Doorstep?

Upon our arrival, jetlaggy and tired, the relocation firm hired by Darling Husband's ushered us into a temporary "self-catering" apartment. To get us started, someone had brought in a "welcome pack," a selection of foods that would see us through until we could do a proper shop. The milk and cold cuts were wasted on us, though we did graze on the fruit and make good use of the butter. But can you blame us if the foreign-looking white loaf found another use? Perhaps I was still bleary-eyed from the overnight flight.

Just a chicken

Our quest for good food is ongoing, but we made a giant leap forward this weekend with the discovery of the farmer’s market in Naas. Small, but fine, fresh vegetables to be sure, but also bread piled high, meats, cheeses, the olive lady and even a few home bakers and a gourmet chocolate man. We did the first round, and then started buying: beets, avocado, onion bread, potatoes, strawberries, green onion, even back rashers and sausage. And then I stopped at the butcher’s cart.

I took a deep breathe, and launched into my well-rehearsed query on the kind of life the beasts, both great and small, live before they reach our table, in particular, whether they are fed antibiotics. We are learning that just as the Irish language has a tense that doesn’t correspond to anything we are familiar with, and the gift of Blarney extends to not really answering a question. The fellow couldn’t say for sure whether these particular beasts here had never had an infection or been treated. But, chimes in the neighbor fellow who is holding down his own stool, the chickens, they wouldna have any. Indeed, agrees the butcher, and launches into his own beef, the state of what the Americans do to their poor animals, puttin’ them on huge concrete pads in the desert and not even feeding them grass like we do our creatures. It’s no wonder they have to pump them full of medications. And hormones, well, now just don’t get him stared on that.

Sensing a lull, I nod, and tell him I’ll take a chicken. He bags it, places it on the counter, and tells me it is twelve Euro. A fair price.

As I dig in my wallet, the Stool Sitter asks me who I think will win the election, and that can of worms spilled onto the ground. More discussion and head-shaking. “Don’t the Americans care what the rest of the world thinks?” “I think that it’s not that Americans don’t care, it’s that they’re unaware that the rest of the world thinks differently.” “Ach, an insular attitude. Dangerous, that.”

And so on. The price of the chicken magically drops two Euro, the bill changes hands, and I finally make my escape. The chicken has already been roasted and curried, and the bones will make a healing soup for our common head colds. But I will be back to this market. The discussion will continue, and besides, I didn’t even get to the chocolate man yet.

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.

A perfect storm

Every Wednesday morning, Mama Duck drags me out of bed to help her make breakfast, usually from a chicken egg (though once I used duck eggs, not hers). This morning, cool and clear, came far too early, punctuated by visits from the Tooth Fairy and a perambulating Little One, as well as my new phone reminding me that I forgot to turn off the reminder alarm.

It was me who had to drag Mama Duck from her nest this morning, to make pancakes, since that’s what needs to be used up. Bacon was also on the menu for the same reason, as well as the fact that it would be positively un-American to not have bacon with pancakes. And this is an election year.

There is a Russian proverb that says that you always have to throw out the first pancake, so I nearly always plan on it. But this morning was different. Perhaps it was Mama Duck’s gentle coaching, perhaps I’m just better than I think I am, but there were no dud pancakes. And the bacon came out, well, perfectly.

We’ve been watching the weather forecast for Dublin intently, noting the differences and the sameness; today is the first day that the three day forecast includes a day that we will see there. Met Éireann, the Irish national weather service, is predicting a fair day, with a bit of sun and 66 degrees, about as good as it gets. This is a good thing, as Hanna (not our Hannah, but the one that pummeled the Gulf) has followed the jet stream all the way to Dublin, and is getting the last drops out of her system as I write.

We are down to one pot of soup for tonight, and snacks for the plane tomorrow. The adventure begins, on a full tummy of a full American breakfast.

Local calls

Any talk about sustainability often turns to a discussion of acting locally. It seems odd that as a person who finds herself beating the local drum, and that rather loudly at times, that I don’t always seem to hear it myself. Consider if you will, the tale of the last week, spent not only icing and elevating an injured torn hamstring, but also bouncing from one distant DSL customer service location in a seemingly futile effort to stay connected.

A month ago, it seemed like a good idea to take care of all those things we had put off for too long before removing ourselves to the Emerald Isle, things like having teeth cleaned, selling off vehicles, and moving our broadband to newer technology (one of the disadvantages of early adoption means that our old framed relay DSL modem was getting long in the tooth, not to mention expensive). I drew the short straw, which meant that making calls to the phone behemoth (the DSL connection) and our local ISP (the email provider) fell to me. A quick, local, call to the kind soul in Bellevue—the same one who has answered that line since at least 1999—revealed that I could keep my current email address for a song, and they could make the change in a couple of hours max, no problems.

Ah, but such is not the case for the national monster: for nearly a week, we (for somewhere in there, they broke me, and Darling Husband had to take over while I retired to my bed with an ice pack for my leg, and Bailey’s on ice for the rest of me), logged nearly six hours of navigating voice mail menus, traveling the globe (to call centers in Mexico, The Philippines, India and Long Beach), and listening to the same annoying jazz music loop on hold. Darling Husband, The Mistress of Indulgence and our Housesitter Extraordinaire have rolled under the desk (no need to dust there any time soon), plugging and unplugging devices in a seemingly random fashion, all to no avail.

And so it was, that today, on the drive to our last doctor’s appointment while we still have insurance, Darling Husband and I figuratively slapped our communal foreheads and said, “why, oh why, didn’t we just call that groovy local guy for DSL, and just dump the landline (and Verizon, to name the culprit) altogether?” Perhaps, once we have recovered from the double trauma (I understand that Eirecom can be equally obtuse), we will come home and do just that—live where we are.

Larder-Bo

From the makers of Uno comes a game called Skip-Bo. It’s only related to Uno by the fact that both are played with colorful, numbered cards. But there the similarity ends. The goal in Skip-Bo is to draw down your stockpile to nothing by building up build piles, using a combination of your freshly-drawn hand, your recent discards and your stockpile itself. It is not a fast-paced game, and lends itself to knitting and chatting between turns.

It is hard not to see the similarities in what is happening on our kitchen. In a process similar to the familiar emptying the fridge to prepare for a few weeks’ absence, we have taken things to a new level. The objective of this game is to draw down the larder to nothing, building up meals using fresh veggies from the garden and the CSA, leftover odds and ends in the back of the fridge, and the dwindling contents of the larder itself. We are in the early stages, and things like tomatoes and blueberries manage to make even the most mundane noodles or baking mix seem like a summery treat. I imagine that as the season winds down, we shall increasingly turn to soups, with the ultimate concoction likely to draw sneers all around; vilified but for the thought of the airplane food to come.

For now, the last of the tomatoes join some leftover garlic oil in a quick sauté over a half-packet of elbow noodles, not bad for the start of a new game.