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.