From Bunting Making to Blowing Eggs, we get you ready for Easter with our top five seasonal tricks! It’s Easter, and Spring is really taking hold, so we’ve decided to round up some seasonal Easter tips to soothe your chocolate cravings and indulge in some Easter Cake. It’s with a hop, skip and jump, like the Easter bunny, that we bring you the seasonal tricks we can impart in preparation for Easter, which is falling this year on March 31st this year. Here are our top five seasonal tricks to help you get ready for the Chocolate season!   1. Make a Simnel Cake This is a light fruit cake with a layer of marzipan running through the middle, and topped with marzipan, before decorating with eleven balls of marzipan. These balls represent Christ and the apostles, minus Judas who was the bad betrayer! He’s not allowed on top of this seasonal cake! Simnel Cake is a Victorian England invention. Sometimes decorated with fluffy chicks and eggs, as well as the marzipan balls. So, if you’re making one, stock up with your dried fruit and candied peel from the speciality food shops within the Good Food Ireland® Collection. Our Approved Member, Ballymaloe Country House Hotel, Co. Cork have a splendid Simnel Cake recipe, why not give it a go? View Simnel Cake Recipe     2. Blow a few Eggs to Paint and Decorate Blowing Eggs involves using a clean skewer to carefully make two small holes at the rounded ends of a fresh egg. Next, insert the skewer into the egg through one hole, so as not to break the shell. Twist it around gently, to break up the yolk. This will make the egg easier to remove from the shell. Holding the egg over a bowl, blow hard into one hole to remove the contents. Keep blowing till you’re sure you have all the eggs removed. Save the fresh egg to make scrambled eggs or an omelette. Repeat with as many eggs as you have the breath for!! Wash the empty shells, allowing the water through and drain out the other side. Drain empty eggshells and allow them to dry thoroughly. Paint with pastel colour artist’s paints and decorate with different coloured stripes, dots, ribbons around the middle, sequins or whatever takes your fancy. Glue on some coloured ribbon or craft string to make a loop for hanging. Use to decorate branches that you’ve snipped from the garden, as a lovely seasonal touch in the house. Pussy willow looks great with painted eggs hanging from it. Good Food Ireland® Approved member Ballymaloe House, Co. Cork has a wonderful Simnel Cake recipe for you to try:   3. Order your Easter Sunday Lamb from the Butcher Easter falls early this year, so the new season spring lamb may well be heavily in demand. Order yours now to make sure you have some on the day! Try out our wonderful selection of lamb recipes from the Kitchens of Good Food Ireland®. View Lamb Recipes   4. Make some Easter Bunting This is one for those who like sewing! Find some pretty material remnants which have spring-like patterns on them. We especially like pale pink, baby blues and lemon colours, and particularly if they are decorated with a vintage/Easter/ foodie-themed print like cupcakes, tarts, wedges of gateau, buns, kitchenware, little chicks, eggs, spots or deckchair stripes. You may very well have some lying around the home. You want double-sided bunting. So, fold a strip of material in half and using a template, cut pointy bunting triangles with two equal long sides and one short side. When you have your triangles cut, to make one piece of bunting, turn two pieces of material wrong side out and sew them together along the long sides, leaving the short side unsewn. You now have a triangle of bunting which is inside out. Repeat till you have all the triangles sewn, then turn them right side out and iron them nice and flat. Then you need to attach your bunting to some cotton wide bias tape with a double-fold. Cut the length of tape you want, making sure you leave some spare at the ends for tying on to where you are going to hang it. Leaving about a foot at each end of the tape, start to attach the bunting triangles by opening the fold in the tape, inserting the short unsewn side of one triangle into the fold, then folding the tape back down to cover the edge of the material and sewing. Place the next triangle immediately next to the first one and repeat. Do this all the way along with your tape. Voila! There you have your own homemade Easter bunting decoration to drape around the house!   5. Invest in chocolate! Last and, most importantly, not least! Buy some good quality Chocolate from Irish artisan Chocolatiers and give it to your friends and relations on Easter Sunday. A lovely touch for a homemade little gift could be as simple as placing four perfect handmade truffles in a little tissue lined box and wrapping it with a ribbon. Or you could choose a large flamboyant egg or anything in between. Look out for our Good Food Ireland® Chocolate Makers. You won’t beat the quality and taste they offer View Our Chocolate Makers

In Seán’s small abattoir, artisan practices are just as important for the welfare of the animals as for the end product. When animals don’t have to travel great distances, when they are walked to an abattoir near to the farm where they were reared, they are calm. This affects the quality of the meat. “Travel stresses the animal and the meat won’t be as tender”. Apart from the animals, local abattoirs are better for the farmers too who care deeply about their animals and want to sell locally produced meat that is of high quality. “For the local people, if farmers want to get one of their own lambs killed for their own freezer, if they can’t do it here they have to bring it 12 miles and the next place is 25 miles away. When local abattoirs close there is no place they can get it done”. Local abattoirs, like Seán’s, are an essential link in the farm-to-fork chain for local meat. To have local meat you need to have a local abattoir. It is also better for the customer, as they can buy local meat from suppliers they know and trust. It’s a way of supporting the community, and as we know, community is very important here. “We dress the animals in the abattoir. We hang the beef for three weeks and the lambs for a week, and we use everything. Nothing is wasted. When foot and mouth came in, you could not give away oxtail, liver, anything like that, but it is all coming back again now. We are even selling beef cheeks now. People are asking for beef cheeks, oxtail, and lambs liver and lambs heart. All that is coming back in again. It is a delicacy. They are seeing it on telly anyway, what you can do with it and people are starting to use it. I think it is an interest in old ways of cooking. You see, there are so many of these new slow cookers now and people are using this meat to go into it and break down the muscle into a nice dish. I started 50 years ago, more, more than that. I remember seeing books that my father had back in the 1930s and sirloin steak was a half a crown, which was 2 shillings and 6 pence, which was low money. Well, I suppose at that time it was an awful lot of money. But dripping was 2 shillings. So the people that time thought that dripping was just as valuable as sirloin steak”. Now Seán sells dripping in his shop and it is particularly popular at Christmas, although he does admit “some people don’t even know what it is but those people that do know what it is will buy it”. In Kelly’s Butchers, alongside your dripping and sausages, you’ll get a side order of gossip and friendly banter too. It is during these interactions that Seán (yes, you’ll still find him behind the counter) builds rapport with his customers and listens to what they are saying, which in turn feeds into their product offerings. “The person that thinks they know it all, they know nothing. You have to listen to your customers, see what they want, what the trends are, and keep going that way, developing that way”. This approach has paid off for Seán and the family business. His shop not only sells local meat from local farmers, and from his own herd, but also stocks an array of award-winning products developed by the Kellys. Most famous are Kelly’s Puddings and Kelly’s Speciality Sausages. But by listening to his customers Seán also developed a gluten-free black pudding and vegetarian white pudding, both of which are very popular. The impact of tourism can also be seen in the products especially the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ and ‘Greenway’ products which are made with Atlantic seaweed. Much like the way the proximity of the sea flavours the Achill Mountain Lamb, the seaweed flavours the puddings with a taste of the Mayo coast. Due to the popularity of these products, the Kelly business has grown. Alongside the abattoir and butchers shop, there is now a farm, a factory and a shop where Seán, his brother, and Seán’s sons Kenneth and Cormac all work.