Smoked Beetroot

Ardsallagh goats cheese, smoked beets, salt baked beets, beetroot & cider reduction, walnuts, pickled shallots & raisins - all on one glorious plate.

Here are photos of us smoking our beets and of the final dish.

It's All About the Hollandaise

When it comes to our Saturday brunch, we make a lovely hollandaise. A dash of lemon gives it its distinctive fresh flavour.

It accompanies our Durkin's Spiced Beef Hash, Eggs Benedict, Eggs Florentine, and sometimes a brunch special or two.

Durkin's Spiced Beef Hash

Eggs Benedict

Eggs Florentine

Special: haloumi, purple potatoes, sprouting broccoli, hollandaise & eggs.

Special: Eggs Florentine with black pudding granola

Special: K. O'Connell's smoked salmon, poached egg on McCarthy's buttermilk pancake, spinach & hollandaise sauce

Farm house cheese and a trip to RTE Cork studios

In conjunction with Bord Bia I popped along to RTE studios to cook on the Today show with Dáithí Ó Sé and Maura Derrane, the theme was farmhouse cheese as Bord bia are running a campaign to make people more aware of  such cheeses and promoting the stories behind them for more info www.discoverfarmhousecheese.ie

I choose my home town cheese Carrigaline with Dillisk and Cooleeny camambert to go in to my dish of Ballyhoura mushroom pots a quick easy dish to do to see how I do it skip ahead to 43 minutes 

http://www.rte.ie/player/ie/show/10353603/

And here is the recipie 

Ballyhoura mushroom pots with carrigaline farm house Dillisk cheese & cooleeny Camembert with toasted soda bread 

Ingredients 

Serve 4 

Ingredients 

300g mixed Ballyhoura mushrooms (shiitake & king oyster ) chopped 

1 clove garlic minced 

100ml white wine 

250 ml cream 

20g grated Carrigaline  Dillisk cheese 

100g cooleeny Camembert sliced 

Rapseed oil 

Method 

Preheat oven to 180c 

 warm a frying pan once hot add a drop of rapseed oil add the mushrooms and minced garlic sitting for 2-3 minutes add the white wine on a high heat and reduce then add the cream and lastly add the grated carrigaline cheese. 

Divide your mix between four ramekins and place a slice of cooleeny Camembert on top bake in the oven for 6-8 minutes and serve with toasted breads 

Tip 

Cheeses freeze well so if you have to much portion them down cling film and freeze them also soft cheese like cooleeny when frozen you can shave of shavings into salads 

Risotto balls

Risotto balls with Hegarty's cheddar wild garlic dulse & Ballyhoura mushrooms just about to be bread crumbed.

Savoury ice cream ? Give it a whirl .

Getting prep under way on a Saturday afternoon we play around with ideas of dishes for specials as we do every other day but we recently purchased an ice cream machine and we had chicken livers on the bits list so what to do ?

The bits list is the list of vegetables meats etc. that are not on in use on our menu but are to be used in specials.

Blue cheese is a common match with chicken livers but with the new ice cream machine just sitting their an experiment had to be done using a traditional vanilla ice cream recipe minus the vanilla a few slivers of Cashel blue cheese whisked into the warm ice cream base with 1 teaspoon of freshly coarsely ground black pepper then into the machine until frozen.

The result was a creamy ice cream that embraced the wonderful flavour of the cheese that paired so well with the livers and our red onion & bacon jam .

Have you tried any unusual flavours ?