Yule B-Log

7 December 2009

’Tis the season to be jolly once again, and if any of you have ever been lucky enough to attend a celebration catered by The Yellow Door you’ll know that their wonderful range of canapés are second to none.

In addition to sharing some of their party-planning expertise, The Yellow Door: Our Story, Our Recipes features a delicious array of nibbles and drinks perfect for impressing your friends and family this Christmas. As a special Christmas treat from Blackstaff Press, here’s a mulled wine recipe from the book that is guaranteed to get your guests into the festive spirit!

Yellow Door Mulled Wine
Mulled wine is great for a family Christmas get together. I love to serve it with mini mince pies and petit-four-sized Christmas puddings. Cheesy I know, but it certainly puts everyone in the festive mood.

Serves 20

450g unrefined brown sugar
3 vanilla pods, split lengthways
10 cloves
3 star anise
1–2 cinnamon sticks
grated zest and juice of 2 unwaxed oranges
grated zest and juice of 2 unwaxed lemons
4 bottles medium- to full-bodied red wine, Rioja, for example
500ml cranberry juice
1 orange, sliced
1 lemon, sliced

Place the brown sugar, vanilla pods, cloves, star anise, cinnamon sticks, orange zest and juice, and lemon zest and juice in a pan. Bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar and simmer over low heat for 30 minutes to extract the flavour from the aromatics.

Place the wine, cranberry juice and sliced orange and lemon into another pan, then strain in the syrup. Place over medium heat and bring to the boil. Taste to check the sweetness and add more sugar as necessary.

Serve the mulled wine straight from the pan, or pour into jugs.

Variation

Non-alcoholic Mulled Wine
Use the same recipe to make drivers and kids feel part of the party, too: simply use grape juice instead of the wine and reduce the sugar by half.

© Simon Dougan, taken from The Yellow Door: Our Story, Our Recipes

4 November 2009

As a lover of great books I’ve always felt very proud of the rich literary tradition we have here in Ireland.

And it is, undoubtedly, thanks to authors like Sam Hanna Bell that we are internationally renowned as a place where the arts thrive. So it was fitting that on Friday 16 October, on the centenary of Bell’s birth, a distinguished crowd assembled to pay tribute to his life and work, the grand surroundings of the Linen Hall Library providing a fitting backdrop to the line-up of speeches, poetry and song.

Poet Paul Muldoon treated the crowd to a reading from his foreword to A Salute From the Banderol, describing the awe he had felt as a young BBC producer working alongside Bell, who, in fact, ‘needed no production whatsoever’ and who ‘understood more profoundly than anyone … how to combine narration, dramatic dialogue, music and sound effects to conjure mystery and magic’.

We are delighted that A Salute From the Banderol brings some of the ‘mystery and magic’ Bell brought to his work as a radio broadcaster into print for the first time by including three of his radio scripts. And you can still visit A Man Flourishing, an exhibition celebrating his legacy, running at the Linen Hall’s Vertical Gallery until 14 November.

Ireland’s continued contribution to world-class literature is the focus of The Great Irish Book Week (Saturday 24 – Saturday 31 October 2009). Thirty titles, including Blackstaff’s own Flying Finn and Tales of the Dogs, have been selected by an independent panel to give readers a taste of the fantastic range of books being published in Ireland today. If you buy any book from the list displaying a Great Irish Book Week sticker you will receive a free copy of Be Inspired – Gems from Irish Publishing – a 208-page paperback containing an extract from each of the thirty recommended reads.

I can’t think of a better way to support Ireland’s authors and publishers and of ensuring that we can continue to take pride in our nation’s literary excellence for many more years to come.

JS

9 October 2009

Hello all. This is not only my first blog as a member of the Blackstaff team (having only started on Monday morning) but it is also my first blog ever. Unlike my namesake Julie Powell of Julie and Julia fame I have, to date, been a stranger to what I believe they call ‘the blogosphere’ but it’s great to have finally arrived.

I’m also very fortunate to have arrived at Blackstaff at a really exciting time, just as a number of our forthcoming titles are on their way to press and the launches for recent titles are taking place. Indeed this Sunday (11 October) we’ll be making our way up to Ballymoney where Flying Finn, Stephen Davison’s tribute to Martin Finnegan, one of Ireland’s best-loved and most successful road racers, will be launched at the Joey Dunlop Leisure Centre between 1.30 and 5.30pm. While next Friday evening sees the launch of A Salute From the Banderol: The Selected Writings of Sam Hanna Bell as part of a weekend long programme of events at the Linen Hall Library to celebrate the centenary of this great Northern Irish author’s birth.

Hope to see some of you there, and now that I’ve cracked this blogging business I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date with any future Blackstaff books or events I think you might enjoy.

JS

11 September 2009

John Martin's Tales of the Dogs: A Celebration of the Irish and their Greyhounds is out now. The launch of the book is on Wednesday 16 September, but my husband and I had an amazing introduction to the greyhound racing experience at Shelbourne Park last Saturday, when we went to the semi-final of the Irish Greyhound Derby.

We soon got a general grasp of the terminology and by the end of the night, were feeling confident enough to place combi bets. We're now hooked and my husband is off to the bookies at lunchtime to place our bet for tomorrow night's Derby final . . .

Thank you to Orla and everyone at the Irish Greyhound Board for a great night.

27 August 2009 - Recipe from The Yellow Door

The August bank holiday weekend is a great time to cook for family and friends. The weather forecast looks woeful, for NI anyway, but this lovely recipe from The Yellow Door: Our Story, Our Recipes is sure to brighten the rainiest day.

Seafood Stew with Saffron and Tomatoes

This golden-orange fish stew is one of my favourite suppers to share with friends. It is easy to prepare, very versatile and just hits the spot in late summer – a ray of sunshine in a bowl.

Serves 6

3–4 tbsp olive oil
2 onions, thinly sliced
1 leek, white part only, finely sliced
4 garlic cloves, chopped
2 glasses of white wine
1 x 400g can tomatoes
500ml fish stock
pinch of dried chilli flakes
large pinch of saffron threads
grated zest of ½ lemon or orange
2 bay leaves
bunch of marjoram stalks
bunch of parsley stalks
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1.5kg mixed fish, such as hake, mullet and monkfish, skinned, filleted and cut into chunks
500g raw shellfish, such as mussels, clams and prawns, scrubbed and beards removed from mussels
2 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley or coriander leaves

Heat the oil in a large frying pan or skillet. Add the onions, leek and garlic and cook for 3–4 minutes. Do not allow to colour. Add the wine, tomatoes, stock, chilli flakes, saffron and lemon or orange zest. Tie the bay leaves into a bunch with the marjoram and parsley stalks, then add them to the pan with some salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 25 minutes, after which time the tomatoes will have started to break down. Give the tomatoes a squash with a wooden spoon to help them along.

Add the chunks of fish, firmest fish first, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the shellfish, discarding any open mussels or clams that do not close when tapped, and cook for a further 4–5 minutes until the prawns are cooked and the mussels and clams have opened. Discard any unopened mussels or clams.

Remove the bunch of herbs and add the chopped parsley or coriander. Serve the stew immediately, with big chunks of crusty bread and a bottle of well-chilled crisp white wine.

© Simon Dougan, taken from The Yellow Door: Our Story, Our Recipes

21 August 2009

I haven’t read Liam McIlvanney’s All the Colours of the Town but already I’m looking forward to it. Set between Glasgow, where I was born and grew up, and Belfast, where I’ve now spent nearly half my life, I couldn’t fail to be drawn to McIlvanney’s crime thriller. And it’s had a great press – a quick look on Amazon shows that it’s had 32 reviews since it was published on 6 August. Good going, by anyone’s standards. I must admit I’m biased in favour of this novel, not just because of the Glasgow-Belfast content but also because I’ve met Liam and he is sharp as a tack and is blessed with that dry wit that I associate with both cities. He also comes from impressive writing stock – he’s the son of celebrated Scottish writer William McIlvanney, who wrote Laidlaw, a terrific crime novel and an inspiration for Rankin’s Rebus novels. I still remember my excitement when I read Laidlaw about ten years ago, and here’s why:

‘Laidlaw sat at his desk, feeling a bleakness that wasn’t unfamiliar to him. Intermittently he found himself doing penance for being him. When the mood seeped into him, nothing mattered. He could think of no imaginable success, no way of life, no dream of wishes fulfilled that would satisfy … He was drinking too much – not for pleasure, just sipping systematically, like low proof hemlock. His marriage was a maze that nobody had ever mapped, an infinity of habit and hurt and betrayal down which Ena and he wandered separately, meeting occasionally in the children. He was a policeman, a Detective Inspector, and more and more he wondered how that had happened. And he was nearly forty.’

Liam McIvanney is reading from All the Colours of the Town in No Alibis on Wednesday 26 August at 7 p.m.

18 August 2009

I’ve finally discovered Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, after everyone else in the world, it seems. I was having coffee with Glenn Patterson yesterday and he asked me if I had read The Twelve. I remembered that I’d heard something about it on William Crawley’s Sunday Sequence but weirdly I thought it was called The Seven! Anyway, having heard from Glenn the story of how the novel came to be published and of how gripping and interesting he thought the book was, I rushed out to get it. And when I got to work this morning I was full of excitement, ready to tell everyone about it, only to find that most people already knew about it. Damn!

The last novel I read about the North was David Park’s wonderful The Truth Commissioner. I’m interested to see what Stuart Neville can do with a similar kind of territory. Will keep you posted.