Damien Mulley

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It had to be the Ivory Tower:

• Surprise starter of marinated salmon slices
• The bread came with bone marrow butter, served in a bone. Looks like this.
• Lamb kidneys for next starter
• Aspargus soup for final starter
• 50 day cured rare steak for the main
• Ice cream for desert (coconut, chocolate, balsamic and beetroot)

Not the steak you were looking for:

Photo owned by TheBusyBrain (cc)

RTE Cork are currently in pre-production for a new food and business programme called Recipe for Success where they invite amateur cooks to submit their original recipe ideas. The best ideas will then be selected and participants will be invited to present their recipes to a well-respected Irish food businessman who will over several weeks select a winner. The winner will then have their product sold in the Supervalu.

The closing date for applications is 26th September 2008

For further information please email the show at recipeforsuccess@rte.ie

Or write to them at:
Recipe For Success?,
RTÉ,
Father Mathew Street,
Cork.

As you may or may not know, I run Irish Food and Drink aggregator Gastronom.ie. There are about 45 Irish Foodie blogs that it aggregates and it gets about 110 visitors a day and has a few dozen people subscribed to the feed. If you want to get emails updates of the posts then there’s a subscription box towards the bottom right of the front page.

Aggregator, what’s one of them? Yeah, it’s a single place online where you can get the latest content from a load of other sites. Gastro is structured so that it only takes summaries of the blog posts and so the original owner gets all the Google rankings for their content.

Photo owned by Phillie Casablanca (cc)

The site is going to be rejigged in the next few weeks and we’ll ramp up the homemade content. We’ve already started though and the wonderful Sinéad from Inkheart has come on board to write summaries of what Foodie content was covered in the Sunday papers. We decided to call it Post the Roast. Go and have a read. She’s a great writer isn’t she? You’ll see a new Post Roast on a Monday morning. With enough sponsors we’ll have new content daily.

Speaking of which, if you want to sponsor sections of the site, let me know. There’ll be regular sections a sponsor can have their name on. Our main sponsorship route right now is the sponsored blog post. See, we dislike pure ads. We think they’re bad for the advertiser and bad for the reader. A sponsored blog post means the advertiser/sponsor has to do a bit of work and create something useful such as a competition or a blog post with recipes or a sample chapter from a book or something interesting for the readers of the website. Our readers get value and our sponsors engage more with the readers as a result. Well, that’s the idea anyway… Email me at the usual (see contact page) if you want to be a sponsor. It might work well for companies that work in the Food business.

Via Kerry is a story how via Twitter, a blood drive was organised in Austin, Texas. At the same time Will McInnes has a great blog post on how we the diggerati split our time between talking, thinking and doing and maybe we should do more of the doing.

As well as generating a huge amount of buzz on Twitter and the blogosphere far more importantly it led to 100 donations that day, may from first time donors.

A great idea. The Irish Blood Transfusion Service are always looking for people to donate blood and there are loads that probably would donate if their peers around them are also doing so. Shouldn’t social media (still dislike the term) also be about empowering people and getting them to be social and helping society?

I don’t like many charities. I have a particular dislike for African charities and those gimps on the street that harass you on their behalf. I don’t think giving money to an org is the best thing to do most of the time so actually giving blood without harassment, that’s good.

Photo owned by basykes (cc)

So what’s a geeky way of organising a blood drive and who’ll help organise it? Online sign-up form? Limited number? The Austin drive billed it as “exclusive” as only 100 people could sign up. The buzz generated on Twitter and Facebook got the momentum going and people turned up in droves. It seems afte ryou give blood the IBTS do clever things like text updates etc. to let you know when they’re next about or phone you up when they’re at crunch time so that bit is sorted. Should there be an aim to get 40 new people to donate blood and be brought there by experienced people?

Should local businesses sponsor the refreshments afterwards? Pillows to faint on have been sponsored by Swan beds? Booze by diageo.

Oh and who’ll organise such a thing? Not gonna be me. Your turn.

That’s my simple pleasure. Despite being a total food snob and liking all sorts of “foreign” cuisine there are times when I just want something simple. Really simple. Normal bread (as in Pat the Baker), a banana, butter and that’s it. Of course I ate the bloody thing before I took a photo so here’s a stock photo:

Photo owned by bcmom (cc)

What food is your simple pleasure?

Oh and by the way, Irish Food Blog Aggregator Gastronom.ie has been updated and now aggregates about 40 Irish Food Blogs.

In a discussion on Sunday night with some of the folks from Salesfoce and Coda and other companies, I mentioned the notion of eating chocolate with crisps. It seems the non-Irish (everyone there except me) were a little disconcerted at the idea of having a pack of crisps and eating a chocolate bar at the same time or just after. It appears to be a foreign concept in many parts of the (not so apparently) civilised world.

Questions were flying at me like the time between eating the crisps and then having the chocolate or was it at same time, the flavour of the crisps (when I said cheese and onion there was uproar!) and I was also asked would white chocolate be used. Vile. No.

Who else likes having their crisps and choccies at the same time?

These:

Photo owned by kissmygrandmother (cc)

plus these:

Photo owned by ChezDeniseetLaudalino (cc)

= yumm.

Had a lovely meal in the Dylan last night. We started with Gazpacho which was presented as a plate with the bread, a basil and cress thingy on the bread and tomato foam around it and then the waitress poured the gazpacho from a mini-jug around the bread:

For the main meal was Sea Bream with borlotti bean purée & Spanish ham(yay Spain):

Quenelle of Cheese Cake, with sablé crumble, raspberry coulis and filo crackers: