Grow it, Cook it, Eat it.The freshest, healthiest, tastiest food is what you grow and eat yourself!

Program 5 in the 10 part radio series “Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” presented by Michael Lemass was broadcast today, Wednesday 26th of August from the top of the Dundrum Shopping centre in Dublin South FM 93.9 studios!

For starters we visit Sherron St Clair in Laragh, County Wicklow. Sherron has a passion for natural foods and has brought up her 4 children on sugar-free diets. With some help from her two sons, Khai, aged 8 and Indi, aged 6, Sherron makes yeast bread rolls and then carrot and lentil soup.

Its nice to see that bread making can be fun and educational for young children and there’s a tasty reward at the end of it all! Indi and Khai knew quite a lot about bread making as you will hear!!

We will be going back to Sherron in a later program for a full exposé on the demon SUGAR!!

If you love cooking you might also love pots and pans by Le Creuset, http://www.lecreuset.co.uk
They can be used for frying, boiling and put into the oven. They have a non-stick enamel inside which doesn’t scrape off like the black coating of a frying pan does, which isn’t very healthy as it ends up in your food and then in you!

Im still saving up for one but I reckon what I spend on Le Creuset I can save on gym membership – you will know what I mean when you lift one of these iron pots!!

They are french so you dont pronounce the “t” at the end of Creuset! Oooh la la!! And you need to be wearing a beret and black and white stripey jumper to operate them properly.

Next we are off to Stillorgan in Dublin to visit Owen Rice and his wife Simone who have made raised beds and pots for veggies out of recycled materials such as wood palettes and sheets of plastic. This is the first year they are growing vegetables properly so I thought it would be interesting to hear how they were getitng on and what they had learned so far. In order to have anything left to eat they had to become experts in slug wrangling. In this program they share with us their philosophy of slugs and how to make containers out of recycled materials to grow veggies and herbs in.

We are offering a prize for the best slug recipe!

This is one of their raised beds with herbs in it. You can see chives, parsley, sage, marjoram, thyme and leeks (which aren’t herbs). Again you can get an idea of the wood used and the construction technique from this angle:

Here’s a close up on the corner of the raised bed so you can see how easy it is to screw or nail together. The sides might be a bit high if you dont fill up the inside with soil. If you didnt have enough soil or compost and only filled up the raised bed half way with compost and soil then the sides would shade the plants from the sun which isn’t a good idea:

To the left of the corner in the above photo you will see a plank of wood lying on the ground. This is the slug trap referred to in the interview. Basically the slugs hide under it during the day because its sheltered and moist, so you can lift it up at any time and grab them!
Pretty high tech eh?
It does work!
Try it!!

By adding a simple bar over the middle of the frames Owen and Simone were able to put a sheet of plastic over the raised bed before the summer to keep the heat in like a mini glasshouse and keep the rain off because the bar helped angle the plastic so the rain ran off:

Owen and Simone found that cats were getting in to use the loose soil as their toilet and birds were getting in to eat the leaves of plants so they put netting over the frame to protect them from the wildlife. Again the bar across the centre helped to prevent the netting from sagging in the middle of the raised bed:

These are the peas growing up against a west facing wall in a south facing garden:

The sheets of plastic that Owen and Simone were talking about can be seen in this photo below. The plastic was found in a skip and curled around into a cylindrical shape and taped or stapled. When put vertically into a plastic bag you have a pot for a plant ready to go with almost no cost! There are lettuce plants in this one and the pots were also used for potatoes and tomatoes too!

Here are the pots being used for the tomatoes in the conservatory which became a jungle as the summer passed with 8 foot plants growing out of the free pots:

And again more of the pots with very happy tomato plants in them:

You can now download Program 5 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 5

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it, let us know what you think of the show or share any food related thoughts with us.

Thanks for visiting and remember to come back for 5 more programs in this 10 part series!

Michael Lemass

Program 4 in the 10 part radio series “Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” presented by Michael Lemass is being broadcast on Dublin South FM 93.9 today at 4.30.

This program features a visit to Darragh Flynn’s sprout farm “Happy Pear Living Foods” where he tells us all about the health benefits of eating and juicing sprouted sunflower seeds, pea greens, wheatgrass, alfalfa, puy lentils, aduki and mung beans and chick peas.

If you want to buy sprouts from Darragh for your home or your business you can contact him by email at: darragh (at) thehappypear.ie

You can buy a hand cranked juicer from The Happy Pear for 45euro for juicing all the sprouts you are buying off Darragh or growing yourself at home. Ive just bought one and they are great; easy to use and easy to clean!

Next we go into the Happy Pear kitchen and learn how to make a squash and coconut soup and a tomato and red pepper soup with chef Doreen Palmer and then chef Noel Healy shows us how to make the dressing for the very popular house salad!

Dave and Steve Flynn decided to set up The Happy Pear 4 years ago based on an interest in food and health and a desire to make a positive change in their community through their business activity. They explain how its not just a money making exercise but more a social and educational activity as they have now started running education events as well as community events like the baking competitions which extend their business well beyond the concept of a shop and restaurant. Check out their site thehappypear.ie and check out their food in Greystones, County Wicklow!!

You can download Program 4 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 4

Feel free to add your comments after you have listened to it and let us know if you start sprouting!!

Thanks for visiting!

Michael Lemass

Program 3 in the 10 part radio series “Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” presented by Michael Lemass was broadcast today, Wednesday 22nd of July from the top of the Dundrum Shopping centre in Dublin South FM 93.9 studios!

In this program we talk to Deirdre McCafferty from the vegetarian restaurant Cornucopia.ie on Wicklow Street, Dublin. Deirdre tells us how she became interested in food while working at The Hippocrates Institute in Boston (hippocratesinst.org) and how a raw vegetarian diet is beneficial to our health. She set up Cornucopia in 1984 initially as a health food shop and later it became a restaurant. In one of our future programs Deirdre will take us through the award winning “Cornucopia at home” cookbook.

Then we go into the Cornucopia kitchen and make some beetroot salads with James the chef.

Then we are outside in the Tymon Park Allotments with Michael Fox who has been growing his own food for 25 years. Michael is also the Chairman of the South Dublin Allotmens Association and runs an 8 week course from his house in growing your own food(plottopot.ie). Michael talks about some of the veggies he is growing and how he likes to cook them. We also talk about the importance of allotments allowing people to learn about food growing and what the future of allotments might be in Dublin.

SouthDublinAllotmentsAssociation.ie are having their annual open day this saturday from 12 till 4
Friarstown Allotment Site, Bohernabreena, Tallaght

You can now download Program 3 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 3

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it and let us know what you think or share any food related thoughts with us.

Thanks for visiting!

Michael Lemass

Program 2 was broadcast today, July 1st at 4.30pm on Dublin South FM, 93.9 FM.

This program features an Organic Fruit & Vegetable Gardening Day organised by the Wicklow branch of SlowFoodIreland.com

The event was hosted by Brenda McKenna and her niece Lauren in the totally edible organic front and back gardens of their house in a housing estate in Saggart on the outskirts of Tallaght!

Brenda and Lauren take us on a tour around their garden and demonstrate how they have turned the small urban garden into an organic/biodynamic fruit and vegetable garden.

We pot up some salad seedlings to make a “cut-and-come-again” salad leaves box and a herb one too. The idea of a “cut-and-come-again” box is that it will provide you with all the salads and herbs you need for the rest of the year!! You simply cut off what you need, and allow the leaves to re-grow so you can cut again!!

We then go inside for a 9 course tasting session made from vegetables, salad leaves, herbs, edible flowers and berries from Brenda’s garden.

If you would like to contact Brenda to find out more about some of the very tasty courses she is running give her a call on 087 679 5494 or you can email her at “brendamck(at)eircom.net” (replace the (at) with @)
Tell her we sent you!!

Big thanks to Michelle Darmody and Hermione Winters of Slow Food Ireland and to all the Slow Foodies who came along on the day and allowed me record them. It was a really great day with a great bunch of people!!

You can download Program 2 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 2

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it and let us know what you think or share any food related thoughts with us.

I will upload some photos at the weekend.

Thanks for visiting!

Michael Lemass

The theme music for the show was created by Derek Cronin from sounds made in his kitchen using food and kitchen utensils, performed by Derek and Michael Lemass. This musical approach comes out of the “Musique concrète” (French for “concrete music” or “real music”), movement started in the late 1940s which means that real world sounds are used rather than being restricted to those of traditional musical instruments.

We were inspired by a number of modern “Musique concrète” musicians and tunes such as Bjork who made the music for the Lars Von Trier film “Dancer In The Dark”. The original soundtrack CD is called “Selma Songs” and uses real world sounds of machines, basketballs and runners moving around a basketball court. Tom Yorke of Radiohead sang on the album with her though we are not sure which machines, runners or basketballs he operated!

Bjork later expanded on her dribbling techniques with her collaboration with the German duo Matmos on her album Vespertine, Matmos, who have been known to use the sounds of amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, slowed down whistles and kisses, liposuction surgery, rat cages, cards shuffling, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids and rhinestones on a dinner plate which we would have done too but we were making music for a series about food and therefore had a framework but in truth we felt free to use anything after looking at what Matmos had been using!! They’re nuts!!!

Other “Musique concrète” inspired musicians spring to mind too such as Tom Waits using dustbins and lump hammers on metal piping and also stuff by Steve Reich such as Different Trains and Baka Beyond’s rainforest sounds.

But our series was all about food and therefore would be restricted to food dribbling related things performed in a kitchen, sure where else would we go for an authentic taste-bud-triggering-kitchen reverb?!

Anyway, I arrived at Derek’s gaff one morning(not too early now, he is a musician after all) equipped with Schoeps and DPA microphones, a SoundDevices sound mixer, Fostex hard disk recorder, Sainsburys organic carrots(one of the clearest, most transparent sounding carrots in the world if not the universe), celery, cucumber, red and green peppers but no orange ones, apples, pepper grinder, eggs(organic ones give a better crunch sound), a frying pan, my favorite noisiest saucepan and beer(which Derek doesnt drink, so I had to drink any bottles we opened! I had to!! He wouldn’t help me at all!). Actually, now that I think of it, one of the hardest things to get a good recording of was a beer bottle being opened. We had to open so many in the end that I had to get a taxi home, a few days later!

We had a lot of fun trying out different objects to see how they sounded and what would be the most evocative of food and cooking. It reminded me a bit of a percussionist I saw called Trilok Gurtu performing at the New Morning Jazz Festival. I thought “that guy must spend all his time off just going around hitting things just to see how they sound”. He was sitting on the New Morning stage with all sorts of drums and pots and pans but it seemed that day he was especially interested in hitting a cymbal and dipping it into a plastic bucket of water, a blue bucket if I remember correctly. I suppose there is a musical aspect to every object especially a percussive one when you make it ring by hitting it. Perhaps its only percussionists who discover those new sounds, and boxers too I suppose!

So back in the kitchen with Bjork, Tom Yorke and Trilok in the back of our minds we recorded the gas being turned on, the gas lighter, the whoosh as the gas lites(like in “Panic Room”), a saucepan going on, water being boiled, a glass of water being filled, glasses being clinked together, then we filled the glasses for different pitches. We boiled the kettle. we made toast and blended something undrinkable in the blender. We bit into celery and carrots and chopped them up too. We filled up wine glasses to different levels and rubbed the rim to get eerie tones which we didnt use in the end but they were interesting to hear all the same. Eerie tones that are now waiting in Derek’s sampler for the right horror film to be made…..

The bubbling we got was a really nice sound to listen to, a bit like a cat purring and the frying sounds had to be the most evocative of food to the point where I could smell what was being fried even when I was listening to the sound playing back through my speakers!

We made tea for our tea break cus we were tired of all the hard work and forgot to record it! We captured the pressure escaping from a beer bottles and the fizz of the bubbles as it was poured into a glass and then thought perhaps we could get a better take…..

“Eh try opening another bottle there Michael” said Derek

“Oh, ok if you insist” said Michael

We made toast and fried eggs which someone had to eat and then we had ice cream, not cus it makes a good sound but because it just tastes great! Green and Blacks organic of course!

It sure was a fun way to make music and discover new “musical instruments”! We were stuffed by the end of it and so was my recorder! Just as well “Musique concrète” doesnt mean music made out of concrete! We’d have no teeth left and terrible indigestion!!

And I cant hide the truth I suppose………

…… many, many vegetables were grievously harmed and very tasty in the making of this music!!

“Its not cus I love animals that Im a vegetarian,
its just that I really hate vegetables!!”

( thanks for that one Phil! )