Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Friday evening is warm (hot by Irish standards) and we enjoy a stroll around the Ballymaloe House grounds. J. has her “Welcome to Ireland” moment the next morning, though, when she sees rain bucketing down on opening the curtains. After breakfast (yoghurt & fruit from the buffet then mushrooms on toast for J., fried fish with potato farl & lemon & caper butter for me), though, it’s no longer raining even if the sky is threatening. So, after a quick visit to my Pennywort cell, we take a visit round the Ballymaloe gardens and greenhouse while the going is good.

Visiting the gardens first proves to be a wise choice as the heavens open as we’re walking past the dairy and hens. Fortunately it’s not far to the school but we skip picking some basil from the herb garden for the water kefir… J. gets to see the demo room

the three kitchens

the dining rooms, the bread shed and Fermentation HQ where she tastes the new batch of kefir before I add chilli (snaffled from K1 as basil was rained off).

After a visit to the Shanagarry Pottery we head to the Salty Dog in Ballycotton for lunch. The plan is to follow this with a walk along the Ballycotton Cliff Walk, a plan whose feasibility changes as rainy and bright spells alternate as we eat. There’s a bright spell as we’re heading back to the car in the Cliff Walk car park, though, so we have a very blustery 15 minute walk along the path before deciding that going much further would be tempting fate rather too much (I’ve left my rain jacket back in the cottage…).

After picking up my rain jacket we head off to an Art & Sculpture exhibition in a swanky hotel-cum-resort in nearby Castlemartyr. The detour proves to well-advised: the heavens open just as we start to look around the outdoor works! These include a Lost Dog that J. refuses to allow me to offer it a home.

Then back to Ballymaloe House for dinner.

This morning there’s a clear blue sky when we open the curtains but one that gradually clouds over as we watch whilst breakfasting in the glasshouse. Making sure we have our rain jackets with us, we head off to Lismore Castle Gardens. On arriving we find our guidebook is out of date: the gardens open at 11am, not 10:30. This gives us half an hour (quite enough) to look around Lismore itself and St Carthage’s Cathedral but means we have less than an hour (not nearly enough) to look around the impressive gardens…

… before we have to head off to Ardmore for a very pleasant lunch at the Whitehorses restaurant in Ardmore. Unlike the foggy weather for my previous visit last month we had a clear sky for a walk along the cliffs here. A much less blustery cliff walk than yesterday’s until we round the head by the watch tower and are exposed to the full force of the southerly winds! Along the way we see St Declan’s Stone—a stone which miraculously carried his heaven-sent bell to him when he (or a servant, tales differ…) left it behind in Wales on his trip from Rome to Ireland and which he then followed to where it should happen to land in Ireland.

(Apparently the stone is not geologically similar to those around, so some explanation as to how it arrived in Ardmore is needed. Unfortunately, the information panel doesn’t tell if it is geologically similar to ones somewhere in Wales. Even if it is, though, I doubt it floated across the sea carrying a bell…)

It’s getting late so we skip the Distillery Experience in Midleton, but pick up some snacks for a picnic in the hotel room as I write this blog entry and J. updates her diary.