News, Stories and Comments from a Smoker

Niall Harbison of iFoods sent me this link over the weekend and I do, of course, encourage you to watch it!

http://www.ifoods.tv/blog/?p=277

They are also appearing on The Dragons Den tonight at 9.00pm on BBC2 pitching their business for investment to the mighty Dragons!

Back from 40 degrees in Spain on Monday afternoon to be welcomed by 36 hours continuous rain!

Busy catching up on all that happened after ten days out of contact with the world; it’s an experience doing without all the mod cons of today’s world, but is a great relief to know that emails, mobiles, blogs, and newspapers are not essential to life!

Good news came through the mail with results from the Great Taste Awards in the UK; and I was pipped to the post in blogging this news by Ivan McCutcheon on his blog Food Culture West Cork and he had a photo taken at the recent Taste of Cork Festival!

I have just returned from a delivery to Scally’s Supervalu in Clonakility where I grabbed a copy of the current edition of the West Cork People, from Jean Farrelly, Joint Editor, as she was making a delivery there.

Lo and behold we were on the front page!

Jean told me that my Press Release arrived with her at 2.30pm yesterday and the edition was scheduled for printing at 3.00pm!

I think this is the first time that Ummera has been responsible for “Stop the Press”!

The actual Press Release can be downloaded as a pdf file here.

I almost forgot what the Awards were for! Ummera Smoked Chicken and Ummera Organic Gravadlax. This  now means that all our products have received awards at the Great Taste Awards over the last three years!

And Spain was fantastic!!

Arnaud and myself have almost finished converting our ordering pages into French to run alongside the English version.

OsCommerce which powers our ordering pages has the facility to use several different languages, but naturally any amendments we have made since installing osCommerce have all had to be checked and translated into French - a tedious task especially having to do battle with the vagaries of php language! Still we have succeeded,

One last thing to do is to work out how to enable visitors to the site to be able to select their language. A rather basic need of course!

In the meantime, any keen linguists out there who would like to send in corrections and suggestions please go to:

French Version of Ummera Orders

English Version (default)

We still have the main pages of the website to translate …………..!

Great June weather! Reminds me of the Slow Food Sustainable day we had here at Inchybridge last July!

Our wireless broadband was out this morning, but back again now; I think the rain got into the  inter-connectors yesterday.

Anyway, The Taste of Cork starts this evening, and Ummera will be there at both sessions tomorrow on the Good Food Ireland stand, Stand No. 27, along with Mossfield Cheese, Silver Hill Ducks, Jack McCarthy, James Whelan, Gee’s Jams, Declan Ryan’s Arbutus breads, the Apple Farm, The Connemara Smokehouse and Kelly’s Resort Hotel.

We are taking part in this weekend’s Taste of Cork at the Cork City Gaol in conjunction with Good Food Ireland.

Ummera will be there on the Saturday and I look forward to seeing you.

Come and say hello and we might have a competition for the best review on any of our products on LouderVoice!

Details later this week!

Dashing out the door to do a couple of days In-Store tasting at Cork Airport in the Duty Free Shop - so if passing through on the way to the sun (or rain!) today or tomorrow, come and say hello!

We will also have some cards from LouderVoice which will show you how to send instant reviews by SMS of anything you want! See the left hand side bar of this page for some examples…..

In February RTE’s Nationwide included a piece on Ummera, and I have been thinking about embedding it onto our website, but with no joy.

However, this morning whilst scanning through my Google Reader feeds for interesting bits, Damian Mulley gave me the solution with a  link to Jazz Biscuit who has created some code to embed RTE’s Realplayer clips.

So now, thanks to the Irish blogosphere, I have the solution and the clip can be viewed directly from www.ummera.com

As part of The Butler’s Pantry Artisan Week in Dublin, I will be tasting some of our smoked products at:

Rathgar on Wednesday afternoon from 3.00pm to 7.00pm,

Greystones on Thursday morning from 11.00am to 2.00pm,

Mount Merrion Avenue, Blackrock, Thursday afternoon from 3.30pm to 7.00pm.

Come and say hello!

Full details of locations at http://www.thebutlerspantry.ie/Contact_Us.aspx

The Sunday World Magazine yesterday had some great coverage of Clodagh McKenna and the launch of her second series of Fresh from the Farmers Markets which is being screened on RTE 1 at 7.30pm on Wednesdays.

Delighted to see that Clodagh used our Smoked Chicken in one of her two Main Courses in her “Ummera Smoked Chicken Paella”; the original version, which doesn’t include mussels or prawns for those with shellfish allergies, can be found on our Smoked Chicken page .