Jan 10, 2010

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 FoodReemskiFoodiePhotos, 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 !

 

 

 

 

 

Posted via web from kerrieannesfridgemagnets's posterous

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