Archive for March, 2006
Buffalo Wings, mmm tasty but not so hot
Posted on March 31, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cooking, Entertainment, Food.
I’ve made a few half-hearted attempts at doing chicken wings over the years. Usually in the oven and usually burnt beyond all recognition. I now realise that you add the sauce afterwards as anything with sugar will burn.
Recently I spotted a bunch of blog postings about buffalo wings (mainly related to the Superbowl I think) and decided I wanted to try and do them properly. I’ve always found people raving about Elephant & Castle chicken wings to be a bit weird. I’ve had them, they’re fine but they are chicken offcuts in hot sauce, get a grip.
The simple recipe given on Slashfood seemed to fit the bill. I found a great site in the UK called Chilli World who stock Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. This is the “original” hot sauce used for Buffalo wings. I ordered a few bottles of that plus some other Caribbean hot sauces and some spices. They arrived within the week.
So on Monday, after buying 30 chicken wings in the English market for €2.10 (no, I don’t want to know where they came from), I made my first real batch of buffalo wings. I fried them in about an inch of oil in a pan (rather than going the full deep-fat frying route) and then coated them thoroughly in the mix of butter, Frank’s Red Hot Sauce and cider vinegar as quoted by Slashfood.
Well Frank’s sauce may be tasty and red but it ain’t hot. I ended up dousing each wing in the sauce from the bottle to get any sort of kick. Hell, I could put the sauce straight on to my tongue and it did not burn. I also question the butter. is it just to make the sauce adhere more? I dunno. What I do know is that they were damned tasty and I had 10 for lunch.
Next time I’ll try one of those Caribbean scotch bonnet pepper sauces and see if that works better/hotter.
Can someone do a margin analysis on buffalo wings for me? What are we talking? 1000%? Whoever came up with them has one sharp business mind.
For fans of “My Name is Earl”, the exchange between the main characters on chicken wings this week was comedy perfection. Dammit these guys can write:
Randy: You takin’ Pops’ hot dogs outta Camden County is like taking chicken out of Syracuse.
Earl: It’s Buffalo, Randy.
Randy: No, I’m pretty sure it’s chicken, Earl.
Joy: Yeah, it’s chicken. Hot chicken!
[tags]Buffalo Wings, My Name is Earl, Franks Red Hot Sauce, Chilli World[/tags]
21 Comments
Ice-Cream Disclosure
Posted on March 31, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Food, Ireland.
I have written some very complimentary things about Murphy’s Ice Cream recently. In addition, Kieran’s blog has become, in a few short weeks, one of the best in the country, IMHO. I gave Kieran a few tips on blogging software recently and was gob-smacked when he sent me a fabulous gift of some ice-cream and chocolate sauce (via the very facilitative Urru).
Now that I have made that disclosure, I feel comfortable in continuing to rave about their products. The ones we got today were Irish Cream Liquer and Mint & Chocolate. Holy god, they would be banned in any communinst country for their utter gorgeousness. I had to wrestle the spoon off Catherine so we could put them aside for later when the sauce would be de-frosted.
Listening to Kieran and Seán on Winter Food, I realise that they have far too much in common with Catherine for them to ever meet. She is toying with the idea of offering to be an unpaid tester for them. She is eating for two you know.
It is usually a long process for us to come up with the final name for each of our children. Fionn was named as the epi went in. This next baby has already been named: Uachtar Reoite Ó Néill.
Whilst I am here, any ideas why the ice-cream from our cheapy ice-cream maker is really solid and dense in comparison to the lightness of Murphy’s?
p.s. Interesting factoid: If you Google “Uachtar Reoite”. the first hit is the Murphy’s Web-site.
UPDATE 1: In the interest of full and unambiguous disclosure, I should point out that my wife is a svelte and gorgeous size 10. But not for long. Ow, ow, joke, joke.
[tags]Murphys IceCream, Urru[/tags]
1 Comment
Yahoo Mail Beta -finally! Initial impressions
Posted on March 31, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology.
Months after I signed up, I finally got access to the new Yahoo Mail Beta programme. I’ve been using Yahoo mail as my “we are a web-site, give us an email address” address for over ten years now. In that time, I don’t think it has really improved one iota in usability apart from the addition of spam catching. It has always been slow, clunky and riddled with obnoxious massive ads.
The new one is a major improvement on the usability front. Full ajaxian interface with drag n drop and reasonably speedy 3-pane display. So far I like it a hell of a lot but there is no way it is ousting GMail as my favourite email system. There are far too many “please wait” messages for my liking. And the screen real estate just does not seem to be used efficiently.
But the number one problem is the continued presence of those horrible huge flashy animated ads. Let me make this clear Mr Yahoo: In ten years of using Yahoo mail, I have never, ever, clicked on one of those ads. If I suffered from epilepsy, I am pretty sure they would trigger an attack, they are so visually offensive. In a much shorter period of time, I have clicked on many Google Adsense ads. The are unobtrusive, relevant and don’t take up half the screen. If you want to beat Google, do some simple end-user surveys and see if anyone on the planet likes your current ads.
But if Yahoo mail is your primary web-mail system, you are going to love the new one.
[tags]Yahoo, Mail, Beta[/tags]
4 Comments
Two words: Green Wing
Posted on March 31, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment, Humour.
Tonight 9.00, Channel 4.
From the last series:
MAC to his surgical team: What can I tell you? A few ground rules. No bombing, no running, no petting, no diving and no inflatables. In fact, probably best to leave all swimming related activities until later ; this is after all, an operating theatre.
[tags]Green Wing, Channel 4[/tags]
6 Comments
Cafe Paradiso, no meat necessary
Posted on March 29, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Restaurants, Reviews.
Cafe Paradiso
Food style/ethnicity: Vegetarian
Price: 40 - 50 (Euro)
Location:
16 Lancaster Quay
Cork
Ireland
As a traditional meat and two meat kind of guy (see my recent Meatapalooza tour of Austin, Tx), I’ve always been in two minds about going to Cafe Paradiso. On the one hand, everyone raves about the food, on the other, I need my dead animal products. It is one of those places about which I kept saying “I must, I must” but I never did, despite sending plenty of other people there to eat!
Last night there was a slow food event involving a movie in the Kino followed by supper in Cafe Paradiso. I signed up last week but as the day approached we realised the night was going to be far too long for Catherine who suffers very badly from tiredness in the initial phases of pregnancy. On top of that, I was wrecked from filling a skip with garden rubbish. So we decided to give the movie a miss and just re-book the restaurant for 7pm.
It’s a fairly small place with cafe style decor rather than a formal fine-dining (to use an American phrase) setup. The staff had been very friendly in my dealings with them when originally booking and re-booking and that continued for the night. Only two other tables were occupied but that may have been due to the imminent slow food supper.
The menu looked great even if I had to change the way I usually read one from “which meat am I in the mood for?” to “which combo of flavours really does it for me?”. Whilst we were figuring it out, we got a small basket of breads which were bursting with taste.
As I mentioned in the comments on my posting about pregnancy and cheese, there were a lot of dishes with cheese in them and we had to get the young waiter lad to find out which ones were pasteurised and which weren’t. The Knockalara sheeps cheese was ok so Catherine had a fantastic “tartlet of caramelised red onion, pinenuts & Knockalara sheeps milk cheese with watercress pesto and olive-crushed potato”. She demolished it and thought it was fantastic. I had “vegetable sushi with pickled ginger, wasabi and a dipping sauce, and tempura of aubergine & cauliflower”. Utterly brilliant. I do love my wasabi and the sushi with the pickled ginger was just awesome. Tempura can often be dodgy but this was light as a feather. A perfect perfect plate of food.
In white wine I am very boring. I am a longterm member of the ABC club (except for really good Chablis) and a lifetime member of the NBSB club (nothing but Sauvignon Blanc). The very odd time I’ll have Riesling or Pinot Grigio or even Gewurztraminer. Throwing safety to the wind, I went with half a bottle of Loosen Riesling. Wow. On the first mouthful I thought there was something seriously wrong with it, there was so much happening in my mouth. What sort of devillish mixture have they created to get so much taste into an itty-bitty bottle of wine? I’ll be searching that out again very soon.
And then we had the mains. Catherine went with “eggroll pancake of leeks & spinach with oyster mushrooms in cider cream, and a crushed potato, parsnip & wild rice cake” which looked fantastic, had a great sauce which I tried and she loved the whole thing.
I went with “watercress, red onion & pinenut risotto with Desmond cheese, tomato-basil broth and panfried fresh artichokes”. This was superb, the mix of flavours was really stunning with each ingredient identifiable but working together and I loved the artichoke on the side. However, I do take issue with calling it a risotto. It was made with risotto rice but was totally non-creamy. My guess is that it was cooked like normal rice and then the ingredients added after afterwards. As I said, it tasted fab but didn’t have the expected texture.
Most of the desserts sounded awesome and Catherine went for a dark chocolate dessert with coffee ice-cream and ginger sauce (exact description missing off their web-site). She thought it would be too heavy and initially found the flavours a bit too strong but the trooper that she is, she persevered and funnily enough she cleaned the plate.
After dithering for ages I went for “ginger-poached rhubarb with a set vanilla custard
and orange shortbread “. It tickled every bud on my tongue. Coffees were spot on too.
This is a chef at the top of his game. We were blown away by how he managed to pack so much flavour into every dish. Whilst we were eating, a diner was settling up and I heard her pass comment about the potential for them to be called “best vegetarian restaurant in Europe”. It sounded like this was more than her just passing her opinion. I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if they do get such an award.
The total for an almost perfect meal? €108. An incredible bargain. Do yourself a favour and have a meal there.
[tags]Cafe Paradiso, Denis Cotter, Vegetarian, Slow Food[/tags]
27 Comments
Bandon Farmer’s Market nearly here
Posted on March 28, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Food.
Bandon Farmer’s Market
Begins: Sat, 01 Apr 2006 at 10:00 AM
Ends: Sat, 01 Apr 2006 at 2:00 PM
Entry fee: 0
Location:
The Old Market Garden Bandon, Co Cork Ireland
Update 1: The times above have been confirmed and here is the official flyer. I’ll definitely be there.
If this infringes any copyright, let me know and I’ll take it down
It had been thought that the sad passing of Peter Crowley, who had been the main driving force behind the setting up of a Farmer’s Market in Bandon, would result in the plan being shelved. However, I was thrilled to read in the current edition of the Bandon Opinion that the organizing committee have not given up and Peter’s daughter is now involved.
The plan is for the market to take place in (what would commonly be known as) the Mace Carpark in the middle of town. The first one will be on Saturday April 1st and will run on the first Saturday of every month up to and including September.
I’m sure all food producers in the area know about it already but if you don’t and you are interested in taking a stall, please contact Dianne Curtin or Veronica Neville.
This is genuinely a great leap forward for Bandon. As a historical centre of food production for centuries with very productive agricultural land in the area and as a market town, it is only right and proper that we should celebrate Bandon’s local food producers and provide them with the opportunity to sell directly to the public.
I am convinced that Farmer’s Markets do not reduce revenue for local businesses, rather they increase business due to the larger number of customers attracted to the town who might otherwise go to Clon or Cork.
Now all we need is for someone to open a micro-brewery and I’ll be a very happy man.
For those of you wondering where the Mace Car Park is, follow this link to Microsoft Windows Live Local. I was very surprised to discover that Microsoft Maps is far superior to Google Maps for rural Ireland.
This is the structured version of the previous post and highlights how some of the most important information is presented in a way which is easily collected by automated systems.
I have a few observations of my own on the hCalendar structure and the Wordpress plugin:
[1] The Address Fields are very U.S. centric
[2] It would be nice to have a “Map” field to highlight the specific location
[3] There is no facility for repeating events. I know this is a major topic of conversation among the developers of the hCalendar format. But to me it is
critical for any Calendar structure.
[4] The Tags don’t get hyperlinked over to Technorati
[5] As mentioned in my first review of the Structured Blogging plug-in, we lose all rich text editing when using it.
These issues are all fixable and do not detract from the advantages offered by the addition of structure.
Tags: Farmers Market, Bandon, Peter Crowley, Mace, Structured Blogging
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Tips for Father’s Day
Posted on March 27, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cooking, Family, Food.
The traditional Mother’s Day treat in our house is to get a nice simple poached eggs on toast breakfast in bed which the kids can easily help with. This year, as wifey is up the pole, soft eggs were a no-no and hard poached eggs are pooh, so we needed an alternative.
On Saturday, in a flash of inspiration I checked out “Easy Entertaining” by Darina Allen. My lovely parents got this for me at Christmas. The “Darina” bit would make it instantly interesting to me, but the “Entertaining” bit would put me off. The only entertaining we do is giving people a laugh with our uncontrollable demon children in SuperValu when we go shopping. But this is a great book. Tons of very manageable recipes ranging from 5-minuters to multi-hour slow-cookingers. What I had remembered was her particularly good brunch chapter.
I found “Buttermilk pancakes with crispy bacon and maple syrup”. Wife looked very happy when I suggested it.
I did a bit of shopping with the two eldest for basics in SuperValu. I got the special bits in Urru (sadly lacking in Mother’s day specific treats for some reason) and we were all set.
The pancakes were a doddle to make and I’m completely incompetent at baking (yes, pancakes are baking in my world). These were paired with Gubbeen streaky bacon which has a very distinctive and enticing aroma (is it the juniper?). Canadian Maple Syrup finished it off. Wife rated it as the best Mother’s Day breakfast ever. Result.
Dinner was our old reliable spaghetti n meatballs as we wanted us all eating at the same time. All plates were demolished. I then rolled out my secret weapon - Murphy’s Chocolate Ice Cream with Glenilen Raspberry Mousse. Catherine argued with me that they did not go together. As far as she was concerned I was ruining a perfect chocolate moment with fruit. I disagreed and insisted she try the combo. Success, she loved it! They are effing fabulous together. I’m not even that big a fan of chocolate ice-cream but with the fluffy mousse it was awesome.
One downside was that both Oisín and Oscar tried some of the ice-cream. They both adored it - Ois licked his bowl, Osc licked the carton clean. There goes our cost base - they won’t accept HB Neapolitan from us any more.
I know what I want for Father’s Day.
[tags]Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Murphys Icecream, Glenilen, Urru, Gubbeen, Darina Allen[/tags]
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Goat’s Cheese and Pregnancy
Posted on March 27, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Babies, Food.
We were in The English Market on Friday getting a few bits. I was buying the membrillo in Iago which is the bigger of the two cheese places. In passing, as Catherine is preggers, I asked if they had any pasteurised goat’s cheese. The person I asked didn’t know but one of the other ladies came over and said that no goat’s cheese or sheep’s cheese is safe to eat during pregnancy because listeria is not killed by pasteurisation. We were a bit stunned as we are pretty sure Catherine has eaten some of the harder goat’s cheeses on the other pregnancies.
When we went home, she checked her library of pregnancy books and they all said that listeria is killed by pasteurisation. So what is the reality? Is listeria a red herring? Are there any safe non-cow cheeses during pregnancy? In any case, what are the stats on problems occuring? Ignoring goats for a moment, what is the problem with soft cheeses like brie if they are pasteurised?
Let’s use that collective swarm intelligence out there to create a bizarre answer to this conundrum and post it to Wikipedia.
[tags]Listeria, Goat’s Cheese, Chevre, Brie, Pasteurisation, Pasteurization, Iago, English Market[/tags]
48 Comments
Boqueria Tapas Cork
Posted on March 27, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Ireland, Restaurants, Reviews.
Boqueria
Food style/ethnicity: Spanish Tapas
Hours: Pub Hours - Pub Hours
Price: 6 - 12 (Euro)
Location:
6 Bridge Street
Cork Co Cork
Ireland
Two and a half years after leaving, I have finally left the building. To celebrate getting rid of me, we had my bye bye meal in Boqueria Tapas in Cork City the other night. I have heard nothing but good things about it since I’ve been down here. Finally I had the opportunity and a bunch of us headed in quite early on a Wednesday night.
I was well surprised to see that it was hopping mid-week. A very good sign. I was a bit late (projectile vomiting baby emergency) and luckily Christian already had a bottle of Rioja on the go. The world’s least sexy name for a wine: “Muriel”. But it was a fine bit of booze as the three bottles between 3.5 people proved.
There was a lot of discussion and tooing-and-froing on the menu as most of the gang had never had tapas or any kind of Spanish food. The menu was split simply between hot and cold with most dishes averaging between €6 and €12.
I was aiming to do the “proper” thing and order one item at a time interspersed with copious amounts of booze. But most people were in Irish mode and ordered the equivalent of “starter” and “main”. I thought it was a pity the waitress wasn’t giving us guidance. The big advantage of “one at a time” for beginners like us is that you can see what other people are getting and can then decide to have that yourself for the next round.
Patatas Bravas seemed to be the dish of choice for the night and all seemed to like it. I started off with a plate of charcuteria. What came out was a big plate laden down with meat. I was a bit shocked by the size of it but it was an awesome dish. Serrano, salami, chorizo, grapes, manchego cheese and membrillo. The latter two were new to me but W had lived in San Sebastian for two years and explained that membrillo is a quince paste and is famous for going well with manchego. He wasn’t joking, both were fantastic. Martin didn’t know about chorizo so I showed him the two different types on the plate. Or as Marion put it “small……far away”.
The place itself is beautiful with lots of dark wood and has the bar at the front with shelves full of spanish food products. The rear has more seating but is long and narrow and not really suited to a crowd our size. I felt sorry for the waitresses having to force their way through all night. Service was fine considering how many of us there were but there were some big gaps between waitress appearances at the table.
My second plate was Albondigas which are Spanish meatballs. These were bloody gorgeous and I scoffed the lot in no time. Portion size again was quite large.
Due to the large portions, most people stopped at two which was a pity. I think they should reduce the plate size by half which would give us the opportunity to try twice as many things. Throwing weight-loss to the wind I went for number three but it didn’t work for me. It was chickpeas with sultanas, parsley and garlic. And that was literally what I got on a plate. A bit too much like eating muesli for my liking but nothing inherently wrong with it.
From talking to people, Boqueria seems to be used a lot by those going to the cinema / theatre / stock-car racing who just want a quick bite to eat and a glass of wine beforehand and for that it is perfect. As a result it is probably not a romantic location to “impress the bird” unless the bird is a foodie. If we are in the city sans les enfants (some time around 2025) we’ll definitely be going again but I doubt we’d head all the way in on a whim. For whims we have Davida Tapas in Bandon which does a smaller menu but is probably as good.
With W’s guidance, two days later we went to The English Market and got Manchego and membrillo. Yum tiddley um tum tum.
[tags]Boqueria, Tapas, The English Market, Davida[/tags]
7 Comments
Foodie Podcasts - From truffles to roadkill
Posted on March 25, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Food, Reviews, Technology.
UPDATE 1: I am re-publishing this post as I did a great dis-service to Adam over at Men In Aprons by confusing his Podcast with another one. MIA is a lighthearted foodie podcast where Adam is the main presenter and he riffs with his wife and friends in the room about food related topics. Adam sent me a great e-mail describing some of the background to MIA and I have to say I really like his attitude and approach. So, not only do I recommend that you check out MIA and see if it is to your liking but I have re-subscribed too.
Whilst I am at it, anyone else out there using Juice for Podcast downloads?
Original Post:
Since about November, I’ve been listening to some (mainly foodie) podcasts. As someone who thinks Steve Jobs’ real name is Damien and is the spawn of a wolf, it is a case of ipod schmipod for me.
My first set-up was my Nokia 6230 with a 512MB MMC Card and the standard Nokia headphones. The biggest drawback of it is that the transfer of music or podcasts via Bluetooth takes forever and USB isn’t great either. So I end up removing the MMC from the phone, popping it into my laptop, copying what I want and then re-assembling the phone. For cycling this setup worked fine.
The music player on the phone is a bit crap with FF and REW being particularly useless. For the car, I got a standard “taxi-driver” phone holder and an adapter to connect the phone to a normal set of head-phones or line-out. This is then connected to a VRFM8 FM transmitter thingy which takes the sound and broadcasts it illegally to my radio and I listen via the radio. Sound quality on those FM transmitters is pretty rubbish and they really don’t work for music, but for podcasts they are fine.
At Christmas, I asked my very kind father if I could borrow the Palm Tungsten T that he had never used and he said sure. I thought it only took SD cards but for the laugh I stuck the MMC card from the Nokia into it and the beauty worked. I then grabbed Real Player for Palm and loaded it up. This is a very nice piece of music playing software which integrates very smoothly with Real Player on the Desktop. I can now just drop MP3’s from my desktop onto Real Player and it transfers them (at quite high speed) to the MMC in the Palm. The Tungsten T has a headphone socket, so I just connect that to the FM transmitter and I’m in business. The main advantages over the Nokia are the speed of music transfer, the far superior music player and the big buttons for controlling it whilst driving. The other advantage is that the card slot is open at the top of the Palm so I can easily swap cards if I have more stuff on another one.
Of course, we can’t forget the other advantages of the Tungsten T: ZX Spectrum Emulator, tons of great games, currency convertor, web-browser which works using bluetooth to the phone, eWallet, Avantgo, Vindigo. Whilst it is a little long in the tooth and under-powered compared to current models, I think it is a far more impressive piece of industrial design. Most current PDAs just look cheap, nasty and flimsy. The only thing it is really missing is wi-fi.
That is the tech sorted. What the hell is podcasting and which ones do I listen to? For non-techies, the explanation is really simple. Podcasts are recordings made by anyone from a guy in a shed talking about potting compost to a journalist with Business Week talking about Google to a normal radio show. Those recording are saved onto computer in a format called MP3 (just a sound compression system so the files don’t take up too much space) and they then upload those files onto web-servers and let people know by various means that they can download them. If you want to listen to a podcast, you can grab the file off the web-site, save it on your computer and listen to it there (Windows comes with a sound player for them) or copy it to an MP3 player like an iPod and listen to it whilst walking or cycling. Nothing to it really.
The variation in quality of content and sound in podcasts is very interesting. The pro ones are often less impressive in what they are saying than the guy with the cheap handheld recorder. Here is a selection of ones I have checked out -
Gastrocast: Neal the Podchef is based on an island off Washington state. He is very informed and has a wide range of food interests which are similar to my own. He spent time in Ireland and has been to Ballymaloe so Darina gets a mention. He often does bits on Irish food products like cheese. He has a very distinctive voice which is highly enunciated and this is exactly what is needed in a podcast. I can actually hear him whilst cycling unlike a lot of people (like Om Malik for example) who mumble into their chests and are often indecipherable. There are only two small negatives to my mind. The first is that an hour per episode is heading towards too long. My attention span isn’t that long 
Also, I have found that podcasts work best when there is more than one person involved. The interaction makes it more interesting. But considering where Neal lives, I don’t think that is solvable. The other approach (as taken by Men In Aprons) is far far worse where the main talker shouts to his wife in the background and she shouts back.
The Restaurant Guys: Informed, professional, funny. It is just a recording of their daily food show on a New Jersey Radio station. Francis and Mark together own two big restaurants in New Brunswick and each day they usually cover one main topic in great depth and with tons of humour and have an interview with someone. Check out the episode where they discuss the bison cull in Montana and what sort of loser you’d have to be to mount the head of one of those animals. The bison are so used to human contact they think their photo is about to be taken! I listen to every episode these guys make.
The Remarkable Palate: Mark Tafoya is a personal chef in New York. He covers lots of local NY things but also does recipes and lots of interviews. I just like his attitude to food in general. He should lose the recent music interludes tho.
Eat Feed: Anne Bramley seems extremely knowledgeable and interviews a wide range of people in the food business. But it just doesn’t work for me. Her focus is on things I just do not find interesting (like baking) and I find a lot of the interviewees just plain annoying. I’m sure that it would be interesting to lots of people, just not to me. Actually, I did find her recent podcast on food interests and personality types to be worth a listen.
On Food with Hsiao-Ching Chou: Food Editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. Very professionaly produced. Good meaty interviews mainly with chefs. Well worth a listen.
Men in Aprons: Seems to be recorded in a toilet by a husband and wife. The first episode I tried to listen to had recipes for your cat. I’ve tried several episodes since and I never last past their incessant giggling which usually starts after less than a minute.
Girl on Girl Cooking: Or as they should be known “Cooking by the hard of thinking”. Car crash podcasting. Their episode on genetically modified foods was one of the funniest things I have ever heard and they were being deadly serious. “They kinda like, ye know, f**k with the molecules of the food”.
All You Can Eat: Don Genova is based in Vancouver and mainly does walkabout interviews with local people. Very down to earth and relaxed. Worth a listen.
BBQ Forum: If you are interested in BBQ or you’re trying to learn about it (as I am), this is a must-listen. Ray Basso runs the biggest BBQ forum site on the web and is deeply knowledgeable. The guys he interviews (and in the world of BBQ it seems to be mainly guys) range from the very funny to the very strange, but all of them know what they are talking about. Very enjoyable.
And for a few non-foodie ones, you should try:
Tom Raftery’s Podleaders: Great interviews with tech visionaries by a Cork-based IT person
Ricky Gervais: Awesome. Snot out the nose funny. Karl Pilkington for King! Nearly finished so hurry and grab em.
Diggnation: Should be annoying; Two young guys talking tech in valley speak. Actually hilarious and very interesting.
[tags]food podcasts, diggnation, ricky gervais[/tags]
15 Comments
Dammit, there goes that plan
Posted on March 24, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Humour, Pictures.
My genius syrup-a-day plan foiled.
[tags]Roches Stores, Syrups[/tags]
No Comments
I swear, the queues of screaming fans were out the door of Roches Stores Cork
Posted on March 24, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Humour, Ireland.
“What’s that you’re wearing?”
“It’s Hope by Ronan.”
“Is that kind of like a St Jude Miraculous Medal?”
Yeah, yeah I know it’s for “Charedee” but apart from your granny buying you this instead of socks, who does he think the target market is? Other talented singer superstars like himself? Gift Grub fans being ironic?
And why does Ronan look like he is checking his arm-pit for B.O.?
So many questions, so little interest.
[tags]Ronan Keating, Boyzone, Gift Grub[/tags]
2 Comments
Live From The Field
Posted on March 23, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Pictures.
After a night of pints. Or rioja actually.
2 Comments
Waterfall Farm Shop - Why aren’t there more places like this?
Posted on March 21, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Food.
We were over in Ovens recently looking at patio “toppings” in Irish Aggregates. On the way back I finally decided to check out Waterfall Farm Shop. I’ve known about it for more than two years and passed it a few times but just never took the extra few minutes to have a look.
The farm also appears to have a food distribution business as they had several branded vans parked in the yard. A few tired old labradors gave the perfect welcome. The shop itself is basically the corner of one of their barns where they store veg for the other side of the business. So it was coats all round.
At this time of year I didn’t expect much apart from root vegetables but they had a good selection of fruit n veg. I’m guessing the banana’s are not grown on the farm. The lady running the place was really friendly and pointed me to a few of her favourites. I grabbed one of those apple juices made near Cahir and some jams that are made on the farm. Then I spotted her relishes. A sweet beetroot pickle looked lovely as did the ratatouille-style chutney.
I picked up a few more bits n bobs like eggs and went back over to her at the register. It turns out that it is her farm and she makes all of the jams and relishes herself. As she was totting up, I grabbed a few beetroot and she gave them to me for nothing!
I then realised I didn’t have any cash and told her I just had to pop out to the car to get money off my wife. Her response? “Shur you can catch me the next time”. Wow. I really thought that world no longer existed in Ireland. A world where trust is the default position and you assume good of people. I was deeply impressed but I also insisted on getting her the money.
I can’t recommend her jams and relishes highly enough. They are all stunningly tasty.
If you live or work anywhere around Ballincollig, Waterfall or Ballinhassig, you should be giving these fine people your business. I’m really looking forward to heading back for the early summer produce.
It is surprising that there are not more places like this in West and Mid-West Cork. Apart from the fantastic farmers stall at Halfway where you can get corn cobs and a ton of other fresh veg for three quarters of the year and the odd place advertising “farm fresh eggs” near Clon, I’m not aware of anywhere else near me. If you know of any, please let me know as I am happy to do a detour (or shortcut as I call them) to give them my business.
[tags]Waterfall, Farm Shop, Halfway[/tags]
9 Comments
What if I suggest a structured recipe format and you critique it?
Posted on March 21, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Cooking, StructuredBlogging.
Between this blog and my posting on eGullet regarding the sort of structure people would like to see on recipes in blogs, I received the sum total of zero/null/nada/nialas replies. The world was about as vocal as that time I asked “so do I look good in these speedos?”
In retrospect I should have suggested an initial idea and then asked you all to improve on it. So read on and start entering comments. Critical is good, bitchy is good, offensive is good. Silence is badddddd.
Here are my initial thoughts for “fields” that might be useful in a structured recipe on a blog. My starting point is the RecipeML spec plus fields from Gourmet Recipe Manager and anything else that popped into my head.
From The RecipeML Spec (renamed for clarity):
Title
Measurement System (U.S., Imperial etc)
Creator (Person)
Source (Book Title etc)
Date (Of Creation or Publication)
Rights (Copyright or other)
Summary Description (one liner)
Preparation Time (overall time)
Yield Quantity and Unit (4 pancakes or 5 servings)
Meal Category (Starter etc)
Main Ingredients Category (Pasta etc)
Cuisine Category (Italian etc)
Ingredients (each one a separate “item” rather than block text with count/amount/range/unit broken out too)
Description/Instructions (as free form block text)
Other possibilities:
Picture(s) (either on the blog/site or externally hosted)
Rating (how much you like it yourself!)
Difficulty Level/Experience Required
Notes (e.g. warnings)
Dietary Information (e.g. gluten-free)
Ones from the RecipeML spec which may be overkill:
Equipment
Variations
Recipe broken into parts (pastry vs filling etc)
Subtitle
Version
Breakdown of Preptime into phases
Nutritional Information
[tags]Recipes, RecipeML, Structured Recipes, StructuredBlogging.org[/tags]
7 Comments
Slow Food Cork City Spring Supper and Slow Film
Posted on March 21, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Entertainment, Food, Ireland, Restaurants.
I found out about this movie/grub combo that is on next Tuesday (28th) on The Slow Food Ireland web-site. Clodagh McKenna describes it as follows:
A showing of the new Irish film ‘Short Order’ in the Kino cinema, Cork at 7pm and following the film a spring supper at Cafe Paradiso at 9.30pm (there will be a half an hour gap so you can have a drink at Reidy’s bar)
Short Order is a new film from Irish director Anthony Byrne. A colourful, tongue-in-cheek surreal musical-comedy, starring Emma de Caunes, Jack Dee, Paul Kaye, John Hurt and Vanessa Redgrave. It’s a magical night in the lives of our protagonists: Short Order Chefs, Masterchefs, Delivery People, working out their philosophies between bites of honest to goodness, onions, garlic, lemon and rum drenched prawns, house special Osso Bucco (featuring the freshly chopped fingers of Bill Dodging Customers). A little bit of life, love and wisdom come together over one night in the culinary underbelly where life is a buffet and everything is short order.
Please note that tickets for the cinema have to be purchased through the kino 021 427 1571 and tickets for the supper through cafe paradiso 021 427 7939. Tickets for the supper are only available for cinema ticket holders and supper tickets are limited. Cost: Film - €8, Supper - €35 (this includes a glass of organic wine)
I booked for myself and Catherine earlier. There was a wee bit of confusion about how/where you book but I think it is like this: The Kino does not accept Credit Card bookings on the phone but if you only want to see the movie then deal with them exclusively.
If you want the movie and the meal, then ring Cafe Paradiso and they will let you pay in advance for both the meal and the tickets. You still have to pop in at some point to get the tickets. When I was booking this afternoon, they had 15 people booked for food out of a max of 35 so get your skates on if you are interested.
[tags]Slow Food Ireland, Slow Food, Kino, Cafe Paradiso, Short Order Movie[/tags]
1 Comment
GoEat.ie - anyone else checked it out?
Posted on March 21, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Reviews.
I discovered goeat.ie recently and have been looking around the site. Overall it seems well designed and they have the usual bunch of reviews and competitions and recipes that you would expect on any food site.
They also have the first ever Irish Video Blogs (according to them). A very neat idea but to be honest the videos are brutal. They look like the sort of thing they used to show in the Savoy Cinema on O’Connell Street years ago before the movie. Long sweeping shots of the restaurant and you are just waiting for them to say “After the feature presentation, why not pop next door to the Khyber Pass Tandoori and experience our range of international Vesta cuisine”.
I looked at their video reviews of both Wagamama and The Mongolian BBQ. They didn’t have a negative word to say about either of them (apart from some gentle dig at Wagamama about it not being a place you “dine”). I think this may be a bigger problem than it first appears. On the home page they have a link for restauranteurs. Is it a case that they are trying to play both sides of the field? If so, they will find it very hard to gain credibility with consumers. They need to tread very carefully there.
But all in all, they deserve support for trying to do a decent foodie portal. Check them out.
One other dig: Don’t advertise web-design expertise when your web-site throws a SQL Server error if people with apostrophes in their names (a huge chunk of the Irish population) enter that name to take part in a competition. Tut tut, I’ll accept that beginners mistake from US web-sites but not from Irish ones.
And because I am in a crabby humor - where are the RSS feeds boys? You can’t do Video Blogs and have ads for iTunes and not have RSS. I know you are worried that you will lose advertising revenue but I am actually open to ads in RSS feeds as long as they are small, unobtrusive and relevant.
[tags]goeat.ie, GoEat, Food Portal, Video Blogs[/tags]
3 Comments
It’s against nature, it’s against god, it’s against everything our society holds dear
Posted on March 20, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Food.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
p.s. still one of my favourite blogs despite this crime against humanity
[tags] Hot Sauce Blog, Ice Cream, Chilli Sauce[/tags]
No Comments
Request for Feedback - Structured Recipes
Posted on March 19, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Cooking, StructuredBlogging.
If you’ve seen the various posts I’ve done over the past few weeks on structured blogging and it has all been a bit beyond you, please keep reading, this won’t be.
A discussion had started on the structured blogging mailing list about creating a format for structured recipes. The idea here is that all those people who publish recipes on their blogs would hopefully move to using a common format which provides structure where appropriate but still allows for each person to do things their own way. This provides benefits to both recipe writers and those of us who read and use them.
There are two reasons for this. One is that you end up with a nice simple form to fill out when typing up your recipe which will help ensure that you don’t leave out anything critical. But more importantly it will enable a new breed of search tool or recipe web-site which can trawl all of the blogs out there and provide recipes to end-users which are a much closer match to what they want than typing “chicken recipes” on Google.
With any approach which applies structure where there was none previously, the critical success factor is finding the right balance between structured information and free-form information. Add too much structure and it inhibits you, add too little and it provides no gain.
So I am throwing this question out to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you have written your own cookbook or have only ever read how to cook spaghetti from the back of the packet. What information do you think would be useful to have structured in a recipe on a blog or web-site?
To aid the thinking process, I have done some screenshots from a very nice Recipe Management Tool called Gourmet Recipe Manager. Even if you have no interest in this post, I recommend you check the tool out. The screenshots are of the windows it displays to enable you to enter a new recipe. So have a good look at those and let me know which fields you think are important to be kept “separate” from the main recipe description.
One way of thinking about it would be to imagine what you would search for if you were on a recipe search site. Is it “main ingredient” or “overall time” or “ethnicity” or “main vs sweet” or “ballpark cost” or “skill required”. There are a ton of possibilities but the idea is to find the really critical ones and work from there.
So all you lurkers who read this blog (including the 300 who suddenly appeared from the BBC2 web-site last Thursday - and I’m still trying to figure out why), de-lurk and post your opinions. This is one of those cases where no-one is wrong and all opinions are equally valuable.
There are some techie aspects to this which I will only mention in passing. Skip this paragraph if you are not technically inclined: An XML format was developed in 2002 called RecipeML to allow different software packages to swap recipes. Unfortunately, it looks like it never took off but that should not detract from the technical quality of the idea. It may form a strong basis for the under-the-hood aspects of this discussion. Having said that, Troy Hakala (one of the original authors of the format) pooh-poohed the idea of trying to do anything with recipes scattered across millions of blogs back in 2003! He does this as a comment to a post on the OxDECAFBAD Blog. it is worth reading that original post and his reply to see how much things have changed in the blog world since November 2003. Back then, Troy effectively came up with the same idea as Edgeio (but thought it made no sense).
Anyway, techies and non-techies, foodies and non-foodies, have a look at these, have a think and post a comment.
[tags]Structured Blogging, StructuredBlogging.org, RecipeML, Recipes, Microformats, Gourmet Recipe Manager[/tags]
No Comments
HDClone Hard Drive Copier Review
Posted on March 19, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Reviews, Technology.
HDClone
Year: 2006
Version: V3.1 Basic
Author: Miray Software
Platform: Windows
Category: Utility
Publisher: Miray Software
Price: €19.90
My Acer 2026 laptop has very few features I don’t like. But one thing which has always annoyed me is the 4800 rpm Hard Drive. It really slowed down an otherwise speedy machine. Ages ago I bought a replacement 5400 rpm drive of the same capacity (80GB) from dabs.com. Not being a complete idiot, I also purchased two 2.5″ to 3.5″ disk cable adapters so I could plug both the old and new drives into a spare desktop and clone one to the other.
I have always used Maxtor MaxBlast to do this in the past but this time it had serious problems with the source disk and I never managed to do the cloning.
Recently I saw mention of HDClone on Lifehacker and they recommended it as a free solution to cloning hard drives. Last night I assembled a desktop from spare parts, put the two laptop hard drives in it, burned the HDClone Free Edition to CD and booted it up. All looked well and both disks were visible. But when I asked it to clone, it returned with a message saying that the free version only supports copying to a bigger disk, it would not handle same-sized disks and I would need to upgrade to HDClone Basic. Bum.
I went on to the site and realised it was only €19.90 for the Basic Version. Not much more than the bottle of wine I was drinking. I paid via paypal but was confused as to how I got my hands on the software. I mailed the support address and got a reply at midnight their time (Germany)! The mail with the code would automatically follow later. It was in my inbox this morning. Now that’s customer service.
I burned the bootable image to CD and started up the old desktop again. This time, I clicked a few “nexts” and off it went. About two hours later it was done. Worryingly it reported 17 read errors off the source disk but no write errors to the new disk. Maybe this is why MaxBlast had such problems before?
I decided to chance it and plugged the new harddrive into the laptop and all has been well for over an hour (I’m posting this on the laptop). I’ll basically try every piece of software installed on the laptop over the next few days to make sure those errrors had no effect. Obviously I still have the original if anything goes wrong.
In summary, an excellent piece of software which only loses one star because it does not provide a list of the locations of the read errors so I could follow them up. Highly recommended if you need to upgrade your hard drive and don’t have the time to re-install everything from scratch.
Tags: HDClone, Dabs, Acer 2026wlmi, MaxBlast, structuredblogging, LifeHacker
