Tomato Kumato

For those of you who, unlike me, have begun to grow weary of green, green and more green, you’re in luck: this is my last post about Ireland. This also means that soon we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program of me winding odd stories to relate food to my life. And recipes. There will definitely be recipes. It’s strange how quickly I’ve begun to miss writing about food… But I couldn’t not mention the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher.

Like the Ring of Kerry, the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher were not on our original to-do list, but we noticed that we would be passing nearby, and when we heard that the Cliffs of Moher were Ireland’s contribution to the new seven wonders of the modern world, we decided we had to make a stop.

To get to the cliffs, we had to drive through the Burren, which is a rocky terrain in county Clare–where my Irish family comes from. I know I hardly ever mention them on this blog… most people who know me only know about the Italian side of my family (except for a select few who have found out about my Portuguese ancestors and never stop reminding me…) Nevertheless, I do have some Irish blood running through my veins–25%, to be exact–and it was pretty interesting to drive the same roads that they might have seen years and years ago.

I doubt they had to deal with bike races, however, something that we happened to stumble right into the middle of. I was the one driving, so I was the one avoiding racers as they took over the entire road. It was kind of cool to be in the middle of all of it–it felt like accidentally stumbling into someone else’s party, if such a party were taking place on narrow roads filled with blind curves and strangely beautiful rocky landscapes.

I didn’t hit any… in case you were wondering.

Nevertheless, I was quite happy to arrive at our final destination: the cliffs of Moher.

One of the first things people say to me when I say I’m from the States is how big everything is. While it’s true–I’ve been to Muir Woods and Yosemite National Park–I’ve never seen anything like the way these cliffs loom. You can see the grassy hills from far down the road, although nothing prepares you for what it’s like to approach the edge and look down at the sea.

It’s places like this that make me wonder why anyone would bother living in a city… and this coming from someone who’s spent the majority of their life in either New York or Paris. Still… the natural beauty of something so old and real is astounding, and anything man-made I’ve ever seen pales in comparison.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel the need to pay the two euros to visit this little tower, which you can climb to have an even higher view down to the bottom.

Instead, I continued along the path, past the giant sign forbidding entrance that everyone was blatantly ignoring, to where the path led right to the edge of the cliff, with not so much as a small barrier protecting us from falling into the sea.

The side of the path was decorated with flowers, but all I could see were the cliffs and the waves.

Oh… and the cows. I love cows.

There’s no real reason for me to love them as much as I do, but being in Ireland and seeing cows and sheep everywhere has made me giddy. I snapped way too many pictures of cows, walking up to them and reaching out to touch their giant noses; I always forget how huge cows are.

For awhile, I just sat and looked, my feet dangling over the edge, until I thought I had wasted enough of the CYF, the Engineer and King Kong’s time, and so I picked my way carefully back along the path, to where the car was waiting to take us back to the real world.

Or, you know, as real as my world ever gets, anyway.

There are some songs that, for some unknown reason, make me smile every time I hear them. “Vienna” is one, though the song doesn’t remind me of Austria, but New York. Another is “Galway Girl,” but, again, the song doesn’t remind me of Galway–I’ve only just been to the city for the first time in my life.

Though I was looking forward to it immensely–I even got giddy when I heard a street performer play it in Cork, which I took to be a good sign of things to come–Galway, for all its charm, fell short of my expectations. In the end, I think it all boiled down to time: with so much to see, our plans were fairly ambitious, so by the time we reached Galway, tired and ill, it was hard to muster up the energy to do anything aside from wander.

And wander, we did. From the streets of the city to the port to a small park we found, we got to know Galway by foot. I geeked out over signs in Irish–more than any other destination on our trip, Galway’s citizens spoke the other official language of the country on a daily basis–and the CYF found a shamrock necklace as a keepsake. We came across some swans that seemed sweet until one attacked a small boy, who will never believe his mother again when she says, “They can’t get out from behind that fence.”

When all is said and done, Galway is a lovely city. I can see why people fall in love with it. Still, there was something lacking in this stop that makes me want to reserve that song–”Galway Girl,”–for some other city… maybe one I haven’t yet visited.

Without fail, whenever I plan a trip, my favorite parts are the ones I never planned for;  for someone who loves to plan, that’s saying something. The Ring of Kerry was something I had no idea about until, in a fit of planning mania, I decided to map out our driving routes for the entire trip and stumbled upon what everyone else apparently already knew: Green Bits. And not just any green bits… these were the kinds you see in movies and in postcards. I didn’t buy any–I was too busy snapping pictures of my own.

I had been driving since the beginning of the trip, so I didn’t mind at all when the CYF volunteered to drive this portion of the route… especially because it was rumored to be fairly high and cliff-like. I got to sit in the back seat and stare from the window as she attempted to stay on the wrong side of the road and avoid hitting mirrors. (She did an excellent job, by the way.)

The Ring of Kerry usually takes nearly a whole day to drive; as we were hitting it on the way to our next destination, we decided to only do the top portion, from Killarney to Valentia Island. Along the way, we passed through a town that crowns a goat king every August, which reminded me of some of my favorite sections of A Year in Provence, a favorite of mine that details one man’s love affair with my favorite country.

We stopped at a viewpoint where we could climb a path through the trees…

… to where we could reach a point that overlooked even more hills and even more green.

And then we piled back into the car and drove for miles and miles of nothing but green.

I had a creeping feeling that it should have been growing monotonous, that I should have been growing tired of all of the trees and grass and hills everywhere…

… but somehow…

… it just didn’t happen. For some reason.

Then, just when I thought that the drive couldn’t get any more beautiful, the CYF pulled to the side of the road behind a tour bus, to where there was a small cliff overlooking the sea.

I stood with my feet at the edge, staring down at the rocks and the crystal water, and I couldn’t help myself: I laughed out loud.

I believe this may have frightened the CYF, the Engineer and King Kong, but they were nice enough not to say anything about my apparent verdent-induced psychosis.

That said, we did start to look for somewhere to stop and eat along the way.

Alongside some cows.

And when we’d eaten our fill of our usual hummus, vegetables and endless ham sandwiches, we made good on our real reason for stopping…

Homemade ice cream. With milk from the cows we ate next to. It doesn’t get fresher than that.

The boy working behind the counter looked as though he had never been more bored in his life. While I don’t blame him–it’s not a very populated location–I wonder if he may have forgotten to look at what was around him. I know that as I ate my ice cream cone–peach, if you were wondering–I leaned against a stone wall and soaked up the green. I don’t know if I would ever be able to forget being surrounded by something so incredibly, naturally beautiful.

When I was eleven years old, there was something wrong with you if you didn’t know who Leonardo DiCaprio was: star of the blockbuster Titanic, which all of my friends had seen at least two or three times in theaters, “Leo,” as we called him–as if he were all of our best friend–was the dreamboat of my generation.

It’s strange to think that that was more than a decade ago; it was more than ten years ago that my aunt took me to see Titanic even though my mother had strict rules against PG-13 movies before the age of 13, and it was from my first summer camp that I wrote her a letter confessing what I felt to be the most unforgivable work of deception that I had ever committed.

Luckily, my mother forgave me, and even went on to trust me again, so much that she let me flee the country at fourteen, striking a match that lit my wanderlust ablaze–wanderlust that has led me here, to Cobh (pronounced “cove”), the last port of call for the actual Titanic as well as the Lusitania, two ships that would never see another port again.

I expected Cobh to be vaguely creepy–something about the idea of hundreds of ghosts not knowing where to go after being stranded at sea had me expecting some sort of ghost town. While the old-fashioned signs pointing towards Cork and Dublin may make it seem as though not a day has passed, however, the only real tribute to the famous ship that spawned the famous movie is a small plaque that hardly bears mention and is easy to miss: we walked past it twice before finally noticing it.

I am glad that we stopped in this tiny town on our drive from Cork to Killarney, though: in a small park named for the only Irish-Catholic to ever be president of my country, we dug into a spread that has become our staple meal over the past few days and looked out onto the port of a typical small Irish town: bread, hummus, vegetables, ham and a giant bottle of that ubiquitous British condiment known simply as “brown sauce.”

While I’ve enjoyed seeing some of the bigger cities along the way, it’s these tiny stopovers that make this trip completely different from any other I’ve taken. I loved looking at its brightly colored houses and watching the fishermen spend their afternoons casting off a dock into the port. We only stayed a few hours–just long enough to gobble our lunch and climb back into the car–but I didn’t mind.

I realize that this blog is becoming less and less food-centered and more and more travel centered, but never fear: soon, I will be back to my kitchen–my favorite kitchen in the whole world: the Paziols kitchen, and there, you will be regaled, once again, of stories of meals for 25. Until then, though, please bear with me as I document my traipse through Ireland; I had no desire to start another blog just to tell these stories and post these pictures.

I try as hard as I can to mention food at least somewhat, even if I know that I’m mostly discussing my travels, but I’ll be up front with you all now when I say that today’s post has absolutely nothing to do with food. If you want to read recipes today, I suggest either perusing the archives or stopping by somewhere else. For those of you who want to see even more pictures of green, green and more green, stay right where you are: Blarney, home to the Blarney stone and the Blarney castle, is chock-a-block with green.

Coming to Ireland, I had two goals. “First, I want to meet Gerard Butler,” I told the CYF. “Or else his twin brother. And then, I want to see green bits.”

Sadly, Gerard Butler was not available, and I was thus incapable of living out my P.S. I Love You fantasies. The green bits, however, more than made up for it. We drove from Cork to Blarney in about fifteen minutes, parked the car, and for the next several hours, we treated the park and the castle as our personal playground; I wove daisy chains and the CYF attempted to climb trees.

We discovered several different places that are rumored to be filled with mysticism, like a circle of druid stones that allegedly protect you from evil spirits, like the witch who lives trapped in a rock until nightfall, when she roams around the empty castle and surrounding park.

The boys climbed several walls, as boys often do, and when we’d all had our fill of playing and exploring caves and caverns, we climbed to the top of the castle to kiss the Blarney Stone.

It took me two tries, but I managed to do it: I hadn’t expected to be forced to hang upside down several hundred feet above the ground in order to kiss the stone that, according to rumor, gave Winston Churchill his famous eloquence, but I did it. I’m not sure that I feel all that much more eloquent, but I’m quite pleased anyway.

You know you’re a food geek when you’re willing to wake up at 8 in the morning after a night of beer, cider and more beer to visit the English Market in Cork. Which is what I did… so I guess that makes me a food geek.

We had arrived in Cork the night before after a long drive from Dublin–a drive that, I’m proud to say, we all survived with only slight amounts of emotional trauma, even if I was driving on the left side of the road. That being said, we were all quite tired when we arrived, and so it was completely understandable that my geeky desire to visit the market would be braved alone. The rest of my friends still snug in their beds in our hostel, I grabbed my bag and my camera and marched across the river to peruse the market stalls, selling everything from bread pudding to Irish cheddar.

There were Irish potatoes, piled high with the dirt still clinging to them. There were cuts of Irish beef and chicken sitting in butcher counters, and something called “best ground,” which I believe would make an absolutely stellar hamburger. There were scones and sodabread and all sorts of muffins and cakes that made my mouth water, but what I really wanted was some of that produce, maybe some of the fresh-caught fish and, of course, a mound of Irish potatoes to take home with me so that I could conjure up some sort of amazing, typical Irish meal. With sodabread, of course.

If that doesn’t make me a food geek, I don’t know what does.

After wandering all the stalls for an hour and snapping pictures surreptitiously as frequently as I could without startling the sellers, I walked upstairs to where there is a small café, bought a coffee, and watched from above. One of the women working at one of the butcher counters tied knots in a filet roast expertly, the string moving in a perfect pattern. A woman selected a couple of tomatoes and paid for her purchase, carrying on her way.

I know that I have similar markets to visit at home, but there’s something about markets in other countries that makes me want to be more than a voyeur, more than a tourist. I want my own kitchen, my own cache of family recipes for Irish stew and colcannon. I could blame it on the fact that we’ve been subsiding off sandwiches for several days, but I know myself too well.

I’m a food geek… and I’m proud.

Cork English Market
Princess Street, Cork