So the new issue of Bon Appetit magazine has a feature on West Cork, with a photo of Giana and one of her roosters looking as cool as it is possible to look! Also quoted is Fingal, on the subject of an experimental Blood Mary sausage that he and his friends tried making last year.
My first reaction was bitter envy, that someone else wrote an article that could have been mine...(didn't I query them about this place over a year ago??) but then upon further reflection, I think, which is better - to have flown over to Ireland for a couple of days and visited Gubbeen for an hour or two, and tried to pack in all of the extensive West Cork food scene in just a few days - or to have lived at Gubbeen for almost two weeks, actually helped make some of the cheese, and sold it at the Skibbereen market too? I'm the one with the good deal, and how lucky we are to share in the life here for even just a short time.
This morning Reed sat and watched the entire time while a baby chick broke its way out of the shell in the incubator, a process that takes about half an hour or more, so this particular little ball of fluff has been christened Reed in his honor. When I came in to lunch today after spending the morning in the dairy, Reed announced "this is the best lunch I've ever had" and I had to agree, it was pretty great: Clovisse's carrot-apple-coriander-lime soup, Fingal's ham, Gubbeen cheese, Ballymaloe country relish, Fingal's sausage rolls, lots of fresh bread, and a winter greens salad that Clovisse made as well, with a lovely smoky vinaigrette dressing. Reed also polished off the duck liver pate but managed to leave a little of the Explorateur cheese for Giana. This is a French triple creme fresh cheese - clean and snowy white and unctuous on the palate.
I'll take a moment to note here that this has got to be one of the healthiest places for eating I've ever seen. In the dairy at breaktime, standard fare is plain crackers, apples and bananas, cheese, butter, and jam. To drink: tea and fresh milk. No chips, no candy, no soda pop, no crap. I don't know what the rest of Schull eats, but at Gubbeen, it's all good.
Showing posts with label Gubbeen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gubbeen. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Gubbeen House, Schull
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Gubbeen House, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland
April Fools’ Day passed while we spent the day on trains, trams, the bus (the driver showed no mercy on these winding and bumpy roads down here in Cork), and a car on our journey from Bangor down to Schull. We arrived in Schull at 8 pm and were met immediately by Giana Ferguson, smiling a warm welcome for us. She drove us back to the farm and led us to the little trailer house at the edge of one of the cow pastures where we will be staying while we’re here, and then took us back to the warm kitchen in the big house for roast chicken and potatoes with peas, and some wine. Reed was amazingly still awake enough to eat some too, and we splashed some wine in his water to try to help him get settled down enough to sleep.
The countryside is ablossom with gorse, which they call by a different name down here. It was dark when we arrived at the farm, so the first impressions had to wait until morning.
The birds woke me shortly before Reed came in to wake me up for good, and it wasn’t long afterwards, as I was standing at the sink helping get Reed his breakfast, that the black and white cows started going by on their way up to the pasture. They went by in twos and threes for a long time while Reed counted them: 114! They had been milked and were on their way up to graze for the day. We had our cereal with their milk from the day before, fresh out of the huge stainless steel tank outside the dairy where the cheese is made.
Giana gave us a quick tour of the whole place – the scale of the cheesemaking here is on a much more commercial level than at Les Fromentaux. There are 5 or 6 employees in the dairy and huge vats for the curd, hundreds of cheese molds, and humongous sterilizer for the molds, which is the most awful of backbreaking work if you have to do it by hand. Afterwards she showed us the chicken set-up, Clovis’ herb gardens, greenhouses, and orchard, and Fingal’s charcuterie operation, where he makes sausages, chorizo, salamis, ham, bacon, pates, and other pork delights, with recipes he’s developed with his chef friends, and encouraged by Darina Allen of Ballymaloe, who gave him his first pig and said, here, won’t you try making me some salami? Fingal, too, has several employees, all friendly and handsome young Irish lads.
Lunch was a lemony chicken rice soup that Giana made, like avgolemono (delicious!), fresh bread, with Giana and Tom’s son Fingal’s ham, Gubbeen cheese, hard boiled eggs, cherry tomatoes, salad, Ballymaloe relish (“Grown up ketchup” Tom called it), leftover roast chicken, and apple juice. We sat at the big wooden kitchen table with Giana, Tom, Fingal, Clovis (the daughter), Rosie (practically a daughter), Missy the jack russell terrier, eating this wholesome delicious and simple meal off assorted mismatched and chipped crockery.
Reed spent the day chasing around in the woods and gardens and by the creek with Missy: seven year old boy bliss.
Gubbeen House, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland
April Fools’ Day passed while we spent the day on trains, trams, the bus (the driver showed no mercy on these winding and bumpy roads down here in Cork), and a car on our journey from Bangor down to Schull. We arrived in Schull at 8 pm and were met immediately by Giana Ferguson, smiling a warm welcome for us. She drove us back to the farm and led us to the little trailer house at the edge of one of the cow pastures where we will be staying while we’re here, and then took us back to the warm kitchen in the big house for roast chicken and potatoes with peas, and some wine. Reed was amazingly still awake enough to eat some too, and we splashed some wine in his water to try to help him get settled down enough to sleep.
The countryside is ablossom with gorse, which they call by a different name down here. It was dark when we arrived at the farm, so the first impressions had to wait until morning.
The birds woke me shortly before Reed came in to wake me up for good, and it wasn’t long afterwards, as I was standing at the sink helping get Reed his breakfast, that the black and white cows started going by on their way up to the pasture. They went by in twos and threes for a long time while Reed counted them: 114! They had been milked and were on their way up to graze for the day. We had our cereal with their milk from the day before, fresh out of the huge stainless steel tank outside the dairy where the cheese is made.
Giana gave us a quick tour of the whole place – the scale of the cheesemaking here is on a much more commercial level than at Les Fromentaux. There are 5 or 6 employees in the dairy and huge vats for the curd, hundreds of cheese molds, and humongous sterilizer for the molds, which is the most awful of backbreaking work if you have to do it by hand. Afterwards she showed us the chicken set-up, Clovis’ herb gardens, greenhouses, and orchard, and Fingal’s charcuterie operation, where he makes sausages, chorizo, salamis, ham, bacon, pates, and other pork delights, with recipes he’s developed with his chef friends, and encouraged by Darina Allen of Ballymaloe, who gave him his first pig and said, here, won’t you try making me some salami? Fingal, too, has several employees, all friendly and handsome young Irish lads.
Lunch was a lemony chicken rice soup that Giana made, like avgolemono (delicious!), fresh bread, with Giana and Tom’s son Fingal’s ham, Gubbeen cheese, hard boiled eggs, cherry tomatoes, salad, Ballymaloe relish (“Grown up ketchup” Tom called it), leftover roast chicken, and apple juice. We sat at the big wooden kitchen table with Giana, Tom, Fingal, Clovis (the daughter), Rosie (practically a daughter), Missy the jack russell terrier, eating this wholesome delicious and simple meal off assorted mismatched and chipped crockery.
Reed spent the day chasing around in the woods and gardens and by the creek with Missy: seven year old boy bliss.
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