
Barbecue lamb kofta with pickled red onion
:
2
Course
:
Lunch, Dinner
Cooking Time
:
15 mins
Prep Time
:
15 mins
Ingredients
For the pickled onions:
2 red onions, peeled
150ml red wine vinegar
50g caster sugar
Pinch sea salt
For the kofta:
200g lamb mince
200g pork mince
8g sea salt
2tsp harissa paste
1tsp ground cumin
2tsp ground coriander
Handful picked flat parsley leaves
Handful picked mint leaves
Handful picked dill fronds
30g feta cheese, crumbled
Greek yoghurt, to serve
Start by making the pickled red onions. Slice the red onion thinly using a sharp knife or mandolin and place in a bowl. Add the red wine vinegar, sugar and a pinch of salt to a small pot and heat until the sugar has dissolved. Allow to cool, then pour the mix over the red onion slices. Cover and place in the fridge.
Preheat the barbecue to a medium-high heat. In a large bowl, add the lamb mince, pork mince, salt, harissa, cumin and coriander and mix until evenly combined. Place a large sheet of parchment paper on a chopping board or work surface. Divide the mince mixture into four, then roll and mould each into a long sausage shape one by one on the parchment. Carefully place the skewer through the middle of each kofta and roll lightly to smooth.
Place the koftas on the barbecue and cook for two minutes until charring, then roll them 90 degrees and cook for two minutes, keeping the lid down in between turns. Do this twice more until evenly charred and cooked through – about eight to 10 minutes total, then remove and allow to rest for three minutes while you assemble the salad.
Add the picked leaves, some pickled red onion and the feta cheese to a mixing bowl and mix lightly by hand. Lightly drizzle with some olive oil, then serve in a small bowl alongside the barbecue koftas, with some yoghurt on the side.

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Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Cities of the World: Around the globe in 282 artworks
Because my family seldom throw things away, we still have a copy of the Certificate Atlas for Irish Schools from 1980. It shows a number of countries that no longer exist. Alongside the vast pink mass of the USSR, and hugging the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is Yugoslavia. Casting an eye north, there is Czechoslovakia. Germany is divided into two, with Berlin an isolated halved dot in the middle of the German Democratic Republic, surely an ironic name for the politics of that former Soviet state. Spain and Portugal were not yet members of what is now the European Union. Looking at old atlases is a salutary affair: so much can change in a generation. Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach, two artists who have had a fascination with the shape of cities and mapping, are showing their work together for the first time at the Butler Gallery in an exhibition that opens during Kilkenny Arts Festival . Prendergast began her City Drawings series in 1992. 'I'm trying to put myself back to when I started,' she says from her London home. 'In a way, all the work I have done since weaves in and out of ideas around it.' Prendergast is endlessly fascinating. Earlier this year her From Abandon to Worry: An Emotional Gazetteer of North America, from 2003, was shown as part of Land, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In that work she had extracted placenames with an expressive resonance from US maps. There was a lot of lost hope and heartbreak. READ MORE Dublin born, Prendergast is adept at taking ideas that seem simple at their core, and weaving in astonishing depth. From Abandon to Worry tells the stories of early pioneers, echoes with the lost native names their journeys replaced and speaks to current anxieties on that continent. When 90 of the City Drawings were shown at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Prendergast won the best young artist award for Ireland. 'I had thought I would complete it, but then I realised it wouldn't ever be possible,' she says. 'It started when the USSR was dissolving, and all these 'new' countries were emerging. The Berlin Wall had fallen [in 1989], and that opened up a whole new order of things.' Prendergast works from a combination of maps and intuition; her drawings follow the lines of rivers or mountains, picking out the underlying structure of each city in a kind of psychogeography that excludes all the layers of naming. The internet wasn't yet the resource it is today, so she gleaned her information from map shops and libraries. There are no princes, lords, martyrs or megalomaniacs commemorated in street names in her drawings. Instead the shapes emerge from a combination of landscape, lives lived and, in the gridded cities particularly, a strong chunk of civic ambition. 'I'm a real city walker,' the artist says. 'Walking, you feel the layers underneath. In London, within a 20-minute walk, you can feel the age of the city change.' Kathy Prendergast's London, from City Drawings Kathy Prendergast's Mexico City from City Drawings Favourites emerged through the project, one being Yaoundé, in Cameroon. 'It is a set of wavy lines, and I felt that this was like how cities begin: somebody walks from here to there, and then that becomes a habit and a repetition.' This is also the tragedy of cities, as, once set up, they become something to defend, and the idea of defending implies a threatening other, comprising pretty much everyone 'outside' the settlement. On the other hand, cities are also vital gathering places for new arrivals, offering space to find where, and who, you want to be. Prendergast says her work is outside politics, but it can't help but imply them. Her Black Map series, which blacked out everything save the bigger human settlements, can either be seen as a levelling erasure of borders and boundaries or, as we edge towards ecocatastrophe, a poem to our fragility. Of course, when such an interesting artist follows an idea, it will always bring us to interesting places. Prendergast's City project concluded at 113 drawings, deliberately unfinished. 'It was a wonderful few years drawing them, but I stopped around 1995. There was a point when I realised that, if I added any more, it just became an exercise to complete.' Fascinated by the legacies and politics of mapping, the Butler's director, Anna O'Sullivan, came across the work of the British artist Chris Leach while visiting a different exhibition entirely. Leach's extraordinary series of miniature paintings of the 196 currently recognised capital cities began in 2012. From Abu Dhabi to Zagreb, his paintings zoom in on scenes gleaned from the internet. And, as with Prendergast's drawings, the works are of a uniform size. Dublin occupies the same space as London, which in turn gets the same attention as Sana'a, in Yemen. Installation view of Chris Leach's Capital Cities at the Butler Gallery 'I couldn't get over the detail in these tiny pieces, and the breadth of the work,' O'Sullivan says. 'I realised that showing it with Kathy's drawings would, hopefully, prompt discussion around geography, architecture and politics: what cities say about us and what they don't.' As Brian Friel 's near-perfect play Translations shows, mapping and naming, while handy for getting where you want to go, are instruments of ownership and control. Translations was first performed in 1980, the same year as my Certificate Atlas for Irish Schools – although, unlike my atlas, it remains completely relevant. Mapping imposes meaning: in the United States, the lands of the different Native American peoples flow under, around and through today's federal boundaries. Look at maps of US states, and of the continent of Africa, and see the straight lines. When a straight line depicts a border on a map, you know it's trouble. 'Any border on a map is trouble,' Leach says. It is fraught. In Prisoners of Geography, his 2015 book, Tim Marshall argues that global geopolitics are still driven by geography: by mountains, minerals and the need for deep sea harbours. On the other hand, Paul Richardson's book Myths of Geography, from 2024, is equally cogent in claiming that it's all constructed in pursuit of empire building. Still, as Leach's work shows, miniatures can put us in our place. All those grand boulevards, castles and palaces are made so small you could almost pop them in your mouth. Yet they exert a powerful pull. Peering in, you can easily get lost in these tiny worlds. Tonga by Chris Leach, with pencil, scalpel and burnishing tool Aside from the astonishing talent and commitment to make the project, there is an underlying intent to Leach's series that makes the work even more compelling since its completion. 'It is a picture of the world,' he says, 'but from a very specific viewpoint and point in time.' The starting point was the aftermath of an exhibition the artist had held at Ballina Arts Centre, in Co Mayo, where he had painted all the capital cities on the equator, and those on the prime meridian, essentially mapping a 'journey to the centre of the earth'. Except it isn't: the Greenwich meridian is an arbitrary construct of colonial mapping, as is our familiar Mercator view of the globe. Dating from 1569, the Mercator system distorts countries to lay them flat on a map, putting Europe firmly at the centre of everything. The project took Leach almost a decade, and its early years encompassed some false starts. 'I got information from the internet,' he says. 'And sometimes I'd realise that Google was wrong, that I was painting the wrong place.' It also involved an intensive look at some of our lived contradictions. 'There are the Diomede islands in the Bering Strait. One is owned by America, the other by Russia, and they're on either side of the International Date Line. So you can stand on one island looking across to the other and see someone who is in the day before.' This, Leach agrees, comes from our very human need to impose an understandable narrative on our lives, marking out experience in both time and distance. Nonetheless, it all stands or falls on the stories we're able to tell ourselves through language – which have been proved, over and over, to be essentially inaccurate. Dublin by Chris Leach 'That is intrinsic to the project,' Leach says. 'There are 196 countries, 196 capital cities, and they're all arbitrary, because we're all part of the world. If I can do one thing, it would be to put forward a picture of humanity, and have people empathise with the greater context of things. 'I mean, from a political perspective, you would imagine that this all has to change at some point in the future. You have to stop looking at nationality as a basis of our own personal journey, infrastructure and story. 'And yet,' he adds, 'nationality is family, and family is close. Family is heartfelt.' Together, Prendergast and Leach's work lay out these ideas and feelings in ways that open up new avenues of thought. Added to this is the permanence of art, versus the seeming immutability of capital cities as seats of power, turned on its head. It is wrenching to see Kyiv and Beirut. The island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu may not be habitable in a generation, their capitals, Tarawa and Funafuti, lost to rising sea levels. Indonesia is moving its capital from Jakarta to Borneo, as Jakarta itself is sinking. One missing city from Prendergast's series is Dublin. 'I did try and draw Dublin quite a lot, but I just knew it too well,' she says. 'Then, actually, this morning I was thinking, I wonder if maybe I should just draw it now.' Cities of the World: Kathy Prendergast & Chris Leach is at the Butler Gallery from Saturday, August 9th, until Sunday, October 26th. Kilkenny Arts Festival presents a panel discussion hosted by Valerie Mulvin, Cities of the World: Productive Disorder, on Sunday, August 10th, and an artists' talk with Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach on Tuesday, August 12th


Irish Times
26-07-2025
- Irish Times
Roast lamb rump with jus gras, peas and mint
Serves : 2 Course : Dinner Cooking Time : 25 mins Prep Time : 20 mins Ingredients 1 lamb rump, approximately 500g in weight, boneless 40g butter 2 sprigs rosemary Sea salt 220ml chicken stock 20ml lemon juice 120g fresh or frozen peas 4-5 asparagus spears, trimmed Zest of 1 lemon 30g feta cheese Fresh mint leaves, to garnish Preheat the oven to 180°C. Remove any of the silver skin on the lamb rump meat by carefully sliding a sharp knife under it and pulling it away from the meat. Heat an ovenproof pan on a low heat and place the lamb rump in, fat side down. Cook over a low heat for 10 minutes to render the fat, then flip and add the butter and rosemary and season with sea salt. Place the pan in the oven to finish cooking for 15 minutes at 180°C. Remove the pan from the oven and place the lamb rump on a plate to rest for 10 minutes. Keeping all the juices in the pan, place the pan back on the hob and add the chicken stock. Bring to a simmer on a medium heat, and cook for 3-4 minutes, allowing to reduce and thicken slightly to a glaze. Then remove from the heat and finish with a squeeze of lemon juice. Place a small saucepan on the heat and add some freshly boiled water from the kettle. Add the peas and asparagus and blanch for two minutes on a high heat, then strain. Cut the asparagus spears into bite-size pieces and add them and the peas to the pan to toss in the glaze. Cut the lamb into 2cm-thick slices and on top of the veg in the pan. Finish with some lemon zest and crumbled feta cheese, and garnish with fresh mint leaves.


Irish Daily Mirror
19-07-2025
- Irish Daily Mirror
Bible bombshell as previously unexplored area unearths evidence of huge battle
Archaeologists have unearthed "incredible" evidence suggesting a Biblical king was toppled by a vast Egyptian army millennia ago. The team of researchers has stumbled upon remarkable evidence that a massive Egyptian force overcame one of the legendary Biblical kings, with the discovery of Egyptian pottery remnants confirming the presence of Egyptians in the Levant. Recent findings point to Josiah, the last significant monarch of Judah, being vanquished by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II. The demise of Josiah at Megiddo in 609 BCE posed a dire threat to the broader realm of Judah. These events unfolded at the site of Megiddo – also known as Armageddon, which is synonymous with apocalyptic prophecies in Christianity. No archaeological proof had been found until March this year when a peculiar assortment of ceramic pieces was found in present-day Israel. At the historic site of Megiddo, artefacts were discovered that are associated with Necho's forces, reports the Mirror US. This haul included an unexpected quantity of Egyptian and Greek pottery, as noted by Professor Israel Finkelstein from Haifa University – who has long led the Megiddo excavations – and Dr Assaf Kleiman from Ben-Gurion University. Kleiman and Finkelstein, along with their colleagues, delve into their discoveries in two articles released in January and February in the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament. They argue that the refuse left behind serves as proof of Necho's Egyptian troops being there, potentially alongside Greek mercenaries. Around the 10th-9th century BCE, Megiddo was part of the Kingdom of Israel - however, there is debate over whether Megiddo and other territories were earlier part of the so-called David and Solomon and whether the united Israelite monarchy described by the Bible ever actually existed. A mosaic was found on the floor of what is thought to be an old Christian church is Megiddo (Image: Getty Images) What we do know is that Megiddo was a significant hub for at least two centuries. Around 732 BCE, Megiddo was captured and the Israelite capital of Samaria fell a few years later. Megiddo, now known as Magiddu, became the capital of a new Assyrian province in the Levant. Years after the fall of the northern kingdom, Assyria was under pressure from rising powers in Mesopotamia and Iran, namely the Babylonians and the Medes. Around 630 BCE, the Assyrians abandoned Megiddo. In 609 BCE, Egypt, under Necho's leadership, marched into the Levant to aid the failing city. In Jerusalem, Josiah had been on the throne for 31 years before he was defeated by Necho at Megiddo. It remains unclear why Necho killed Josiah according to the Book of Kings. The Book of Chronicles suggests that Josiah had attempted to block Necho's advance and that the ensuing battle was a disastrous affair during which the Judahite king was killed. The bulk of ancient Megiddo was dug up during the 1920s by a University of Chicago expedition, which stripped away and carted off most of the upper strata to reach the earlier versions of the settlement beneath. However, a largely undisturbed section in the northwest corner of the site, dubbed 'Area X', remained intact. It was in this spot that Finklestein's team discovered a stone-paved courtyard area. Judging by the pottery discoveries, the structure was built in the mid-seventh century BCE. The discoveries included fragments from local ceramic vessels, including traditional cooking pots, alongside serving dishes showing Mesopotamian influences. "Scholars believed Megiddo completely changed socially, that the ratio of the local population was very low or non-existent, but we show it must have been higher than what was previously believed," Kleiman says. "There must have been a significant component of Levantine population in Megiddo at the time, and we see this, for example, in the cooking pots, which are very important cultural and social indicators. The pots we found tell us the population at the site cooked like their parents and grandparents, in the same local traditions." The most significant discovery was a collection of pottery in Area X, predominantly of Egyptian origin. "When we opened the boxes of finds from the dig at my lab in Ben-Gurion University, I told my students to put the Egyptian pottery on the tables, and table after table got filled," recounted Kleiman. "The number of Egyptian vessels is double or even triple the amount found in the entire Levant for that period. This is not decorated fine tableware, so it's very hard to argue that someone at Megiddo, a deportee or a surviving Israelite, all of a sudden acquired a taste for sub-par Egyptian pottery and decided to import it into his house." Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.