Social Media Let Loose in the Kitchen

My nephew is an apprentice chef who has worked at Sydney places like Establishment, Salon Blanc, Sydney Opera House etc, so I love to watch the fluidity of his work with food.

I was intrigued with his growing interest in food a few years earlier, when he cooked Sticky Date Pudding from Bourkes Backyard Online - the recipe found after a quick Googling. It was probably the first time that I had seen anyone cook direct from their PC, instead of from traditional Cookbooks, Magazines or PC print outs.

Equally intriguing for me is the growing global list of social media Tweeps & Bloggers who are now also tweeting & blogging about food.

I love blogs like Tony Hollingsworth, TummyRumbles & Inside Cuisine, And the lists feature on Twitter has been fantastic -  Sydney loves Food, Reemski, FoodiePhotos, Frombecca & in mine, I follow Foodie Tweeps from around the Globe. It is so amazing to see these serious social media mavens also sharing their foodie experiences & insights. 

Foodies were firmly part of the Web 1.0 scene even in the late 1990's. I remember asking on a Web 1.0 food forum for a Turkish pizza recipe, like what was served at an old Turkish restaurant in Hornsby, but long since burnt down. There were lots of offerings of Turkish Lahmacun  minced lamb pides, however I never found quite what I was looking for. But I did get a lot of requests that if I found it - then please share it around. In fact I found that there are quite a few other Turkish Pizza types : Kasarli, Kiymali, Sucuklu, Yumurta, Karisik, Kusbasili, Kapili, Peynirli, Samsun, Ispanakli, Pastirmali. 

And I hadn't even found this special Turkish Pide walking around Sultanahmet in Istanbul on the festive Ramadan evenings of October 2006. Athough we did find an amazing variety of Turkish Delight at the Egyptian Spice Bazaar in Istanbul! 

And we do get great Gozleme from the Turkish Community at all the local food fairs down here in Wollongong's Northern Suburbs.

So in the meantime I did manage to create my own Chicken Pide, a fusion of Thai & Turkish, which even featured in Good Taste, an Oz cooking mag and is now on the http://www.taste.com.au foodie website. And it was here at Taste that I really first encountered social bookmarking, eg Delicious, Digg etc. I was a little intrigued & confused for a while as to whether Delicious was about food or social bookmarks. I asked advice from the IT geeks at work about this new world of social bookmarking. They shook their head and warned me off using such dangerous tools! Ultimately I did venture into Web 2.0 & Social Bookmarking for work applications, and of course to the  Foodie 2.0 sites.

Finally after lots of "googling", I even found a blog which mentioned a "Mixed" Turkish Pide, found in King Street Newtown by Rachel, the foodie Dentist from Bathurst. In her rusticfillings blogspot :she describes its slices of turkish sausage, diced lamb, marinated minced beef, fresh spinach, fetta cheese, mushrooms and a freshly cracked egg on the top. It seemed close to what I recalled at Hornsby.

So maybe I'll just have to innovate using Rachel's rusticfillings blogspot description & the copy of Turkish Cuisine by Tugrul Savkay I brought back from Istanbul !

 

 

 

 

 

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Wandering Egyptian Spice Bazaar in Istanbul

We found amazing Turkish Delight and Spices at the Egyptian Spice Bazaar in Istanbul.

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New Year Resolutions - Seeing Further in 2010 ... with a little help from others

Lots of ideas are churning around as I read New Year tweets & blog posts from around the globe. Favourites include Kate Carruthers, who has pronounced her 2010 year as one of reinvention & reinvigoration.

Another personal favourite is from Valdis Krebs "The next decade has got to be better, are we all going to be there for each other ?"

2009 was a year of change for me, with dramatic and unplanned changes in my career direction.

I also found that 2009 was the Year of Twitter, exactly as Kate Carruthers posted, (along with blogging on other areas of her 2009 year of personal growth). Harold Jarche also called 2009 the Year of the Tweet.

Ironically some folks have now predicted the death of social media (eg Twitter) - whilst others provocatively suggested that Twitter will only be populated by social media experts (all 16,000+ of them) in future years. And the Librarians have been pondering the future of the Library in a Kindle era, where it has been reported that the sale of E-book readers like Kindle outsold print books in this holiday season.

Adaptability seems an appropriate strategy, especially as 2009 was defined as the Charles Darwin anniversary year . Valdis Krebs had tweeted Darwin in 2009 "It's not the strongest of the species that survive, but those most able to adapt." Seeing the Darwin exhibition, at the National Museum of Australia, in January 2009 was truly amazing, in being able to see original documents and exhibits.

I guess that is why I still like to read the print edition of New Scientist along with its tweets & web articles. I like to be amazed unexpectedly. And sometimes my Teen even takes a peek at the latest print edition and be amazed over breakfast. This morning, in the latest print edition (Vol 204 No. 2739/40/410), I read of Bill Bryson's new book "Seeing Further: The story of science in the Royal Society". And amazing is a comment that Bryson makes about his observation of the passion of scientists, "In fact everything that happens anywwhere is amazing if you stop and consider it."

A favourite quote of mine is "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants. " I had always thought that it was originally uttered nearly 350 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton, in his 1676 letter to Robert Hooke. I had loved the 1970's Harvard Project Physics course in my senior high school years where I learned of Newton and many other Physicists, as the course seemed to make Physics come alive for me.

So today I was surprised to learn that Newton had in fact been quoting from Bernard of Chartres 500 years earlier in 1159.

Apparently "Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up."

Today, on this first day of 2010, "Seeing further" just seemed to keep popping out at me. Not only in New Scientist, but even in the latest issue of Oz lifestyle mag (Better Homes & Gardens), where its Editor, Juliet Zaetta, quoted Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the centre."

I know that Twitter and many of those 16,000+ self-styled social media experts had already helped me see a lot more in 2009 than I could have ever imagined before attending ACTKM08.

So where to for 2010 ?

Harold Jarche has proclaimed 2010 as the Year of the Community Manager.

And in her forecast for 2010, Venessa Miemis quoted from the Wall Street Journal "Jobs of the future will require skills in trendtracking, strategy and design.by their giant size." This all seems to me to resonate with Harold Jarche's "Personal Knowledge Management" focus.

Inevitably Twitter, along with other social media platforms such as blog posts and RSS feeds, is going to be a key part of my personal trendtracking, as I embrace my new career direction in 2010.

And I would like to thank, in advance, all of those who will help me to See Further in 2010.

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