Tea: Loubet-inspired asparagus & aubergines

I loved yesterday’s OFM. Maybe it’s just the long-weekend mood I was in, but everything seemed interesting and delicious – from Rachel Cooke daring to tell it like it is about task-obsessed men in the kitchen to Jay Rayner’s piece about Bruno Loubet’s swerve towards vegetables, following in the foodsteps of Passard the Great & Robuchon the Tagalong.

Bruno’s recipes seemed utterly doable, and as I have miso paste I needed  to finish I went off to the market to pick up aubergines and asparagus to make recipe no 5 here.

My miso paste wasn’t sweet, so I added some cooked apples I had to hand. I didn’t want to faff about with chopping and deep frying onion rings so I added a tiny clove of fresh garlic before blitzing everything and roasted the asparagus to ensure a crispy texture. A squeeze of lime finished it off perfectly and the children approved. A keeper.

I.C.U Lou Doillon

I love how Paris is filmed in this clip.

Tales from the deep. Irish Times Magazine, 11th May.

Full piece here.

When I was growing up in Co Antrim, we had two freezers. One was the icebox on top of the fridge, constantly bunged with frost, fish fingers, the odd, loose frozen pea and chocolate Easter eggs as, bizarrely, we children liked our chocolate very cold and snappy.

Across the farmyard, in the garage, was a deep, white, meat coffin, regularly filled by my father with whole sides of lamb or beef. At times, distressingly – but usually not enough to stop me eating it – it would be an animal which had grown up in the fields outside my bedroom window.

Review: Monsieur Bleu

“The eye has to travel”, said Diana Vreeland.* And mine likes to roam through property catalogues. A few years ago, the excuse of needing some workspace in Paris had me searching the property sites for a ‘studio with good light.’ A few months later, giddy with excitement from the two or three photos I had seen of the place, I was the agency’s first visit to a 6^th floor walk-up in a crumbling building on rue des Pyrenees, high in Paris’ 20^th arrondissement.

OX Belfast: Civilian review.

Link to CIVILIAN.

MAY 4, 2013

Review: Ox, Belfast

Paris-based food writer Trish Deseine returns home and finds the shoots and leaves of a new Belfast dining scene

It would be easy, after nearly 30 years in Paris, to apply Parisian standards to the menus in Belfast’s cafés, bistros and brasseries, and scoff – and not in a good way. They’re just not doing it properly, you see. Serve good coffee then spike it with banana syrup? Thai green curry with chips? Cajun wraps and garlic potatoes everywhere else? I could, tutting like the starchiest of the growing breed of food “experts”, lament the impending, inevitable obliteration of palates reared on the plainest of produce – beef, lamb, root veg, pasteurised dairy – by their apparent desire for shockingly “inauthentic” food which assails and anaesthetises tastebuds in a deluge of heat, salt and fat.