Mon 21 Jun 2010

The Cure for Bad Eating Habits…and Other Ailments

Posted by Clare under Healthy Food, Irish small town, living in Ireland, Moving to Ireland
[7] Comments

Night SkyA beautiful summer night (11 p.m. to be exact) in Drogheda. 

Remember when I first arrived, and I wrote a post about the “Irish diet?” Basically I was amazed that even though I was eating more starch, fat and sugar than ever before, I wasn’t gaining weight. I think at the time (it was still wintery in early March), I chalked it up to the fact that my body – used to the balmy climate of Los Angeles – was working overtime to keep warm in freezing-cold Ireland.

Well, it’s not so cold here anymore. In fact, it seems Ireland is enjoying one of the best summers in recent memory (naturally I am taking full credit for this freakish change of weather pattern). The good news is that we’re having really warm, perfectly-cloudless days and it actually feels like summer. The bad news is that my body is no longer burning calories at twice its normal rate yet I’m still eating like a bear preparing for hibernation. When I recently saw a photo of me that one of my friends had taken, I nearly had a heart-attack. So mortified was I that I actually asked her to remove it from Facebook (thankfully, she did).

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Thu 17 Jun 2010

Splendor in the Grass: Irish Country Farms

Posted by Clare under Healthy Food, Irish food, Main Course, Recipes
[2] Comments

lambs field The good life: Sheep graze on Ciara’s farm

Being someone who has never lived in the country before, I have a typical urbanite’s image of what a farm is like. The sun is shining, the grass is a deep shade of emerald green and the little lambs and big cows and chubby pigs all play together while being watched over by a talking spider named Charlotte.

Of course the truth is that most animal farms I’ve encountered in the United States are the complete opposite of that fantastical picture I created in my head. The only ones I ever came across were on my drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but they were more like factories than farms. Thousands of cows kept in a field of mucky dirt and mud, covered in filth and baking in the hot sun – not exactly a good life (the “Happy Cows” ad series by California Cheese has to be the most blatant example of false advertising I’ve ever seen – these cows are miserable). The “farmers” were actually minimum-wage employees of some big corporation, and I imagine none had any real farming experience or much care for the animals.

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Tue 15 Jun 2010

The Irish Farewell

Posted by Clare under Irish small town, living in Ireland, Moving to Ireland
[2] Comments

clogher cemetary 2 Beautiful cemetery in Clogherhead

Funerals, to state the obvious, are typically bleak affairs. Everyone wears black, there is a good deal of crying and I think it’s safe to say that everyone feels some sort of pressure to behave in an appropriate manner. This includes not smiling or laughing, keeping one’s head bowed down for a good portion of the event and speaking in soft, hushed tones.

Only two weeks after arriving in Ireland, I attended my first Irish wake and funeral for my friend Trevor’s father, Nicholas, who passed away after a long illness. The family chose to do a traditional Irish wake, which takes place over three days. Trevor, who is the eldest son, opted to have it at his house in Clogherhead, the fishing village where he had grown up. The open casket was placed in a room toward the front of the house, and for those three days friends and family came to pay their respects. For Americans, the idea of having a body in someone’s house is a morbid one. But I can say from personal experience that it was anything but.

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Tue 8 Jun 2010

Ladies’ Night in the Country + Twizzaparty!

Posted by Clare under irish food bloggers, Irish small town, Main Course, Moving to Ireland, Recipes
[7] Comments

ladies 

All the ladies in the house say “Broomfield Festival!”

Ladies’ Night. The term has many meanings. For my generation, it usually means a night out on the town with your girlfriends involving – in this particular order – dressing up, dinner at a nice restaurant, a trip to the local hipster bar and way too many cocktails followed by a ruinous shot of some hideous liquor at last call. And if we’re being really bad, a visit to the local fast-food joint in an effort to stave off tomorrow’s hangover with copious amounts of greasy but deceptively delicious junk food. Occasionally, someone will get sick and, like true ladies, we’ll always hold her hair back while she pukes into a toilet. Can you think of anything more ladylike?

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a real ladies’ night, courtesy of the Broomfield Festival’s “Transform Yourself Beauty Extravaganza” at the local community center. Broomfield, an area in Collon about the size of a postage stamp, hosts a festival every year and the extravaganza evening of fashion/skincare tips/tea/etc. is one of its most popular events. Local shops display shoes, handbags, makeup and accessories at stalls around the main hall and tea and cake is served to all attendees. The main event includes a mini-fashion show, skincare presentation and a how-to on makeup application.

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Wed 2 Jun 2010

Chivalry is Alive and Well…in Ireland

Posted by Clare under Moving to Ireland
[16] Comments

boys funny3

If you were to ask most people to describe me, I think one of the first adjectives they’d use is independent. In the literal sense, I am single, live alone and have no kids or pets. Very independent. In compliance with the larger meaning of the word, I don’t often require the help of others, have and show a deep desire for freedom and rarely look to others’ opinions for guidance in conduct.

Sometimes my independence is a good thing; I’m very proud of the fact that in most situations, I can rely on myself. I can stitch a hem, operate a weed wacker, drive a stick shift, throw a mean left hook, identify a crescent wrench, and bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. But there are times when being a self-governing island creates a feeling of isolation and indifference. And as difficult as it is for me to admit, it can also make me feel less…like a woman.

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Mon 31 May 2010

Going with the Flow

Posted by Clare under Healthy Food, Irish food, Main Course, Moving to Ireland, Recipes
[10] Comments

sashimiFresh sashimi sushi, one of the foods I miss! 

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and there are still many days that I’m smacked upside the head with this realization. It’s been nearly three months since I upped sticks and moved from the urban metropolis of Los Angeles to small-town Ireland, but every day still brings a fresh realization of how different life is compared to the way it used to be.

I’ve mentioned before that living here reminds me of just how entitled I, and a lot of Americans, can be. In America, the customer is king. In Ireland, the customer is…well, just like anyone else. I recently went to Brown Thomas, a high-end department store in Dublin, to return a bottle of makeup foundation I had purchased the week before. Though the sales clerk let me try the makeup before I purchased it, the color of the makeup he put in my bag was much darker (I believe he grabbed the wrong color). When I got home and poured a tiny amount into my hand, I realized this, so I boxed it back up and took it – along with the receipt – back to BT.

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Tue 25 May 2010

A Gathering of Irish Food Bloggers

Posted by Clare under Irish food, irish food bloggers, living in Ireland, Moving to Ireland
[5] Comments

pork belly Beautiful pork belly by Maire Dufficy

My friends and I are dining at a restaurant, and my starter of grilled tomato atop garlic-rubbed grilled bread drizzled with extra virgin olive oil with a dash of sea salt arrives. I say something about the beautifully ripe tomatoes and note the perfect grill marks on the bread before whipping out my camera (cue collective groan from friends) for a close-up shot of the dish. I snap away, taking breaks only to rearrange the food on my plate to get the perfect angle.

This type of pre-dining behavior is not appreciated by my friends. They even have a nickname for me – Nikon (pronounced knee-con here) as I’m hardly ever without my camera. So imagine my absolute glee when I walked into the Bord Bia offices in Dublin last week and saw a room full of camera-toting foodies – I could finally let my freak flag fly! The event, sponsored by Bord Bia (the Irish Food Board) and organized by cookbook author and fellow food blogger Donal Skehan was a day of photography, cooking demonstrations, lectures, and – of course – food! Needless to say, I felt I’d finally found “my peeps.”

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Fri 21 May 2010

Macho Doesn’t Prove Mucho

Posted by Clare under Drogheda profiles, Irish small town, living in Ireland, Moving to Ireland
[7] Comments

 Irish boysThe next generation: boys around town

I hopped into a taxi in town the other day, and in the back seat was a gigantic bouquet of long-stemmed roses.

“Aw, you shouldn’t have!” I proclaimed. The driver laughed and told me that the flowers were for his wife. He’d been “a bad boy” the evening before and said his wife would certainly forgive him after being presented with such a bouquet. Though he didn’t specify exactly what he did, he mentioned something about a lads’ night out and that he’d been in trouble before. “But if I know my wife, these will do the trick!” he said, with complete confidence.

I notice this dynamic – the misbehaving lad and the nagging wife/girlfriend – is a very common one here in small-town Ireland. In any given group of lads at any given pub, there will be talk of the girlfriend or wife who will inevitably be upset with the boyfriend or husband who is a) drinking too much; b) flirting too much with other women; c) staying out too late; or d) all of the above. If one of the lads gets a text or phone call from his partner, the rest of the group will uproariously pressure him to ignore the call. If he actually takes the call, he will be chastised for the rest of the evening and worse, the girlfriend or wife who is calling will be branded as a nag.

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Wed 19 May 2010

Two Great Tastes: The Irish and The Japanese

Posted by Clare under Baking, Irish food, living in Ireland, Recipes
[5] Comments

jcheesecake

Though I spent most of my life in America, I wasn’t born there. Before Arkansas, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles (all places I’ve lived at one point or another), there was the country of my birth: Japan. Officially I am half-Japanese, half-American, and retain dual citizenship.

This may sound absolutely crazy, but after living here in Ireland for a few months I’m starting to see some striking similarities between the two cultures. The most obvious (to me) is a shared love of alcohol. While the Japanese have a reputation for being quiet and relative conservative, they can drink with the best of them. It’s not unusual to see a drunken salaryman on the first train at 5 a.m., still reeking of liquor and exhausted from a night of post-work drinking with the boss. And while my Irish friends have their fare share of hilarious drunken tales, nothing beats a story from my friend Kayo. She once fell asleep in a ditch on the side of the road; she’d gotten out of the car to get sick then decided to take a cat nap instead (love this type of drunken logic!). I should note that she was not driving, but the driver fell asleep in the car waiting for her to come back. Area residents who could see her from their windows called the police, thinking there was a dead body in the ditch. The only thing she remembers is being poked with a stick by a policeman, who realized she was just intoxicated. He lectured her about being drunk in public before sending her on her way.

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Mon 17 May 2010

From Los Angeles to the Emerald Isle

Posted by Clare under Drogheda profiles, Irish small town, living in Ireland, Moving to Ireland
[6] Comments

LA Paris

LA view

 LA sufers  LA 2

My snaps of LA life: View of LA hillside; Paris Hilton waiting for her car; Surfers at the beach; Restaurant opening party in Santa Monica

It’s hard to believe that barely three months ago, I was packing up my life in Los Angeles and preparing for a whole new adventure in small-town Ireland. As I’ve hinted in several previous posts, I decided to move because I wanted to challenge myself and to force a change that felt necessary.

LA can be a strange place. It’s a city where residents get to observe celebrities in their natural habitat. It was perfectly common for me to see Drew Barrymore in the grocery check-out line or Orlando Bloom picking up coffee at Starbucks. Most people in my circle of friends have some connection to the entertainment industry whether it’s through work or social circles. My freelance work with a well-known celebrity magazine frequently placed me right in the center of Hollywood parties, red carpets and celeb-driven charity functions. One of my best friends works for Screen Actors Guild and my sister is a managing editor for a celebrity gossip television show. There are also actors, musicians, chefs, and filmmakers in my social group in Los Angeles.

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