Fruity Fashion

Here are some finished snaps from a shoot (way back) where food met fashion on a fun jewellery shoot. They scream summer....just wish we had the weather now!

Photographer: Cliona O'Flaherty

Jewellery Designer: Alice Moyon from www.aliquoboutique.com

Model: Caoimhe

Fashion Stylist: Jemma Connolly

Food Stylist: Me!

Make-up: Rachel Matthews

Delicious!

Pearl and I have been our usual socialite selves, this time rubbing shoulders with fab foodies at L'ecrivan. The lovely people behind Sacla Sauces & Delicious Magazine were over from the UK and very kindly invited us to lunch as part of a group of food bloggers. What a really nice, feel good afternoon filled with fabulous food and friendly chitter chatter.

Seamus from Delicious told us all about his new magazine Healthy Food Guide and also about his Irish roots. He is indeed 'one of us'! Clare from Sacla filled us in on the amazing Italian family who have been producing the well known Italian sauces for 70 years now. Clare is our 'pesto pioneer' having first introduced it to the UK in 1991. Great claim to fame!

The party then moved onto the Taste of Dublin launch which was sadly rained on by our typical Irish weather. Just when our UK friends were over to visit too! Didn't dampen our spirits though. Here's the only snap I got on the day (having my hands slightly full with baba!)...

Some fab food blogger friends...Aoife, Clare, Moi, Imen & Sheila

Click these links to follow our new BFF over on Twitter! Sacla, Delicious Mag & Healthy Food Guide

A picnic with House & Home Mag

I am thrilled to announce I am now the new food feature writer & stylist for House & Home Magazine. My three page feature gives me a chance to combine my love of food, props & homely top tips. My first feature is all about picnics and is currently out in the May / June issue. Watch out for BBQ's up next in July.

Fab photographer Elisha Clarke took the gorgeous food snaps, Paul Sherwood took my mug shot & Hilary O'Hagan was a great help with the food (particularly as I was a week off my due date & could only waddle about out of breath!). Typically we were challenged by the elements and were actually sliding around in mud & with brollies but that's what picnics are mostly like anyhow don't you think?!

Our Kitchen Hero

You're my hero...swoon...Pearl x

Pearly & I have been keeping up appearances and hanging out in the Westbury Hotel with super heros! We were delighted to be invited to afternoon tea by Donal Skehan, to help celebrate the launch of his fab new cookbook, Kitchen Hero.

Now, Pearly almost didn't get an invite, for fear of her upstaging himself. It was her first official appearance in the company of the coveted food bloggers & so, no doubt Donal feared the cameras & comments may not be directed exclusively at him *tongue firmly in cheek*. But, little does he know, Pearl secretly adores him & has posters of him plastered all over her nursery!

Donal tempts us with his tasty treats.

Anyhow, enough about my little hero & onto the main super hero here. Donal is a total inspiration in catapulting to foodie stardom with infectious enthusiasm. You can see for yourself tomorrow night at 8.30pm on RTE1, when his 13 part series kicks off. We can't wait. In the meantime, we have his book to enjoy cooking from & a resulting big jar of his 'fat boy peanut butter snicker squares' to tuck into. mega yum.

P.S. you too can have afternoon tea in the westbury with the kitchen hero. well, the book anyhow.

This Kit is Closed

Gosh, I've been a bad bad blogger! Luckily for me, it's not because I haven't had any work goings on to tell you about, but quite the opposite. More to the point, due to bumpy (see piccie in previous post) I was getting quite out of breath by the end of every day. I even found it hard to get the remainder of my 20,000 daily allowance of words out. Things must have been bad!

Anyhow, I'm here to tell you I'm now safely 'on the other side'. I'm now a nappy changing, milk machine Mummy to a little girl, Pearl. I'm now a yummy mummy who hangs out in coffee shops having leisurily catch-ups with friends, after long lazy lie-ins with smallie & copious amounts of daily cute kitten cuddles. So much easier than work I must admit (don't speak too soon, touch wood and all that). There's just one small thing to juggle (well, and all her flamin paraphenalia!) rather than several hundred at once. Obviously that's not for long though as I will have to juggle everything together once back from maternity leave.

But for now, yes, maternity leave. (I might just get a chance to reminisce and tell you about what I've been up to over the past months to cause my blogging absence). Will be back soon!

Cover Girl

So I've finally made it. It's every girls dream to be a cover girl and my dream came through this week. Now, admittedly it's not Vogue Magazine as expected but much thanks to Country Living Magazine for featuring me in their current issue and popping me on the cover too. It's a fab mag, read and loved by thousands around the country so I'm more than happy with that!

The lovely Imen McDonnell from I Married an Irish Farmer did a great interview and feature with me. It's mainly about what I do with work and my love of all things food. In fact, the husband kept winding me up about my "everything about food makes me happy" quote. I simply asked him to think what his life would be like if my quote was "everything about food makes me unhappy". Hum. Shut him up.

Also, I have to thank fab photographer Jack Caffrey who took amazing shots as always. I work with Jack on Neven Maguire's food feature shots for the same mag so it made a bit of a change for Jack to get my mush in instead of the food I cook. Anyhow guys, thanks for making a great feature of me...it can't have been easy!

Oh, and it's not a case of who ate all the pies...I'm proudly showing my baby pie off here at about the six month mark.

Check out the recipe for those spiced banana muffins over on my Friendly Cottage blog.

Baking Made Easy

Happy New Year everyone! Hopefully you enjoyed fun & food filled festivities (but are not being too hard on yourself calorie counting now!).

Lorraine Pascale's new cookery show, 'Baking Made Easy' won't be any help to you if you are. The six part series kicked off tonight at 8.30pm on BBC2. It was fantastically filled with lots of deliciously tempting goodies including a savoury fig, mint and pistachio tart, soda bread, parmesan lollipops, blueberry mille feuille and an amazing 'I can't believe you made that cake'. Now, I can save you the calories if you like and tell you that having eaten everything, everything is definitely worth eating!!

I skipped off to London in early last summer for a few weeks to work on the show and ended up staying for five. And boy, was it a long hot summer. We had four ovens on the go with 30 degrees of heat blazing from the sun and of course couldn't open any doors or windows because of noise. Mega Melt. Mega melting chocolate. Mega melting pastry. Mega melting everyone and everything. Thankfully, that didn't show in Lorraine's cool performance!

Here are some behind the scenes snaps...

my very glamorous head quarters in the studio. I could come back from the kitchen to find my desk anywhere, including the garden at one point. on the only rainy day!

some continuity snaps of Lorraine's soda bread bites and the mille feuille pastries.

I can't believe you made that cake!

Have a 'Merry' Christmas

Here's my donation to your consumpton of a tipple or two this Christmas....My Jewelled Mulled Wine Jellies....why stop at drinking the stuff when you can eat it too?!

Find the recipe here as it appeared in The Time's Magazine last weekend.

Snowy Supper

So it's a snow work day! Sounds great in principle and brings back amazing memories of being sent home from school because of burst pipes, but in reality missing work because of it now means for me the diary being thrown into all sorts of disarray. I'm furiously trying to get work done for upcoming jobs so that I can free future days up to give back to the postponed jobs.

Anyhow, at least it's all happening in the comfort of my PJ's and bed hair (something I never normally do when working from home, promise!). It also means I can sneek some time to catch up on some blogging (once and for all) and most importantly cook lots of comforting snowy suppers. Here's a favourite recipe from the new Superquinn cookbook (which is now reduced instore to about E15 I think and so makes an excellent christmas pressie!) as promised. This is delicious just on it's own even!

Irish stoved potatoes with vintage Cheddar

This is a variation on the traditional way of cooking potatoes in a cast-iron frying pan over an open fire. They’re delicious on their own with just a salad or try serving simply with grilled fish or a steak.

(c) Harry Weir

Serves 4

675g (1 1/2lb) potatoes

knob of butter

1 tbsp olive oil

2 onions, thinly sliced

100g (4oz) vintage Cheddar cheese, grated

maldon sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Peel the potatoes and slice thinly on a mandolin or with a very sharp knife.

Heat the butter and oil in a heavy-based frying pan that is about 20cm (8in) in diameter and about 5cm (2in) deep. Remove from the heat and cover the base with a layer of the potatoes.

Add a layer of onions over the potatoes and another of grated cheese, seasoning generously as you go. Continue these layers, finishing with a layer of potatoes and a sprinkling of cheese.

Cover tightly with tin foil and cook over a very low heat for 45 minutes to 1 hour until potatoes on top are just cooked through with pierced with a sharp knife.

Preheat the grill. Uncover the stoved potatoes and place straight under the grill for 2-3 minutes to brown. Serve straight from the pan.

Chef’s top tip –Choose firm-fleshed potatoes for this recipe such as Roosters or Maris Piper as they will keep their shape during cooking and don’t break up. Of course this recipe could also be baked in the oven if you’d prefer.

Superquinn Cookbook

Firstly, big sorry for the lack of posts. I've truely been missing in action, so plenty to catch up with. I have tales from London, New York & well, Cavan. It's all glamour-glamour round here isn't it? Well actually, I don't think so. Here are some behind the scenes snaps showing as usual the far from glamorous affair that is my foodie world.

This time, I was delighted to come home from a trip to see the new Superquinn cookbook on their shelves. I told you about it here. Congrats to everyone involved, particularly my good friend Orla Brodrick who wrote the book & basically kept the whole thing afloat. She deserved the fab review in last Sunday's Times Mag, so well done.

Anyhow, I'll keep it short (& will be back with some finished shots & recipes soon). Here are some snaps of the food's adventure in making it onto those pages...

see? it looks all fancy-schmancy on the pages but not so glam in reality!

desperately trying to cool some bread down very quickly waving it about outside while a yoga class moved into the studio at the end of the day!

photographer Harry checking out the shots on screen.

Harry loved those shots from a dizzy height! a sweet little dessert in not such a pretty setting.

Just Splendid

Have you seen the new Splenda commercial on tv lately? I worked on the ad a couple of months ago with the talented team Reelgood and Bonfire. It's always amusing to work with a hand model and check out how perfect their hands are and how well they look after their money makers. I most certainly wouldn't get the job, what with all that washing up I do. My dear hands did get to do all the very controlled Splenda sprinkles from out of shot though. I'm good at Splenda sprinkling me. Well, after rather a lot of takes.

Commercial story board

Director Aidan keeping tabs on the strawberries with body doubles lined up in the background ready to be sprinkled on.

Hand model doing her thing

THE FINISHED COMMERCIAL:

The Food of The Tudors

I see The Tudors is back on our screens. Here are some snaps from my food file archives from working on Series 1.

Also, here's a blog post from Delicious magazine about food in film. Two well known and respected film food stylists in the UK, Debbie Brodie and Katherine Tidy are quoted in it. I had great pleasure in assisting them when I was 'growing up'. I worked with them on movies like Cleopatra, Tenth Kingdom, The Golden Bowl, Man & Boy, Family Tree, The Visitors and The Golden Bowl. Sadly all in the day when I wasn't a nutty 'photographing everything that moves' blogger and tweeter so I have no photographic evidence. They would have been so amazing too with stunning sets, costumes and of course food.

I have my memories though, with the most memorible food for film moment being at Shepperton Studios in London at 6.30am in the morning, with a stinking cold and having been up since about 4am to get there on time. Then, wait for it, being handed a box with a wild boars head in it, which had just been freshly 'done' (yes, as in, beheaded) the day before, so yes, warts, fur and all. I had to rinse every last drop of blood 'through it' (from cut throat & through nostrils) to get it ready to present on a platter. Nice. See? It's not all glamour glamour around these parts!

Anyhow, speaking of glamour, Katherine didn't take me with her to the set of 'Sex & The City' in Morocco I see! Lucky Lady eh?! Must try and get some behind the scenes gossip from her...

Anyhow, in the meantime, enjoy Season 4 of The Tudors!

UPDATE: Yes, hot and flushed tweeters I can confirm that JRM is a total dish....got up close but sadly not personal. I did chat to him briefly, but I imagine the smell of Tudor food from me most likely put him off!

Pecha Kucha turns Foodie

Huge group hug for the 20 speakers at last weeks final Pecha Kucha. What a great, inspiring, good feeling, one big happy family event! As I said in the previous post, PKN6 was to be the last, and in total about 70 'creatives' had their 6 minutes and 40 seconds on their soap box over the last year. So by the last night everyone in the audience was extra supportive because they had either been up there themselves or their nearest and dearest had.

The evening started with a very funny, dead pan presentation from Artist Teresa Nanigian and ended on a very hilariously weird, but high all the same, taped head performance from 'cool guy' Hugh Cooney. In between we had lots of fun learning more about the weird and wild creative past of Illustrator Steve Doogan, stylish things that rock stylist Angela Scanlon's world and what it's like to be cute little people like daydreamers, Arsheen & Anahita. See? A weirdly wild and ecclectic mix and that wasn't the half of it!

I threw some food into the mix and made myself right at home while chit chatting by doing my usual 'cooking at any opportunity'. A bit of a departure for the PK stage I gather. Thankfully, the end result of what I was making wasn't too important, as it was certainly a multitasking challenge to speed talk to slides and cook at the same time (I know, I didn't think that would be too much of a challenge for me either, but it was!). There was flour flying everywhere and by the end I had got so over-excited, I was jumping around clapping that everyone in the audience was going to get a 'chewy chilli chocolate chit chat cookie'!! Check me out (& go easy on the comments!)...

Fabulous Foodie Fixtures

Summer is a great time of year in foodie diaries. The country is brimming with abundant Farmer's Markets and Food Fairs and Festivals. Did anyone make it to Sheridan's Food Fair last week, the same day as the launch of The Point Village Market or the bank holiday weekend's fabulous Bloom in the Park? Bloom had a great 'Love Irish Food' area exhibiting some of their member brands. Speaking of which, there are also some great food initiatives going on now too. So, this is a bit of an all encompassing foodie round-up I guess.

The 'Love Irish Food' campaign has really taken off with more and more Irish Brands coming on board. They have a powerful message.. "Did you know that if just one third of households in Ireland (that’s 400,000) spent an average of €1.67 more on an Irish item each week for a year we would generate €35 million for the Irish economy". I remember the 'Guaranteed Irish' campaign launching in the 70's having a strong impact on me (and at such a tender young age!), something that is engrained in me ever since so it's good to see this surge or Irish pride and support for our own (struggling) economy once again. Just like old times eh? By the way, you can print off recessionista money off coupons on their site here.

Also, of course it's still not too late to grab tickets for next weekends Taste of Dublin. Check out their site for exhibitor and restaurant listings and chef demo timings also. Superquinn are sponsors of this years event. Check out their demo area where I believe you will be able to preview some of the snaps I worked on for their new upcoming cookbook.

Some Foodie campaigns going on at the moment include Bord Bia's Fish, Surprisingly Simple campaign. Hit the link to check out some fishy recipes. Also, their Best in Season competition for strawberry week is underway. Send a photo of you enjoying strawberries and you could win a €500 all for one voucher. The Irish Heart Foundation have linked up with Safefood and the HSE for their Healthy Heart Eat Out month this June. Their main message this time is 'small portions' (something I must admit I'm not great at but will be more mindful!). Participating eateries nationwide, which you can find listings of here, are encouraged to provide heart healthy choices on their menus.

Localmarkets.ie sounds like a very exciting prospect hopefully coming your way soon, unless you are in Cork, where the site has kicked off already. You can have a wide selection of local produce delivered to your door within 24 hours for €7.95. The service hopes to expand to other counties soon. Check out their site for more details.

'My chef at home' is a new to me website with contact details for the likes of chefs, cookery school, event suppliers and also artisan producers. Apparently they are going to put together a list of food bloggers also! Check it out. Also, check out the newly launched Kilkenny Food Trail for perhaps an Irish holiday this summer?

The Slowfood Sugar Loaf Club has organised a movie viewing on Sunday 27th June at 4pm at the big screen in Brookhall at Macreddin Village. "One food documentary, one food movie, together with slow nibbles, slow wine and slow friends". Contact aislingnicra@gmail.com to reserve tickets which are €10 for members and €15 for non-members.

Finally, are you all set for Streetfeast on the 18th of July? It sounds like a fantastic concept, organised by a group of young volunteers, to bring communities together through the medium of food! You can join one or organise your own, have it in a car park, community centre, your garden or well, a street. I'm loving the idea and am dreaming up decorating banquet tables with pretty fabrics, hanging bunting from the trees and of course...the food. Click the link for the lowdown.

Do you know of any other upcoming 'fab foodie fixtures' that I've missed out on?

Pecha Kucha Night 6, Dublin

click to make bigger & see the full listings

This coming Thursday (3rd June), the final Pecha Kucha looks like it's going to kick off the bank holiday weekend with a bang. It will be the 6th PKN put together by the talented guys at The Small Print and The Irish Architecture Foundation. The event actually started in Tokyo in 2003 with a gathering of creatives and designers as a bit of networking. It has since travelled the world in a simple format where creatives 'chit chat' (the meaning of Pecha Kucha) to their 20 slides for 20 seconds each. The idea is that it stops people from talking too much and just getting to their point. Good idea!

So, speaking of talking too much, this is where I come in. I'm one of the chosen few (well ok, 20) being put to the test of cramming in as many of my 20,000 daily allowance of words into the 6 minutes & 40 seconds. Yes, my name is in lights with the creative movers and shakers of the design community here in Dublin. It's going to be an exciting night with a collection of photographers, fashion journalists, art directors, architectures, designers, jewellery designers, illustrators, artists, daydreamers and of course little old me banging on about...well, food. For fear of potentially boring myself and an audience of 300 (eek), I have a little multi-tasking performance up my sleeve. Never one to make things simple for myself me.

Anyhow, hopefully you can make it and join in the fun! See you at the Sugar Club, 8 Lower Leeson St. Entrance €5...Doors open at 7pm with kick off at 7.30pm.

National Fish & Chip Day

Chish & Fips in Country Living Magazine (c) Jack Caffrey

Happy National Fish & Chip Day! It's officially our first here in Ireland and what perfect timing with such fantastically sunny summery weather. Chish & Fips (as they are called in our house) are half price today from the 190 members of the Irish Traditional Italian Chipper Association. Phew, thats a bit of a mouthful! I know what I'll be tucking into later...what about you?

Gathering of Food Bloggers

food, photos, bloggers, butchers, pigs & swag

We will have to come up with a portmanteau (get me! it's the posh word for joining two names, mainly celebrity couples, together) for the recent gathering of foodie bloggers. It is such a great and enthusiastic group of people with a shared love and interest in all things, well, food.

The event was hosted by Bord Bia and was organised by the faces behind their tweets, Maeve and Klara along with the one and only, good mood food blogger Donal Skehan. The day kicked off with bloggers and tweeters brief shreeks at each other as they put faces to names (or in my case, got completely bamboozled with real names, tweeting names, blog names, faces...). Then we all settled down to David Owens presentation where he spoke on behalf of Bord Bia on all things Irish pork and the Quality Assurance Mark. Our pork industry took a hard knock in 2008 with the dioxin scare, but Bord Bia have since been doing an amazing job rebuilding consumer confidence within Ireland and throughout the world.

They didn't have to do much to persuade our room full of fascinated foodies as we drooled over Maura Dufficy's cooking. Maura cooked several pork dishes, but the one that got my tummy rumbling was the marinaded pork belly which thankfully we were served at lunch time. Yes, they fed us too. These gorgeous people at the Food Board (which is the translation of Bord Bia by the way, for any non Irish speakers) know how to throw a party! You can see some snaps of the food we ate over at the consumed foodies blog. I was quite clearly too busy eating to take any.

Douze points goes to the toughest presentation slot of the day given to Damien Mulley of social media fame. He had to keep our attention while the tongues were hanging out of our heads from the tantalising smells of all things Pork. He did a great job giving us top tips on how to feed our egos with increases in new followers, general admiration and the attention we all expect and deserve (!). Then once our tummys were full, we also gladly listened to Eoin Purcell, a publishing industry analyst. Eoin got our pig tails wagging about becoming the next big thing in the food book world. He was frank about us not being able to necessarily retire on our scooped earnings here in Ireland and the fact that the publisher obviously hoped that they would (!).

Two other presentations that were actually in very stark contrast to each other, were Lorraine from Blazing Salads who is a shine to all things fabulously vegetarian and then the GMIT butchery lecturer, Pat Conway. My god, is this man a butcher?! He could cut you into 6 or 8 different parts in under five minutes. Thankfully he used Mr Porky to demonstrate. Check out some photos of him in action over at The Daily Spud.

Finally the day ended on a high with a food styling and photography presentation from Erica Ryan and Jocasta Clarke. As I said before, I hadn't ever met fellow stylist Erica, so it was lovely to meet her at last. I think she did a fantastic job and had lots of oohs and aahs from the audience on the day (and ever since with lots of tweeting going on). It's funny that you forget what you do on a daily basis is actually fascinating to other people. Erica had put together a comprehensive list of food styling tips and secrets, and likewise, reading through I thought, oh yeah, I guess this is impressive. Even though Erica and I have never met and both picked tips up as we went along I imagine (rather than doing the same course or anything), it's funny how we seem to do all of the same things (yes, kitchen roll and cotton buds are my best friends too).

Anyhow, as if we weren't overwhelmed by all that we had been pampered with already, we turned to leave to find tables brimming with what has been endearingly tagged as 'food swag'. I came home with a gorgeous rosemary plant from Living Flavour (which I have already used over on my home blog), some yummy looking smoked trout from Goatsbridge which I have yet to feast on, chutney from sheridans cheesemongers (I was one of those unfortunates who missed out on the cheese sadly though), lovely shoots from Good4u which I have been nibbling on non-stop and a delightful oat and ginger cookie from fabulous blogger Lilly Higgins, who totally standard pushed with ultra cool, machine sewn packaging!

So my head is still spinning from it all. A really fab day, packed full of pork, info, tips, recipe ideas, food swag, all round good feeling and of course lots of great new foodie friends. I have updated my blogroll over on the right (and will do so over at friendly cottage soon also) to include as many irish food bloggers as I could steal in a hurry from the great list Donal compiled. Let me know if I've missed you out! I promise to follow you all too...

...and a portmanteau? floggers? boodie floggers? foodles? bloodies?...Any other suggestions?

For the Love of Pork

I'm very excited about the food bloggers event coming up this Thursday. The fabulous Donal Skehan has organised it on behalf of Bord Bia - you can read all about it on his blog. An army of food bloggers and tweeters will be attending so it will be exciting to put faces to names. I am also really looking forward to catching up with food photographer Jocasta Clarke and meeting fellow food stylist Erica Ryan for the first time.

Bord Bia sent out pork packs to the first of the attendees who have been busy cooking, eating, blogging and tweeting about Pork since the weekend. Here is my offering from a feature I styled for Food & Wine Magazine. Recipe by Hugo Arnold & Shot by Cliona O'Flaherty.

Superquinn Cookbook

Superquinn turns 50 this year and are publishing a fab new cookbook as part of the celebrations. I have just finished working on the shoot for the book where we shot 50+ recipes. And yes, ate them all too. I was in good company with friends Photographer Harry Weir and Writer Orla Broderick. Together with our new BFF's from Superquinn, Bruce & Alison and David the designer from the publishers Harmonia, we had really great fun.

It has been a tough few weeks though...think 12 hours of food shopping, 40 dishwasher loads, 15 crates of props & equipment and I'm not even going to think about the calories consumed! The shoot days were ultra busy so we didn't even have time to take many behind the scenes shots. You'll get the picture with the few we managed to snap the other day though. So anyhow, as I tweeted, it's been emotional...

On my knees praying and checking my biccies aren't burnt.

Lovingly tending to some luciously lovely leeks.

Harry being happy from a height.

checking out the goods on the big screen.

Orla, David, Harry & Alison tucking into pies for breakfast.

Me unknowingly snapped in action.

Wexford Food Fair 2010

Keep the diaries free for Wednesday May 19th for the second Wexford Food Fair. The exhibitors list is brimming with Wexford pride with companies like Thai Gold, Wexford Home Preserves, Phelim Byrne's Cookery Academy, Greens Berry Farm and a couple of neighbours of mine down home, Stable Diet and Zanna Foods.

Yes, being a Wexford lass, ok yella belly as we're called, I'm proud to promote and be part of it. In fact this year I'm hosting fun interactive food workshops with 8-10 year old local school children (God help me!) on behalf of Safefood, which I am really excited about. My cutsie morning slot getting down with the kids is going to be big news and no way will I let it be overshadowed by the evening demonstrations from celebrity chefs (& friends) Neven Maguire and Phelim Byrne. Put down the milk lads, the apron is on and the knives are out!