Stuart Clark serves up his top foodie tips of the fortnight

If music alone is not enough to sate you, the line-up for the Theatre of Food at Electric Picnic has just been announced with Roz Purcell, YouTube sensation Susan Jane White, Derry Clarke, Gary O’Hanlon, Ross Lewis and Kevin Thornton among those who’ll be cooking up a storm throughout the weekend in the MindField. The beefcake is supplied by David and Stephen Flynn whose The World Of The Happy Pear healthy eating cookbook has (almost but not quite) weaned us off our post-pub spicebags. After much road testing, it’s the Coconut Chana Masala with Spinach that gets the Hot Flavours Grand Seal of Recipe Approval.
As you’ll doubtless have read in Music News, Grandaddy are back together and heading to Dublin in August. We’ve fond memories of the time 13-years ago they popped round to Stuart Clark’s beautiful Liffeyside home and cooked him the Mother of All Fajitas. You can find the recipe – “Shitloads of jalapeno peppers, bunged nonchalantly into the frying-pan; shot of Mescal, worm removed; Jif lemon, squirted into the pan and then at fellow band members” etc. etc. – at hotpress.com/archive
It’s a Hot Flavours “howaya” to Cirillo’s, an honest to god Italian pizza joint that’s flown in with its own wood-fired oven from Naples and taken up residence at 140 Baggot Street Lower, Dublin 2. Anyone asking for pineapple or sweetcorn on their beautifully blistered, thin base pizzas is likely to feel the rough end of an artichoke.
There’s now a premium Irish tonic water t go with those marvelous gins – Bertha’s Revenge and Gunpowder are our current one/two, but it changes regularly – we’re producing.
The blending of sugar beets, Florida orange, rosemary extract, natural botanicals and Wexford spring water makes Poacher’s a deliciously smooth mixer with lots of character.