Sinéad Cochrane of Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology is doing a survey of bloggers and those who read blogs. It would help her a lot if you took part. It’s very short and you could win a prize! Start here
Browsing Posts published in January, 2009
I made a quick mention of the old TB hospitals in a blog post about BCG almost two years ago. As far as I know there were lots of them. Peamount, which we drove past many times, opened in 1912 and there was also Cappagh and others.
I just got a lovely email from someone who was in such a hospital in the 1950s wondering if I’d got any feedback. Unfortunately I hadn’t. So I thought I’d just pop this up with the aim to allow anyone to give their thoughts, reminiscences etc of these places. Good and bad. Feel free to pass on to anyone you know who had TB back then. Of course commenters can remain anonymous/pseudonymous.
We decided to head down and look at the poor dead whale in Courtmac this evening. Totally unprepared of course. Hundreds of cars down there, traffic mayhem, tons of people out on the sand taking pictures. Unfortunately we were a bit late with darkness falling and the tide was coming in fast. So only myself and Oisín ran out to grab some quick pictures. We might pop down at a better time tomorrow.
Update 1:
Great Pics from Anthony
Spooky Pics from Calvin
Main Info Site
I was given this lovely book for Christmas 2007 and finally finished it last month. What initially appears to be a coffee-table resident turned out to be one of the best books on food I’ve ever read.
The title says it all. This is a book about pork. Every single bit of the pig gets a mention and use. The author, Stéphane Reynaud is the grandson of a village butcher from the Ardeche plateau in France. He runs a restaurant near Paris that specialises in Pork. I want to eat there!
The recipes themselves are fantastic but so too are the notes, anecdotes and pictures and people. This is a book centered on the relationship between a community and its food. The way it is sectioned up is unusual but it works. The “chapters” are as follows:
- Pig-killing time at Saint-Agreve
- Black Pudding Recipes
- For the love of Sausages
- Sausage Recipes
- Hamming it up
- Ham Recipes
- Pates and Terrines
- Jacquy’s terrine
- Granny Pig
- Barbecued Pig
- A piggy Party
- Wild Boar
It’s been quite a while since I’ve read a cookery book which stirred up such desire to cook but this did it. Whilst I know recession-talk is starting to wear people down, this book will hopefully be part of a return to cooking cheap tasty food with a bit of soul.
Rated /5 on Jan 11 2009
Vote on Conor O'Neill‘s reviews at LouderVoice
It’s that time of year again to get your nominations in for the Irish Blog Awards. The ceremony is being held in the lovely Cork International Airport Hotel on February 21.
The number of wonderful Irish blogs increases daily and I can’t keep up with the flood of high quality writing out there. There are plenty of categories to nominate in, but you don’t have to do all of them. Why not head over to Irishblogs.ie and have a browse of the posts there? You may find some real gems you hadn’t known about before.
I think this year I’ll focus my nominations on the best of the newer blogs. For example, Ivan1 and Ivan2 will be getting several votes from me.
The Empire may have done its best to kill the pork industry in Ireland but the producers are fighting back. Barrie Tyner from Slow Food Ireland just let me know that the West Cork and Cork City Conviviums are coming together to bring us ‘The Pig Extravaganza’.
I was disappointed to find that this did not include dancing pigs but it’s the next best thing 
To celebrate National Pork Weekend, an evening of eating and great chat is planned down west on Sunday, the 18th of January.
Speakers include award winning butcher Martin Carey. Willie and Avril Allshire of Caherbeg Free Range Pork Farm and Rosscarbery Recipes, Frank Krawcykz, salami maker and artisan, Anthony Creswell of Ummera Smoked Bacon plus guest chefs.
Over the years I’ve driven past many signs for the Ballyjamesduff Pork Festival. I hope we could have something like that down here every year too. Imagaine a giant cook-out with BBQs and Smokers going all day? Yummmmm!
I’ll post an update it when the venue (probably in Bandon) is confirmed. If you love anything made from pork and you want to show your support for fantastic local producers, then I hope to see you there.
UPDATE: The details of the day have been finalised:
Time: 12.00 Noon, Sunday January 19th. Location: Heron Court, Market Quay, Bandon. A 3 course lunch will be served with talks and demonstrations from artisan food producers including award winning Bandon butcher, Martin Carey, Willie and Avril Allshire of Caherbeg, Frank Krawcykz of West Cork Salamis, and Anthony Creswell of Ummera Smoked Products. €30.00 for Slow Food Members, €35.00 for Non-Members. Booking essential as numbers limited. slowfoodwestcork AT gmail DOT com or 086 067 6249.
I just got a mail from the lovely people in The Good Things Cafe in Durrus to tell me that the awesome Carmel was on the Foodtalk programme on Newstalk Radio.
Foodtalk is hosted by one of the best food bloggers anywhere, Caroline Hennessy from Bibliocook.
If you want to listen online and subscribe so that you get each broadcast, then there are a bunch of different ways of doing it.
On your PC, one of the best tools is MediaMonkey. Install it, tell it about Foodtalk, leave it running in the background and it’ll automatically download the new episodes so you can listen at your desk.
If you have a newer car stereo or (like us) one of the replacement Lidl/Aldi ones, then you can copy those audio files onto a memory card or USB stick and play them in the car when you like.
Lots of the newer phones with Wifi also have podcasting capabilities. The Nokia N95, N95-8GB, N96 etc come with the software built in. Owners of the E51, E63, E71 etc can download it from here. You have to manually tell the application to check for new episodes but it takes care of the download etc once you do that. You can listen directly on the phone or plug it into the line-in on your stereo or car-stereo.
If you have an iPod, I’m sure it’s all very similar.
Note that most of the radio stations, in particular RTE, have a ton of podcasts you can get like this. I recently listened to all of a year-old series about De Valera I grabbed from the RTE site on my N95-8GB.
It looks like 2008 was not a good year for new content on this blog. Only two posts were in the top twenty most-read in the last 12 months. I promise to do better this year
The most read content was:
- Tikka Masala
- CBBC on Sky Digital
- Goat’s Cheese and Pregnancy
- Social Worker Jobs in Cork
- HDClone Review
- RTE Free-to-Air
- The Snip
- Cheap Calls
- Nigella Express Review
- English Irish Dictionary
- Tesco Online Shopping Review
- Buffalo Wings
- Real Gourmet Burger
- Heston Blumenthal Review
- Buddah Bar Paris Review
- Capote Review
- Rashers
- Gizmo
- Boqueria Tapas Review
- Losing Teeth
