The biggest date for most people in the Irish blogosphere in the coming weeks won’t be Mother’s Day. It will, of course, be the Irish Blog Awards held on March 1st in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

Before that, under the umbrella of IWTC, will be the inaugural Ireland Geek Girl Dinner, organised by Martha Rotter and sponsored by Microsoft. This event isn’t totally exclusive, as men can attend, but only when invited by one of the geek girls. Since Paul Walsh had been begging for an invite for a while now, I finally took pity on him and invited him!

The end of the week sees the 2008 Irish Blog Awards ceremony taking place at the Alexander Hotel. Once again, Damien Mulley has put in a phenomenal amount of work in organising this event. Unlike some of the other technology awards ceremonies on this island, it’s a more informal event, costing only €10 entry, which is donated to charity. The shortlists have now been announced and the hard-working judges have slogged their way through reviewing all these blogs in order to find the winners in each category.

On the same day as the ceremony, several different meetups have been arranged, as people take the opportunity to catch up with those travelling in from round the country. Firstly, we have Red Mum’s Photo Meet, where they are welcoming people of all skill levels for a simple non-themed photo walk - should see some great shots out of this!

Just after this is the Ladies Tea Party, organised by designer extraordinaire Sabrina Dent. If you’re not into tea, then don’t worry - Microsoft Ireland have kindly offered to sponsor some nibbles on the day and I think a lot of us will be swigging back Martinis!

Sabrina was also responsible for the wonderful logos in use for the Photo Meet, Gourmet Brunch and Tea Party:

On the day after the Blog Awards, Deborah is organising a Gourmet Brunch for those left around Dublin.

A few others will be heading directly back to Cork for WebCamp/BlogTalk 2008, including a bloggers dinner that is currently being organised by Alexia Golez / Tom Raftery. However, I reckon that I’ll be taking a rest on the Day after the Blog Awards!

The following weekend sees the latest incarnation of the BarCamp phenomenon in Ireland. CreativeCamp in Kilkenny Castle on Sat 8th March. I’ll be attending, along with my Husband, George. He, along with several of his colleagues, will be representing Blacknight, who have been sponsors of all the Irish BarCamp style events so far. Their MD, Michele Neylon, was even kind enough to purchase the domain barcamp.ie when I bugged him about it, so that all future Irish camps can have their own sub-domain there.

I’m also delighted to see that the CreativeCamp organisers have ditched the traditional wiki format completely. It never worked on the previous camps, and I’ve bitched about it at length before. They have a lovely sign-up system, where people can input the details of the talks / panels that they want to organise and it transfers to the speakers page here The exact same applies to the registration and attendees pages.

I’ve signed up to be on one of the panels, entitled: Women & Technology - grabbing the blogosphere by the balls - a panel discussion facilitated by Krishna De on women & technology (as titled above).The panel includes Elly Parker, Sabrina Dent, Martha Rotter & Alexia Golez. I guess I should really start prepping for this to make sure I have something coherent to talk about!

Ever since our Media Centre PC (the one that records all our TV for us) broke recently, we’ve been reduced to scrolling through the NTL guide to find something to watch in the evenings.

We’ve ended up watching quite a bit a bit of Gordon Ramsey and last night we finally caught an episode of the f-word. It’s an hour long and action packed - and swear-word packed seeing that Gordon’s about!

The premise is that they bring in a team of 4 amateur chefs (last night was the firemen) and Gordon gets them to cook a 3-course set meal for 50 people in the restaurant (including celebrities). The people eat the food and then decide if they would pay for it or not. Reasons for not paying can run from ‘took too long’ to ‘badly cooked’, etc.

I felt really sorry for the firemen last night, and I think Gordon did as well - the punters were awful and complaining about foie gras ‘being too fatty’. As Gordon pointed out - it’s the fattened liver of a goose, so how on earth could it be less fatty? But you can never please some people…

They also flick out to other stories, they has Janet Street-Porter going to France to pick out a horse to be slaughtered and then serving the cooked horse meet to punters at a racecourse. What we didn’t hear on the screen was that in the wake of her stunt, representatives of animal rights group PETA protested by dumping a tonne of horse manure outside Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s in central London. In another segment, Gordon taught a busy family how to prepare 5 tasty, healthy meals in under 15 mins each.

They flashed up the program’s website at the end and I took the time to have a look and discovered that they have all the recipes listed from each program, going back for 3 series!! Gordon’s food usually looks to be crammed with flavour and natural ingredients, even if like all celebrity chefs I think he uses a LOT of butter - but maybe that’s why their food has so much flavour!

Check out the recipe collection, there’s something to suit everyone’s tastes - and many of them have video instructions as well.

My favourite recipes from last night were:

1. Butter-roasted rib eye of beef
2. Bacon, pea and goats cheese omelette with a tomato salad
3. Pan fried salmon pea and mint puree and crème fraiche
4. Fillet steak sandwich with a green salad
5. Chicken and mixed vegetable stir-fry with noodles

Salamanca Tapas Restaurant,
St Andrew Street,
Dublin,
Ireland

High quality tapas in a convenient central location

My favourite restaurant in Dublin for several years now has been Salamanca. Being a tapas restaurant, it’s all about sharing and tasting. I normally recommend 2.5 dishes per person if you’re up for a good feed. Again with the whole tasting thing, it’s better with a big group, and you would soon find that 20-25 dishes between 10 people would disappear fast.

Specific dishes that should not be missed are:

• Lamb cutlets - don’t bother with a knife and fork, let your caveman instinct come out and eat with your hands!
• Asparagus with serrano ham - tender asparagus, brimming with flavour
• Deep-fried goats cheese with salsa - I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like this dish!
• Pollo al ajillo - chicken in a creamy garlicky sauce - yummy!

Save some room for dessert if you can - the profiteroles and the creme brulee come highly recommended!

Rated 5/5 on Jul 16 2007 by Elly Parker

LouderVoice Review Tags: restaurant, tapas

Vote on this review or write your own at LouderVoice

I know, sad I am! But I have a reason at least, while it’s decorated and functioning, it was only so that we could take some photos of it!

I decided this year that the christmas cards that we send should be Moo Cards, which I will make into fridge magnets before I send them. The little cards are so cute, but I figured that I should give people a way to display them, as they are a little too small to sit alongside the regular cards.

I struggled in getting small envelopes to put them in for sending, I resorted in the end to buying some small cheap prefabricated xmas cards, and will use the envelopes from them. The image below shows some of the cards I’ve ordered, some images from ourselves, others from Flickr - hopefully by next year we will have enough images of our own to use!

I was also reading this week (on someone’s blog, but I’ve forgotten who - sorry!) about a list compiled by BBC website users back in 2004 of “50 things to eat before you die“. I did better that I thought I would on having tried things on the list, but I still have a few to go - marked in orange below. It seems a trip to Australia is required for some of them, but there are a few more that I can mark off by keeping an eye out in my local supermarket - and I’ve been meaning to order scallops at some point!

I’ll be back in Arizona in February, I should use that as an excuse to try a proper diner breakfast - I’m sure that my fellow gastronome Todd will be able to suggest somewhere good. The last time I was there he asked me what kind of food I wanted one night - “I’m in America”, I replied, “Take me out for meat and lots of it!”. So he took me to Fogo e Brasa, one of Phoenix’s best kept secrets… an all you can eat meat fest! They carve the meat table-side and it’s all cooked on skewers with tons of fat and tons of flavour - he had to roll me out of there that night!

As for caviar, well I’m just going to have to try and persuade George to buy me some… wonder what my chances are? Possibly better now that a lot of supermarkets have started stocking Russian and Polish food!

I had to look a couple of the dishes up, Durian fruit and Jerk Chicken were new to me, but I’ll try and find an opportunity to try them at some point!

I’d also add a few favourites to the list above, snails (tried) and frog’s legs (not yet tried) are definites, along with foie gras - there’s nothing quite like it in this world! Another couple of Scottish items that I might add are deep fried pizza (used to be a big weakness of mine) and Roll and Sausage - bought from a roadside van early in the morning - a slice of square sausage cooked until crunchy on the outside, served on a buttered crusty roll with tomato ketchup… mmmm, no better way to start the day!

Chocolate, Chocolate everywhere, way too much to eat!

Trying in vain to decide on what type of wedding cake I want…. too much choice out there! All I know is that I don’t want a traditional fruit cake, it’s really not my cup of tea!

Take a look at these and let me know what you think - which one makes you drool the most?

Set 1

Set 2

That was a good weekend, even if it did pass too quickly!

We got all the household stuff out of the way in the morning as George had his assessment at the gym on Sat afternoon - his workouts are going really well, as are mine and we’re both building up more endurance and stamina - I just hope that we start to see some more obvious results soon.

We’ve also started tracking our daily calorie intakes on spreadsheets designed by Jeremy Zawodny, which uses some cool 5-day averages and monitors our weight, so it should be useful to help us keep tracking our progress! We’re pulling the calorie info from CalorieKing and so far it’s encouraging, we’re both tracking under 2000 calories per day, and are buring about 300 or more of those off with each trip to the gym (every other day at this point). I’m fairly sure that we’re just creating muscle at this point, so hopefully our weights (and circumferences) will start falling now in month 2!!

On Sunday we headed down to Laois for our first full dinner with Avril & Robert since they moved into their new house - it’s really shaping up and it’s gorgeous! We sat down to a great roast pork, with oodles of lovely crackling - I was practically fighting with the kids over it.

Dinner finished with “Eton Mess” - I’ve never had it before but it was a gorgeous, easy to make dessert - some recipes below:

Eton Mess - strawberry, no yoghurt
Eton Mess - raspberry, no cream
Eton Mess - like Avril’s, except she uses Dark Rum instead