Sally's blog

We all have our own Christmas traditions and the taste for tradition begins very young. No-one is more nostalgic about how you carry out Christmas than children. In our home it begins with decorating the tree, playing Phil Spector's Christmas album, and - always - drinking orange miel, warmed freshly squeezed orange juice, sweetened with honey. We asked our twitter comrades to tweet their own twaditions. Here are their heart warming stories:

Music, Mass and Christmas Preparation

We asked some of our Twitter friends to send us a photos of "anything you can eat".  The results make hungry reading (or viewing). Julie from @Juliecheekpoint sent a pic of St Emilion Au Chocolate. Julie's tweets make you so hungry, and she sometimes mentions St Emilion Au Chocolate around bedtime... cruel...  The Foccacia photo comes from @cakeinthcountry, who also sent a lovely pic of mini apple pies. @DarrenBradley sent a very arty shot of Thai steamed mussels from Sheephaven Bay. Gathered, cooked and photographed beautifully, Darren is quite a talent.

The reality of René Redzepi’s wildly-praised second cookbook, Noma: Time & Place in Nordic Cuisine is that it’s as much about seeing, as it is about cooking. The photography, by Ditte Isager, makes this clear. In amidst the shots of food on plates – or on stones – there are photo of the foragers and growers Redzepi uses in his Copenhagen restaurant, and shots of ingredients they collect and grow. The book, beautifully and very artfully achieved, is a parallel to Redzepi’s own journey to find and create a Nordic cuisine.

Jamie Oliver’s cookery book, “30 Minute Meals” is the highest-selling non-fiction book ever in the U.K. Last week, it sold over 97.000 copies, and it is a runaway train: in mid-November it was shifting 15,000 copies a week, an incredible figure, but modest in comparison to the 100,000 it will likely sell this week.

This is a good thing.

With 85billion at 5.8 per cent the legacy of the Government of Ireland to my children, we need to understand just how we got into this mess. The answer is simple:  we have failed to build an economy.

What should an Irish economy look like? it should have world class standards in four areas: agriculture, fisheries, tech and tourism. Ireland does not have world class standards in any of these areas. Our agriculture is a junkie agriculture which survives only on account of subsidies. Without subsidies, we could not even feed ourselves.

This is Diana Henry's best book since her ground-breaking debut, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons. Those who know and cherish that first book will know just what weight that statement carries, because CW, PL is one of the best books of the last decade.

@Kajuiter gives you a bird’s eye view into the kitchen of a multi-starred chef. He complains about his kitchen designer, worries about service, gives off about Ireland, and lyricises about his garden. Fascinating stuff.
tweet of the week - “Still pushing on, what a night, guys pulled it off nicely, it’s going to be a long clean down i guess after this epic service :-)”

Simon Pratt is the Kandinsky of cookery. Better than anyone else, as his new book, A Year At Avoca reveals, he understands colour.

What is a health food? I think we all think we know the answer, and suspect our answers to the question would be broadly similar: health food is food that is good for our bodies, and doesn’t have any harmful effects.

Prannie Rhatigan's "Irish Seaweed Kitchen" is more than just a selection of recipes, it's a book of health, written by someone who seeks to cure. Likewise, her workshop on cooking with seaweed was given by a cook who constantly describes herself as a Medic. This was more than just a demo of recipes with a magical ingredient, it was a close look at how people can use food to keep themselves healthy and active.