Hot Flavours: Our Tastes and Tipples of the Fortnight

As part of its €250,000 Kick Start initiative, Lidl has selected 55 Irish food and drink suppliers whose wares will be available nationwide in their 152 stores.

We’re already massive fans of Wicklow Farmhouse’s Nettle & Chive cheese and look forward (albeit with some trepidation) to sampling Barry John’s Chocolate Chip & Honeycomb Sausages. If that’s all a bit too Heston Blumenthal for you, the Cavan butchers also make rather more conventional Caramelised Red Onion and Cheddar & Chilli bangers.

The list of must-tries also includes Pieman Roast Chicken & Sausage Stuffing and Feta & Sweet Potato pies; Kelly’s Wild Atlantic Way Black Pudding, and Lough Gill’s awesome Mac Nutty Brown Ale.

All roads lead to the Marble City from October 27-30 as Savour Kilkenny treats us to all sorts of Bank Holiday weekend tastiness.

Participants include RTÉ’s Italian la cucina guru Catherine Fulvio; the Happy Pear twins, David and Stephen, who are bringing their beloved food truck, Dahl-ia, with them; actor and TV3 presenter Simon Delaney whose penned his own Simply Simon’s cookbook; Olympic sprinter David Gillick who pipped him to last year’s Celebrity MasterChef title; Russell Alford and Patrick Hanlon, AKA the Gastro Gays; Ballymaloe stalwart Rory O’Connell and Kwanghi Chan, the Hong Kong-born, Donegal-raised creator of the ChanChan range of street food sauces and spice bag seasoning mixes.

“It’s extraordinary the way the Spice Bag has taken off here and how it’s entirely an Irish thing,” Kwanghi reflects. “They’ve something similar in Hong Kong, which you dip prawns into, but they wouldn’t be throwing it in with chicken, chili peppers, onions and chips. The reaction since we put the Spice Bag seasoning into SuperValu and other shops has been amazing. There’s been huge amounts of chatter about it on Twitter and in lots of places we’ve sold-out.”

Find out more at savourkilkenny.com.

Also getting cookbook-ed up for Christmas is Roz Purcell whose Half Hour Hero offers straight in, no kissing recipes for Mini Oat Pizzas, Breakfast Cookies and, best of all, Peanut, Squash & Chickpea Curry.

Steak is both King and Queen in Tomahawk, the latest addition to the Dollard & Co. empire at 1 East Essex Street, Dublin 2. Whether you’re a Hereford, Charolais or Black Angus fan, Barra Hurley and his team will cook your slab of 28-day aged meat to perfection on their charcoal-burning grill. They’re also big into their wines, whiskeys and cheeses.