Day 2 of Don't Eat Any Irish Week for Oisin

Tuesday's biggest challenge for me is just getting out of bed. I have a serious dose of MANflu that's really knocked me for six. For someone whose appetite knows no natural boundaries, I always know when I'm sick when my desire to eat is lost. Day 2 of Don't Eat Any Irish started off for me like that - cue the sappy violins and minor chords on the piano.

Eventually, I brushed off my self pity and knuckled down to some breakfast. A bowl of extremely rich Turkish yoghurt with some toasted sunflower seeds, currants and a nice dollop of date syrup. The yoghurt is 10% cream and tastes great even on it's own, however, definitely not something that you would see on a weightwatchers menu. For me, this is a success for the food experiment as I never would have tried this otherwise. I am very much a toast/porridge/bagel/stealing some of my daughters' cereal in the morning kinda guy.

I got all of these ingredients in the Turkish shop on Liffey Street and my local Halal shop on Donore Avenue. The makers of the date syrup should be done under the trade descriptions act as it is actually produced in Holland, just sayin'. This gave me enough energy to do a couple of hours in the office and to moan about my MANflu with my colleagues and anyone I answered the phone to.


For fear of spreading my MANgerms around the Lower Leeson Street area, I take a half day and return home. This meant that I could spend some more time on Lunch and that was made up of Turkish filo pastries stuffed with a feta like cheese served with a spicy walnut and pomegranate dip. The pastries were again bought on Liffey Street and are pre-made. You have to deep fry them. On their own, they're very boring. But they go very well with the walnut dip and scatterings of flat leaf parsley.

 The dip brought me no end of joy, to such an extent that it felt like a miraculous elixir and my MANflu felt like it was on it's way out. It's a modified recipe that I got from a Turkish cook book a friend gave me. If you want to give it a lash, blitz the following up and get stuck in:
150 grams of walnuts, 2 teaspoons of harissa, 150 ml of extra virgin olive oil, 3 tablespoons of pomegranate syrup, 1 clove of garlic, 1 teaspoon of salt, 100 ml of pomegranate juice, 1 teaspoon of cumin seeds, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of breadcrumbs.

As nice as this was, it did not have the healing properties I initially thought it did. So at half six I decided to skip dinner and hit the hay.  Are you feeling sorry for me yet?