The quest for dill

As we speed past on our way between work and schools, Little One notes that the green hillsides are covered with little white dots: they are fuzzy sheep, their collars turned up against the rain. It is no surprise then, that lamb features prominently on the meat shelves in Irish supermarkets.

Our first day here, we dragged our weary selves to Dunnes, where we found some lovely looking lamb chops, both Irish and organic, to my delight. I thought I could sauté them with a bit of garlic and dill and serve them up on a bed of brown rice. The garlic was right where you’d expect it to be, and I even found organic brown rice, but there was not a spot of dill to be found. Perhaps my mind is muddled from jetlag, I thought, and started reading again back at the upper left hand corner of the spice rack: Anise, bay, chives, fennel, nope, no dill. I look again, perhaps there’s a mix: I spot one for lamb. Alas, it contains garlic, onion, lemon peel, rosemary, salt and pepper, but no dill. I sigh, and toss some herbes de Provence in the trolley and head to the checkout. The chops are delicious and tender, even dill-less. Even if our minds are muddled, our bellies are well-filled.

The next day, undaunted, I aim for a larger supermarket, this time a Tesco. The Safeway-like aisles scream low prices to me, but that’s not what matters. I want organic meats, the measure of a true selection in my book. And I stop by the spice aisle, just to check, for dill has been added to my report card. They carry the same brand of spices (a British one, with a German name, go figure). Same selection, same absence of dill. I turn to Darling Husband—could this perhaps be a cultural issue, maybe the Irish don’t like the taste?

And then it happened. With the help of my sometimes trustworthy GPS and reliable map-reading Number One, I find downtown Naas, and a Superquinn, the most Irish of the supermarkets. The teeny parking spaces prove a challenge, but the mountains of fresh baked goods look promising, even if I’m not in the market for bread. They have a real butcher’s counter (sigh, no organics here), as well as the ubiquitous plastic wrapped meats (four free range chicken breasts and an organic beef roast). And then, wonder of wonders, between chives and fennel, dill weed!

A parking lot conversation at Little One’s school reveals a bit of information I have been hoping for: in the next town over (Blessington, if you have a really good map), there is a little health store with the creative moniker of Harvest Fare. There, perched on wooden shelves, are the bags and packages we seek: gluten-free rice noodles, organic local cheeses, shampoos and soap. A chat with the lady behind the counter reveals that she’s happy to order up a case of our favorite soy milk. It should be in Friday. Oh, and she has some lovely organic dill right next to the counter.

At some point, staring at the shelves of spices and food, it becomes apparent that this is not really about the availability of a certain herb or spice, but it was a reminder of why we are here in the first place: to live here. In the past, when we have visited a place for a few days or even a few weeks, the challenge is buying only what we can use in that short period. There is no comparison shopping, no buying things on sale an freezing them for later.

But we are here to live, and I am looking not for the smallest bottle of olive oil, but the right olive oil. I am not looking for a single herb or spice that I can use in every dish: I am looking to buy not only dill, but a whole collection of mismatched bottles and jars to a usable palate of spices. For just as we cannot live by bread alone, we need more than a single jar of dill to see us through.

Default vegetable

When I needed to choose a name for this blog, I reached back into my childhood, to the weekend morning when the toaster was broken and I hit upon the idea of laying the bread onto the electric coil stovetop directly. Unable to find tongs quickly, the bread became charred on one side, and my father promptly dubbed me the Irish Chef, even as he scraped it back to brown for breakfast. That “Irish” cookery of his childhood has given way to respectable cuisine, even for my Californian-French refined (read snobby) palate. Little did I know when I reclaimed the moniker a year and a half ago that I would find myself back in the old country today (“why on earth would you want to go back?” questions my father from the grave). But here I am, surrounded by golf courses, tiny terraced houses, and the misty Wicklow Mountains (they sure look like hills to me) in the background.

We have begun the cultural shift along with the time shift, with our first forays out into the countryside. It used to be that we used two maps to navigate the quaint, variable-width lanes outside the city; we now know that if the GPS (called SatNav here) knows the name of the town, it can guide you, but unfortunately, it only seems to be aware of about half of them. We still have the two maps as backup. But we do not feel singled out, indeed, the spiral pattern we and the multitude before us have followed to reach a destination is often featured in early Celtic art (check out Newgrange). No mystery there.

And then it came to pass that we needed food for our first night here. We dragged our weary bodies to the closest shopping centre (following the traditional spiral route) and found a Dunnes store, a sort of Irish Albertson’s: pretty wrappers, not much substance. Organic produce was limited to four baskets (onions, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower and an empty spot where strawberries had been); the meat selection was even more limited: lamb chops or beef stew meat. We found one shelf of soy milk and about 3 feet of gluten free products, which contained a pitiful selection of pasta (rotini or spaghetti), but a bounty of biscuits (Jaffa cakes, chocolate-covered digestives and delightful lemon zest biscuits). And to our amazement, we learned that carrots are the default vegetable.

Little One had a wonderful first day of Scoil (that’s school in Irish) today, and learned and promptly forgot how to say hello in Irish. He has promised to try harder to remember the magic word tomorrow, but has set himself the realistic goal of knowing how to greet his teacher in Irish by the end of the week. It may take me a wee bit longer to adjust.