the country. It will probably have been a while since I’ve seen them and a good time is usually guaranteed

Of course the train station offers no such assurances. The memories haven’t all been the cheery kind. Saying goodbye to someone I care deeply for on platform 7, two years ago, was one of the saddest days of my life. I left the station that day with my hood pulled low to cover my face and hide the tears. Heuston has surely witnessed thousands of emotional farewells and welcome homes.

I suppose the same could be said for Dublin Airport, the dock where the ferry comes in or the other train stations around the country.

Maybe it’s the 19th century design, with its grand pillars holding up the portico at its front door. Heuston has something special. For me it is a magic train station. And no, that’s not a euphemism.

Jingoistic

I used to want to be an actor. Actually maybe that’s not necessarily true. I think I just wanted to show off. Acting was something that let me do that but Stand Up Comedy probably suited me better because I was on stage on my own, not sharing the spotlight with anyone. We’ve discussed my enormous ego before I’m sure.

Anyway, between the times I started school and reached the end of my first (and only) year in college I had taken part in an assortment of amateur productions you would expect from institutes relying on funding from Fianna Fail led governments. Production values aside, it was something that gave me a lot of pleasure and to an extent it was something I was good at.

I have played the biggest roles you could imagine a young Irish boy would ever dare dream of. Over the years I have portrayed, with conviction matched only by the greatest student of The Method, three of the biggest characters you can imagine.

My big break came as the saviour of all our souls. Jesus Christ. Not the nativity, I did the gritty one. The Easter play. I was originally cast as St. Peter but I guess the director saw something in me and moved me up to the big role. I was a bit miffed at first because my dad had made me the sword that Peter uses to chop off the roman soldiers ear and everything. I guess when you are good you are good (or perhaps that should be when you’re good you’re God.) I took the lead role and my thirst for fame and adoration began.

From the King of Kings to the King of Rock n Roll. My portrayal of Elvis Aaron Presley was truly a site to behold. With my chubby face with drawn on sideburns (I couldn’t quite grow them thick enough) to my passable (if intermittent) Memphis accent I embodied all that the man stood for. That I didn’t win Best Actor at the M.A.D. festival was an outrage. Ironically I lost to a man playing Jesus.


The third role of a lifetime, and essentially the reason I’m writing this piece was Padraig Pearse. Non Irish readers will probably not recognise. He is a significant figure in Irish History. A leader in the 1916 rising, he read out the Declaration of Independence for the Irish Republic on the steps of the General Post Office. He was executed for his part in the attempted usurping of British Rule. I had to act out all of this in front of all the Mammies and Daddies when I was 11.

The reason I remembered this is because last week I paid a visit to Kilmainham Gaol. I had some visitors from the U. K. and they wanted to do some touristy stuff. I took them to the Guinness Storehouse, Trinity College, the Museum of Modern Art, St Patrick’s Cathedral and various establishments with a licence to sell alcohol.

I wasn’t really planning on taking them to the Gaol for fear it might be a bit anti-British for them. Three of them were English. They suggested it to me in fact and being the good host off we went. They really enjoyed it. It was an excellent tour even if some of it was (to quote our tour guide Ruairi) “grim stuff folks.”

For me it was a refresher course in all the stuff I knew from history class. A reminder of all the cruelty and violence that had gone on along the streets and footpaths of the city I have spent most of my life. I have never been nationalistic in anyway but this tour made me very aware of my Irishness.

Calm down. I’m not about to take up arms and go and ‘fight for the cause.’ That’s not something I’d ever believe in. I’m a man of words not action, a lover not a fighter, a pacifist, a hippy. I am also aware that, while the world would be a better place if everyone saw things my way, not everyone does.

What I mean by being aware of my Irishness is that it awoke something in me that hadn’t been there for a long time. A sense of pride in where I came from. All these people who were willing to risk and sacrifice their life in order to establish the country I call home. That is something to be grateful for.

And if you are going to be grateful for something you need to think about what it is that you appreciate it. Over the years, for such a small country, Ireland has punched well above its weight internationally. Whether in sport, music, film or most famously literature, for a country with a population of around five million, Ireland has consistently shone.

G.B.Shaw, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney have all won Nobel Prizes for Literature. Synge and O Casey have written some of the most interesting plays of the last 100 years. Oscar Wilde one of the greatest wits of all time, creator of some of the greatest literary pieces and the quickest retorts. James Joyce is universally accepted as one of the greatest and most complex writers of all time.

Bands like U2 and the Corrs aren’t really my cup of tea but there is no doubting their impact on an international stage. Snow Patrol, Bell X1 and Damien Rice have all made inroads in to the U.S. Music scene.

Bands like these and Thin Lizzy led by Crumlin native Phil Lynnott have no doubt encouraged thousands of Irish people to take a chance, pick up a guitar and form a band. Ireland has a successful and thriving live music scene even if it has lost a lot of support from music labels. In a time of myspace and itunes independent music is the way forward for Irish Bands anyway.

And let us not forget that we have won the Eurovision Song contest on a record seven occasions. (Am I the only one proud of that fact?)

Our achievements in sport are not to be scoffed at either. Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly, Barry McGuigan, Sonia O Sullivan, Bernard O’Shea, Eamon Coughlan, Derbhla O’Rourke, our Rugby team and on occasion our soccer team (but always our fans) have been fantastic ambassadors for our country.

I do need to mention something. The one time I felt most proud of an Irish sporting accomplishment was in 1996. The surge of pride I felt as I saw the tricolour raised and ‘Amhran na bhFhiann’ played as an Irish woman accepted the first of her three Olympic Gold medals. That woman was Michelle De Bruin.

The controversy surrounding her amazing performances that summer later tempered my national pride.
I may have been a 20 year old man but I felt like a child who just been told there is no such thing as Santa. De Bruin was later given a 4 year suspension from swimming for providing a tainted urine sample.

There are probably two things I should point out before someone get the wrong idea that i have suddenly become patriotic or jingoistic. I haven't.

Just because of newly discovered national pride that does not mean I will be standing for the national anthem. It is a song. I don’t stand for ‘Saturday Night’ by Whigfield or ‘Billy Don’t Lose My Number’ by Phil Collins either.

The second thing is the political hotbed of Northern Ireland. The six Ulster counties have never been part of my home country in my lifetime. Northern Ireland, United Ireland it makes no difference to me. If the majority of the people that live there ever want to create a united Ireland then great. If not, fine.

There are a lot of reasons to be proud of being Irish. I appreciate the welcome it affords me when I go away. People are always happy to hear you are Irish and are quick to share a joke with you.

I do hate the stereotype of the Guinness and whiskey swilling, cabbage eating, begorrah spouting leprechaun. The portrayal of the thick Irish bog hopper is something that has always gotten on my last nerve and in my desire to see that squashed I have perhaps forgotten all the good things that it is to be Irish.