Sunday 8 June 2014

Sunday Brunch and Jazz at the Gibson Hotel

Enid (of renovating lpa) and I arranged to meet our friend Alice for brunch in The Gibson Hotel this morning.

We had a good old catch up :-)
And the food wasn't half bad either!

First up a little amuse bouche
Strawberry yoghurt smoothie and little fruit and custard pastry.
These were a really cute teeny tiny size.  I put my ring on the plate to show the scale - the first photo I took made them look huge.

Starter
We ordered some salmon and tuna sashimi to share.  Alice noted that some ginger would have finished the plate off.  Plus we all agreed that the tuna was not rare enough.

Mains
I got the Gibson full fry - great flavours...a little cold though!
Enid and Alice both got the Eggs Royale - Eggs Benedict but with salmon instead of ham.  Enid got her hollandaise sauce on the side.
They both really enjoyed it - in particular the English muffin which Enid figured were freshly baked.

Two vodka and diet cokes (sure Enid and I weren't driving!)
Orange Juice
A tea and two coffees
€64 before tip.

Oh!  And let's not forget the nice little jazz quartet playing in the corner.  All in all quite nice.
3.5/5...mainly because my fry was on the cold side.

Sunday 1 June 2014

Tedfest - festival 2014 in Saleen, Wexford

This weekend is a long weekend in Ireland which means no work on Monday, hooray!  Friends of mine hosted a festival in their holiday home beside the beach in County Wexford.

All the essentials, car packed up and ready to go.


The theme of the festival was "Tedfest" which is a celebration of the tv comedy show Father Ted so we all dressed up as different characters from the program.

Myself and Aileen were "lovely girls" and Sue was a nun...who also was a lovely girl :-)

Here's some more of the great costumes/people in character - as you can see there was great effort made with the costumes and the decorations.


The full group posed for a photo before it got dark.
Note the prop/lecturn in the middle of the photo.
Plus the fabulous view of the sea in the background on the left.

I think these pics capture the great "mini-festival" feel :-)

Teapots??? Tea?? you ask..
Tea plays a big part in Father Ted as well you know so it was only right that it played a part in our festival, but eh ahem, there was something stronger than tea being served in these teapots! :-)
The pineapple in this photo served as a label that there were cocktails in the teapots
As it got dark (and cold!!!!) a fire was lit.  We really needed it....it was quite cold even though it had been a nice sunny day. So for the night we all sat around the fire drinking, chatting and listening to music.

One really important thing that I need to mention (and sadly that I have NO photos of!!!!) is the FOOD.
Our host Andy, slowcooked the most amazing, amazing, AMAZING pulled brisket and pulled pork.  The texture and flavour of it was incredible.  Thank you Andy.
In addition we all threw normal bbq food on the barbie throughout the night so we were well fed.
 
Next morning!
We then set about having breakfast -bbq'd food again, nyom.
And then over the morning/early afternoon people started packing up and leaving.

The great thing about this incredible place/house:
As I said above, we were all packing up etc - very slowly.  
So we were all making tracks to get on the road back to Dublin - very slowly - when someone mentioned "maybe just checking out the path to the beach" which had been damaged in a storm recently.  So a few of us pottered off  "to see the path" and sure what would you know, suddenly there we were, way passed the path all down on the lovely beach again.
It's just that kind of place!  Time has no meaning.

It's hard to put into words how special Saleen - the house and land is - so I took some photos to try capture it's charm:
It's an old house that has been in the McVey family for three generations - our friends' grandparents bought this house back in the 1950's I believe.

I also took some photos of a very special "document" in the house.
They have a visitors's book which was started in 1961! Isn't that great?



And it's not just me who thinks it's special, so does Pierce Brosnan :-)


And then on the way home I got a huge ice-cream *big happy smug face*

A great night!
Until next year for the next festival :-)
Thank you Richie, Sue and Andy!