And Those We Met Along The Way

And Those We Met Along The Way is a self-published Irish travel cookbook co-written with Sarah Bobbe as part of a David C. Donelson Fellowship project. Through watercolor illustrations, photography, and poetry, it memorializes a summer spent harvesting folk tales and family recipes from three farms.

Author’s Note | Prologue

As we meandered through Ireland, we met people who gave our summer a sense of warmth and vibrancy difficult to capture in words. The ritual of food cooked and consumed together became the foundation for countless tales told--of pirate queens and holy wells, of potato famines and of love.

Nature lent a sense of continuity to our summer. We ate polytunnel tomatoes fresh off the vine, though not from the same garden we had watered earlier in the season. While we spotted green blackberries at Achill Secret Garden, we saw them redden pressed up against the walls of our Milbeg Arts caravan and feasted on them in a Hotwell House crumble.

Working in three gardens gave us a sense of how the world was blooming, ripening, wilting, and withering all at once. The pages that follow are filled with bits of our travels that made us smile, think, and wonder. We've tried to provide a glimpse of the people who live in Ireland today, rooting themselves in place and time as they shared their local history with us. We hope your journey through these pages holds some of the magic our time in Ireland did.