A new series of Come Dine With Me Ireland will soon be filmed by ITV, and they’re looking for people in Cork, Kerry, Leitrim/Sligo, Cavan/Monaghan and Tipperary to take part.  If you’re interested in appearing on tv to show off your cooking skills, your home’s tasteful interior and your grace under pressure, this is the [...]

I’ve seen a sneak preview of Jamie’s Food Revolution in the US (watch the trailer here) and already I am fascinated and horrified in equal parts. I think Jamie is fantastic, you can see that he really cares about what children are eating. He takes Huntington in West Virginia as his starting point for a ‘seed [...]

I was completely hooked to ‘Masterchef’ when it was on BBC and it kind of controlled my life for a while, as sad as that sounds. Due to unstoppable snacking, I had to arrange my dinner around the show and make sure I would either be eating while it was on or have dinner afterwards. [...]

One of my favourite comedians, Maeve Higgins, has a new show on RTE which combines cookery and standup comedy: Fancy Vittles.  Maeve and her sister Lilly prepare meals for guests, such as Those Girls We Went To School With (who’ll “probably just throw it up afterwards,” says Maeve). The cookery is interspersed with some of [...]

Sadly Keith Floyd, the booziest and funniest of all chefs, passed away on Monday. He was a legend. Best known for his haphazard presenting and his penchant for knocking back the vino while he was at it; kind of reminds me of my husband come to think of it. The original TV chef produced some [...]

The good folk at RTE’s The Afternoon Show have been in touch to let us know about a new segment on the programme: Beat the Chef. They’re looking for viewers who fancy going up against the show’s chefs with their favourite dish. For example, if you do a mean moussaka or a cheese cake, their [...]

Thanks very much to TV3′s Ireland: AM crew for having me on this morning. You can watch a clip of the show here. It was lovely to meet Alice Cope Hogan, who recently opened The Mad Hatter Cafe in Castledermot, southeast Co. Kildare, and Kay Weldon, who runs Miss Katy’s Tea Rooms in Blarney, Co. [...]

For today’s Pricewatch in the Irish Times, Conor Pope sampled five Easter eggs. Lily O’Brien and Ferrero Rocher topped his list. Last year I enthusiastically bought myself two Easter eggs, both from Cadbury, and had a long-overdue epiphany: most Easter eggs not nice. Overpriced, overpackaged and underwhelming; the current round of special offers on supermarket [...]

Channel 4′s Dispatches programme investigated supermarket ‘bargain’ foods last night, with the food critic Jay Rayner. I missed small bits of the show due to some toddler melodrama, but saw most of it. Like most Channel 4 documentaries it was fairly well shot and entertaining, but told you a load of stuff you already knew [...]

The food critic Jay Rayner presents a Dispatches special tonight on budget food lines and examines the ingredients that go into them. Rayner wrote on this topic in last weekend’s Observer, and mentioned some pretty unpleasant findings: beef pies that are only 18% beef, apple pies that are only 14% apple, the use of ‘connective [...]