To market we shall go (again)

It would be easy to walk straight past the narrow entrance to the Temple Bar Food Market and never know it was there. But the noise echoing up the alley from the square gives it away – the hum of people chatting, laughing, bargaining and generally enjoying themselves in the end-of-summer/early autumn sunshine, along with the tempting aroma of good things cooking... My kind of place.

Part market/part tourist attraction (it is in Temple Bar, after all), the market gets extremely busy, very quickly. By the time I finally remembered to take a couple of pics for this blog, it was a bit tricky as my shoulders were weighed down with a treasure trove of goodies. Since that pretty much doubled my body mass, people kept bumping into me and I inadvertently kept thwacking them with overflowing bags of veggies every time I turned around, camera in hand. At least one person out there has a bruise from unintentional celery-related assault. I can only apologise.

So here's only a tiny slice of Dennis Healy's enormous veg stall (note the troublesome celery lurking on the left):

And another pic on the run (Dennis Healy's stall again) - the last of this year's tomatoes, along with yellow runner beans and a bumper crop of squash...

Swinging around to to the right, there was a fragrant cheese stall from Cavan, just called 'The Cheesmaker' - where I bought some tangy hard goat's cheese called corleggy (in the lefthand foreground of the pic):

Just beyond the cheese stall, you might be able to make out the Real Olive Company from the English Market in Cork (and someone else taking a photo). They also pitch up at the Dun Laoghaire market on Sundays. For some unknown reason, when I wrote this entry a couple of weeks ago, I thought they were called the Cork Food Company. Oops. That would be why I couldn't find a link to them online.

Llewelyn's Orchard Produce, another Dun Laoghaire regular, was there too - still with those delicious Discovery apples but also selling sweet homegrown grapes. Well, they're already making cider so perhaps an Irish vineyard is the next logical step?

Other interesting stalls included:

• McNally's Farm from North Co. Dublin: lots of greens like watercress, mizuna, Chinese greens, kale... along with dairy produce and edible flowers.
• Piece of Cake Bakery from Belfast: these guys do a mouthwatering foccacia with studded with whole cloves of garlic...
• La Boulangerie Francaise: more lovely bread - can you detect a theme here? I picked up a delicious olive bread, which we snaffled over the weekend, and a rye loaf, which we've stashed in the freezer for later.
• The Sushi Place: this isn't the stall's proper name - it didn't have one. But it's two Japanese ladies making up bento boxes and dishing out curried noodles to hungry passers-by.
• Mero Mero - a Mexican food stall, selling chicken fajitas and veggie burritos, along with a range of salsas. I chomped a fajita for a (late) breakfast and picked up a jar of salsa adoba (medium strength) to pep up the next batch of homemade chilli.

But there were so many other stalls, selling a wide variety of products such as oysters, crepes, smoothies, meat, fish, chocolate, cake, pesto, shots of much-needed espresso... It's well worth the trip - just bring your crowd-control elbows to deal with all the people.