A number of farm families will feature on the second series of the ‘Tastes Like Home’ series with Catherine Fulvio. The RTE One television programme is a cookery show with a dash of travel thrown in.
It will air from November 1 on Wednesdays at 7:30pm, and run for six weeks.
The series sees the celebrity chef visit six families who show her how to make their favourite ‘Tastes Like Home’ dishes. She then jets off to locations around the world to recreate the dishes with their loved ones living abroad.
On November 8, we meet Mary McGowan, her husband Thomas, and son Ronan, on their sheep farm in Clonshanna, Rooskey, Co. Roscommon. We then move onto Vancouver, Canada, to meet their only daughter Lisa, and her partner Ian McCarthy, originally from Kinsale.
Mary prepares Roscommon spring lamb cutlets with apricot barbecue glaze as well as roast vegetables with couscous salad and harissa-style dressing. Catherine Fulvio shows us how best to serve up goats cheese with prosciutto and goats’ cheese with melon strawberry salad.
The family have 25 pedigree Charolais cows, notably the Cloonshanna Charolais herd which has been operating since 2000. They have 40 Texel cross ewes, concentrating on breeding what Thomas describes as “good early spring lamb” on their combination of rented and owned 100ac farm.
As agricultural contractors, they concentrate on slurry spreading and baling silage in the summer months.
The Power sisters – Ethel and Oonagh – feature on episode six, which will air on December 13. Catherine Fulvio heads to Ballinacluna Farm, Carrick-on-Suir, where Ethel shows her how to prepare a beef stew from her childhood which was made by her aunt Bernadette.
Organic beef from Ethel and husband Tom Walsh’s farm is used in the making of the stew. Then Catherine Fulvio heads to Thousands Oaks in LA to meet with Ethel’s sister, Oonagh Gaynor, adding grilled prawns with mango and papaya to the menu.
“We used to do regular beef farming, then we did organic farming for several years,” she said.
“We produced organic Angus beef for the German baby food market and organic oats for Flahavans. This year we decided to lease most of our farm to a dairy farmer. We are now investing our energy into agri tourism, providing holiday accommodation in restored farm buildings in the farmyard,” Ethel said.
The return from beef farming is so low that it doesn’t justify the huge effort involved. Both Tom and I come from dairy farms, and if Tom was younger he would have gone into dairy because at least there’s a viable return from dairy, provided you are at a certain scale. Instead we are in agri tourism.
“We are now welcoming tourists to stay on our farm and enjoy the many fabulous amenities in our area, from climbing Sliabh na mBan to cycling the beautiful river path from Carrick-on-Suir to Clonmel, to visiting Ormonde Castle to fishing, horse riding and walking,” said Ethel.
“We love living on the farm and the children enjoy riding their pony, Molly. They are very young and if one of them decides to run the whole farm in the future, we will support them in that. We won’t force it on them either – they will make up their own minds.”