Book Review: Diana Dodog cooks like an angel in West Cork’s Food Depot. Her new book reveals the zest behind her fabulous food.

In the beginning of Diana Dodog’s cooking was the word.
And the word was ‘Wow!’
You get proof of the Wow! word every time you stand in the queue at Diana and Mike’s Food Depot cart, and see the people ahead of you take their first bite of Depot Curry,  or Rakott Krumpli, or Double Chocolate Brownie.
They take a bite and, either audibly or silently, they say: Wow!
They can’t help it. Nobody can help it. Confronted with food of this deliciousness, this succulence, this excellence, we are all reduced to monosyllables of delight: Wow!
Ms Dodog has now written a smart and winning book, Favourite Recipes From The Food Truck, and the recipes prove something that we already knew: this girl has food in her blood, in her past, in her bones, in her DNA, in her culture.
She is her grandmother’s girl, reared in the kitchen by a granny who taught her how to sweat onions for sweetness, how to make the perfect bechamel, how to harvest the garden to make dinner. When she is living in Toronto, Ms Dodog realises that “food wasn’t just in my past, but in my future too.’
We could have told her that.
Of course, the revolutionary aspect of The Food Depot is that it is a portable food cart, which just happens to serve food of surpassing excellence. But Diana and Mike could feed us in the desert, such is their skill, such is their enjoyment in crafting and creating scrummy things to eat. This is a smashing book, but do note that you will need two copies: one for yourself, and one for the children-friends-relatives who will otherwise steal your copy. Wow! is the word.