-
The Brexit Kitchen Stores
Did I get your attention there? Or maybe, like me, you rolled your eyes a little bit at the thoughts of stockpiling certain food items in advance of Brexit (in whatever form it eventually takes). Bear with me here though, because a fully stocked store cupboard is a thing of beauty and regardless of the UK imminently leaving the EU it’s a good idea. What’s in my pre-Brexit store cupboards? It’s probably easier to list it out according to category: Dry Stores Beans – Black eyed, pinto, chickpeas (garbanzo), and butterbeans Lentils Seeds – Pumpkin, Sesame, Sunflower, Poppy, Nigella (onion seed) Sugar – Caster, Granulated, Soft Brown, Dark Brown, Demerara…
-
The Big Christmas Food Shop
If, like me, you’ve got that slightly rising panicked feeling about Christmas Dinner and what the last shop before Christmas Day will cost, stop now and have a little read of Day 17 of my Christmas With Caitríona series.
-
December 2018
With the Toy Show being on last night Christmas season has officially kicked off in Ireland; in fact I have a Christmas party to go to tonight. The kids are obsessed with Christmas and their pure joy and delight in decorations in the shops and music playing on the radio is brilliant. As usual for the start of December though I don’t have the decorations up and I’ve no Christmas Tree in the sitting room quite yet. I know I’m not the only one. I suppose it’s a hangover from the days of being so stressed out about money that we tried not to put the decorations up early or…
-
45 Days To Go – Dublin City Marathon
The photograph? That’s me completing the Great Ireland Run 10K race in the Phoenix Park in the Spring this year. I hate running photographs with a passion. They are never flattering. I’m embracing the running photographs though. I started running in December 2017 when I previously wouldn’t have even run after an ice cream van. Each photograph tells a story that is far much more than a race. You know all those photos you see tagged on Instagram with #FitFam? The vast, vast majority of those photos are posed and edited by people who want to appear their best ‘for the insta’. My running photos however can’t be edited, they’re…
-
May Update 2018
Oh look I found the blog again under a pile of laundry and paperwork in my so-called-office (aka the laundry area). I didn’t stop blogging for a spell on purpose, I just had so much stuff on that I struggled to find the time. Anyway sure look-it. I’m back and I’ve got loads of interesting things coming up and good news that I thought I’d share it here! The recipes are back; I have a shed-load of recipes in drafts which I’m going to drip-feed to you over the next couple of weeks including some beautiful main courses for family meals, along with some simple sweet treats. If you’ve been…
-
Nearly Never Ran The…
Last Sunday was my second ‘competitive’ running race of the year. I run at least once a week with the Balbriggan Road Runners group. There are not enough superlatives to describe how great and supportive they all are. Normally on a run day I chart my progress using my FitBit to time how long it takes me to run the distance we’ve set ourselves that night, it’s always over 5km though. Which makes it easy to see how I’m doing from one day to the next, one route to the next. Competitive running (so to speak) is a bit different because we have a chip in a bib number that…
-
Mental Load – Food For Thought
There’s a point in a recent documentary on RTÉ1, called Ireland’s Health Divide, where Dr Eva Orsmond can’t get her head around a woman from Limerick buying so much processed food. The woman says that she doesn’t buy Coke (Cola) anymore because it’s worse than the other bottles of fizzy drinks on the countertop in front of her. Then Dr Eva looks incredulously at the woman not understanding how she came to that assumption. Perhaps even with more than a little judgement.
-
Learning From A Two Week Digital Detox
Originally published in October 2015. Sure it’s only two weeks I said to myself as I mailed my essential contacts to let them know that I wouldn’t be available for a fortnight. I set up a blogpost so that readers would know what I was up to. Then I deleted social media applications from my smart phone. Yes. I deleted them so that I wouldn’t be tempted to use them. I turned off every single notification I could, after I’d made sure to take a note of all-important passwords. Yep I was ready to become disconnected. In August 2014 I did something similar, but this time it was for a…
-
Opinion: Food Headlines Worth Banning
Let’s ban the urgency of headlines when talking about food when talking about food OMG if you read one thing about food today, read this, quick. Before everybody else reads it. Does this sound familiar to you? It certainly does to me, and I’m tired of it. A quick trawl through articles published in Ireland by bloggers, online magazines, and newspapers in the past month reveal the following headline samples:
-
Homegrown Food 2017
Every evening when I get back from the allotment I look at my hands. They’re not as soft as they used to be, yet the children still say my touch is just as light as when they themselves were pumpkin-sized. They’re not the prettiest hands you’ll see and after a long day working at the plot there will always be a little lingering dirt even after the third soak. These are the hands that nourish my family, I grow food, and then cook it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way This is my seventh year of growing my own food on an allotment but I grew some food…
-
What Happens From Here?
I’m starting 2017 in a state of flux because so much is up in the air. What happens from here? How will we manage our mortgage/bills and what are my plans for the future? It’s a question I’ve been asked quite a bit over the past few weeks or so, since we finally got our letter and confirmation from Ulster Bank that we were indeed on the wrong interest rate for about the last 6+ years. We have been wrongly charged, we know that we ended up in arrears, needlessly for a substantial part of them.
-
The Solstice Brought Hope
Wednesday morning, long, LONG, before the dawn, I tweeted a message about the days getting longer and that the Solstice brought hope. I’ve not been sleeping very well, the stress of everything has been taking its toll. Later on that day as I waited for the letterbox to click, just as I have done everyday since the CEO of Ulster Bank made that promise at the Oireachtas Finance Committee, I felt that hope wane. The letterbox didn’t click at the usual time and the day got longer. Still no sign of the postman. I sent out a message to the neighbours asking had the postman been yet. Yes, he had,…
