weekend bites

This week I’ll be eating… miso soup. Miso is a Japanese creation based on fermented soya beans or rice, but the one I enjoy most is made from barley. It’s a thick paste, quite salty and very, very savoury. I just make a soup using vegetables and, perhaps, leftover meat, flavour it with ginger and garlic and finally stir in some miso for real depth and that distinctive umami taste. Keep a jar of miso paste in the fridge. It keeps for ages.

You may recall in last week’s review of ultra-fashionable The Ivy in Dublin, I mentioned that there was a long wait before each course arrived. A fellow critic, writing in another paper on the same day, tells me that his food arrived in jig time. This suggests to me that some of my enthusiasm last week should be tempered and taken with a grain of salt. Oh… and The Ivy wouldn’t let our photographer take any pictures. That’s a first, incidentally.

If you think all tomatoes taste the same, here’s an event that may well change your mind. Today sees the Totally Terrific Tomato Festival at the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, kicking off at 10am. There will be a huge number of varieties on display, many of them rare and old, and NBG director Matthew Jebb will speak on tomato history and folklore at 11am, Nicky Kyle on growing and cooking tomatoes at 3pm.

A study undertaken by UCD, analysing the dietary habits of Irish consumers, has thrown up some interesting results and will further encourage a review of saturated fat in the diet. It found that people with the highest intake of dairy fat – in cheese, full fat milk, yoghurt and so forth – tended to have a relatively low body mass index (BMI). The high saturated fat group also had better blood lipids, or in English, better cholesterol levels than the low fat people. See expertise.ucd.ie for more.