weekend bites

THIS week I’ll be e eating… newseason carrots. They make such a refreshing change after the ones that have been stored over the winter and they are packed with flavour. I like to steam them whole, or just sliced down the middle, then tossed in butter with some black pepper. However, the flavour is so good that they make wonderful soup. Just sweat some onions and a little garlic in butter, add the chopped new carrots and toss together for a few minutes before adding stock, ground coriander, salt and pepper. Simmer until the carrots are tender then blitz in a processor. Serve with crème fraîche and a little fresh coriander. A NEW website from the Fat Information Service, which is funded by Unilever, aims to help people ‘understand the facts from the fiction when it comes to dietary fats and oils’ but may, have created a little fiction of its own. The website states ‘the risk of heart disease is reduced when saturated fats are replaced with unsaturated fats’ but then cites a study which, as diet expert Dr John Briffa, maintains, ‘ssays no such thing’. You can read his critique at drbriffa.com. Unilever, incidentally, owns the Flora brand. LAST Saturday, I was on the Marian Finucane radio show talking about my three-course menu for four people (including wine) for a total of €20 – you can find the recipes at tomdoorley.blogspot.com. As I said to Áine Lawlor, who was filling in for Marian, it was significant that all of the ingredients were bought in Lidl or Aldi, something underlined by the fact that these they now account for 15 per cent of the Irish supermarket market. SOME Dublin restaurateurs had their noses out of joint when a US Forbes magazine writer tweeted d about Clodagh’s Kitchen, reviewed here last week, , writing that the ‘new farm-to-table restaurant t is immediately among Dublin’s best’. After much h debate on Twitter, Larry Olmsted, who seems usually to review golf courses, has since toned down his wild claim about celebrity chef Ms McKenna’s venture.