October 2010 Archives

Blogging About Food

October 30, 2010 By Ken McGuire Leave a Comment

I had been thinking about it long enough, taking photos long enough, tweeting about it long enough and getting in the neck from friends long enough.

The “it” I’m referring to is food, my love of food, and now I’ve taken all of the above and finally started up a proper food blog.

I’ve got a year’s worth of photos on the iPhone and HTC that are primarily about food. I kept a tumblr blog going until mid summer which was made up just of photos of meals – breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, anything went. But a trip to Foodcamp over the bank holiday weekend gave me the kick in the arse / boost I needed to put everything in the one place and start writing about all things food. And so, if you didn’t get a nudge from me on Facebook about it, I present Any Given Food.

There’s about a week’s worth of posts on there at the moment but the notebook I’ve been keeping should see me through to the Spring, which is certainly enough in terms of content to get me started. That said, I’m not a conventional food blogger by any means. I can’t see myself painstakingly describing recipes (I’m very much “throw in a bit of this, some of that, bang it in the oven”) kind of home cook but the blog will carry posts on local markets, a wealth of foodie photos, dinners out, gluten-free bits and bobs and whatever else takes my foodie fancy.

I’m directing my food tweets via a new account, @anygivenfood and I’ll be posting extra content as I get it over on the Any Given Food Facebook page.

As of this morning I’ve also released a podcast feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/FoodcampPodcasts) for the Savour Kilkenny Foodcamp Podcasts so if you missed out on Foodcamp last week you can grab yourself some of the talks. There’s four available to download at present with more to come over today and tomorrow.

Thoughts and comments much appreciated and if you would like to subscribe to the new blog use this RSS feed.

Kilkenomics – Ireland’s first Economics Festival

October 22, 2010 By Ken McGuire 2 Comments

With THREE festivals taking place in Kilkenny this weekend between the Rockfall music festival, Savour Kilkenny Food Festival and the World Conker Championships / Festival, news comes by mail of another festival for Kilkenny, this time Ireland’s first economics festival. Of course, it’s not just all about business as some of the country’s leading economists and commentators will be joined by some of Ireland’s leading comedians.

Economists including David McWilliams, Bill Black, Martín Lousteau, Ha-Joon Chang, Vilhjálmur Bjarnason and Philippe Legrain are world class, all offering intelligent opinion on what just happened and what needs to happen next.

Commentators including John Lanchester, Peter Antonioni, Fintan O’Toole, Constantin Gurdgiev, and Olivia O’Leary all offer a unique take on our current circumstances and creative ideas for our future recovery.

Comedians, including Des Bishop, Colin Murphy, Karl Spain, Fred MacAulay, Neil Delamere and Barry Murphy all know how to find plenty of humour in dark times.

By the read of the release and Kilkenomics.com, they’re also introducing a new currency to Kilkenny for the weekend which can be used against shows, books and anything else on offer under the festival banner.

It all takes place in Kilkenny, November 11th – 14th with twenty four events on over the four days. You can buy an individual ticket for any of the shows or a season ticket for €80/€100 which gets you

5 x shows of your choice (subject to availability)
1 x signed book of your choice from the book list below*
1 x ticket to Festival Club
1 x 20 Marbles to spend in Kilkenny on the festival weekend

For all the info, check out Kilkenomics.com.

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: comedians, economics, forum, kilkenny, kilkenomics

Danesfort’s Field Of Dreams (Video)

October 19, 2010 By Ken McGuire Leave a Comment

Utilising some of Kilkenny’s finest acting talents along with the services of Young Irish Film Makers, Danesfort GAA have produced and released the above video to drum up some additional votes and support for the Kellogg’s Field of Dreams competition which closes this month. The local club have been going great guns in terms of getting votes by mail, text and forms from cereal packs, but now they’ve taken to YouTube to spread the message a bit further. If they get their way, Danesfort’s GAA pitch will be turned into one better than the Aviva, Wembley and Croker (or so they video hints anyway). Connaught are in the lead at the moment but there’s plenty more votes to be cast between here and October 28th.

If you’re a fan of Killinaskully, then you should enjoy it. Watch it above or here on YouTube.

How To Vote for Danesfort G.A.A.

Vote By Text
Text the word KELLOGGS followed by Leinster to 53799

One text vote is permitted per day. Each Text costs 20c or 25p. Service provider: Xiam

Vote Online
Log on to Kelloggs.ie and click on VOTE NOW. Once you register your vote you will receive an email confirmation to validate your address. You can then vote once every 24 hours.

Bonus Voting
Use the form on the side of Corn Flakes and Crunchy Nut packs to send in your votes and get 5 Bonus Votes for Danesfort. Everyone who votes using the packs will be entered in a draw to win a dream sporting holiday for your family worth 5,000 euro.

Filed Under: Online Video Tagged With: danesfort, field of dreams, kelloggs, the harvester, yifm, young irish film makers

FoodCamp Hits Kilkenny This Friday

October 18, 2010 By Ken McGuire Leave a Comment

photo credit: thegardenbuzz

A first for Kilkenny and quite possibly the country, FoodCamp (book your tickets) takes place this Friday at the Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel as part of the Savour Kilkenny Food Festival. It’s an all day affair, kicking off at 10am and running through to 4:30pm. The venue works a treat for these kind of events, I’ve used it myself in the running of PodCamp locally a few years ago. But more importantly, it’s a chance to bring foodies and food producers together under the one roof for over 20 different talks and an afternoon panel discussion.

Some of the topics up for discussion on Friday include

Health Tips for Foodies
The Place of Food Safety in Professional Small Food Businesses
Getting a Product to Market
Social Media, the Web and building your Food Business
Trends in packaging/ingredients/processing technologies in the seafood industry.

The panel discussion, taking place after lunch is entitled Digging Ireland out of the recession – Artisan produce, Food Innovation and Guerrilla Marketing and features John McKenna (chair), Dr Susan Steel (BIM), Helen Finnegan (Knockdrinna Cheese), Una Fitzgibbon (Bord Bia), Margaret Jeffares (Good Food Ireland), Paul McCarthy (Teagasc) and Rozanne Stevens (Chef).

I’ve the ticket booked but the lunch box yet to be packed. There is a lunch option available at the hotel which if you pick up a €15 ticket or go the recession-busting FREE day route IF you bring along a lunch enough for yourself with some more to share. I’ve a cracking red rice recipe I’m mad to try out so may well load up on that for lunch on Friday afternoon.

For the past three years I’ve been involved heavily with the Rockfall Festival which runs the same weekend (October Bank Holiday annually), a role which I’ve stepped out of this year so I’m looking forward to getting tucked into some of the foodie treats on offer for the weekend.

Get the run down of the day here, the full list of speakers here and book your tickets here before its too late!

Filed Under: Bar Camp, Events Tagged With: barcamp, festival, foodcamp, foodie, local produce, ormonde hotel, savour kilkenny

Talking Plugins With KLCK Bloggers Network

October 12, 2010 By Ken McGuire 3 Comments

I don’t usually go out of my way to speak at events or gatherings, social, business or otherwise. But when Keith Bohanna asked if I could fill in for him at last night’s KLCK Bloggers Network gathering in Kilkenny I figured I couldn’t say no, the event being on my doorstep and all.

I would equate the gathering last night to something akin to Open Coffee only minus the coffee and a bit more formal. The KLCK Bloggers Network was formed by Amanda Webb (of Spiderworking.com, in the running for best videocaster at this year’s Irish Web Awards) and Lorna Sixsmith of Garendenny Lane who I had met previously at Kilkenny Open Coffee (also turns out we’re both writing for a Carlow magazine). The event itself was held in the Kilkenny Pembroke Hotel who were providing one of their conference rooms complete with projector, screen, notepads, pens, all you would need to run an event like it.

While I was the second speaker on the night (which worked out a treat in terms of the content), Marie Ennis-O’Connor was first up to bat leading a great talk on driving additional traffic to your blog, from starting out as a blogger to building a community around your blog through email, comments, guest blogging and more. The audience (about 18/19 of us there) was a mix of beginner and experienced bloggers with some people simply coming in to get an understanding of what blogging is and does for people.

My own talk was quickly cobbled together yesterday on the back of what I call my WordPress toolbox – the plugins I deem essential to any WordPress installation and ones that I keep handy in a zip file whenever I’m starting a new blog either for myself or a client but I felt it went well for something that was a technical overview of additions you can make to your WordPress blog for the both the admin side of things and your theme out front. You can get the list of plugins and links here on Slideshare. The slides also feature a glimpse of the new branding I’m rolling out across the business later in the month.

Last night was the fourth monthly gathering of the network which heads to Kildare for November and should be back in Kilkenny come February or March. The name – KLCK – is an aconym for Kildare Laois Carlow and Kilkenny and they’re actively looking for topics for discussion that would benefit all in attendance, along with speakers. If the rest of the gatherings are along the lines of last night then they’ll be well worth heading along to. Having it hosted in the Pembroke created an opportunity for people to stay on for drinks and further the conversation in the bar but there’s signs there of a good group and network in the making, with everyone being able to contribute on some level from the own experiences. One thing I did note though is that for the 18 people in the room, there were only four men around the table, one of them being me as a speaker for the evening. Makes a change from the male-dominated Open Coffee mornings in Kilkenny.

That said, it’s also opened me up to the notion that I need to get to more events. Outside of Kilkenny, I think Media2020 and the Blog Awards in Galway were the only events I’ve been to for the year. Time to get back on the road, maybe as far as Kildare for the second Monday in November…