If you are planning to go the Real Food Festival in Earls Court, London this week, and you are booking the tickets online, then save yourself some money by clicking here and enter the Code RFP258.
This will reduce the Door price from £18.00 to £12.50!
And if you do get there on either the Thursday or Friday, you will find us at Stand P76.
We are taking part in the Real Food Festival at Earls Court, London at the end of next week - or rather from Thursday April 24th through to Sunday. The first day is a Trade Only day and I have some complementary entrance tickets available; so if you are going to be in the Big Smoke, and would like to go, do let me know.
Full details can be found at www.realfoodfestival.co.uk
By the way Ummera will be on Stand P76, but I am afraid that we will be there only on the Thursday and Friday.
Come to Hosfords Garden Centre, on the Bandon Clonakilty Road, from 12 Noon to 5.30pm this Sunday, April 6th fora Slow Food For Kids Day.
Denis Cotter of the renowned Cafe Paradiso in Cork will be opening the day at 2.pm.
There will be a Farmer’s Market, talks on worms and vermicomposting, puppet shows, lessons on strawberry growing by Denise Bushby, music and of course John Hosford and his Garden Centre will be there for all to see.
Raffle for hampers will be raising funds for Slow Food Ireland’s Terra Madre in September - details at www.terramadreireland.com
Come along and enjoy!
After two years, William Murphy has sadly announced that he is leaving Ummera at the end of the month. He is moving into the higher echelons of accounting! As Office Administrator, William has helped us enormously to service the new markets which we have been developing since he arrived at Ummera. And we now urgently need a new William!
If you, or anyone you know, might be interested in joining us, please go to www.ummera.com/admin.html to see more details.
February 29th may not be a very propitious day to write a newsletter – it may only be read every four years! But March will be here tomorrow bringing with it St Patrick’s Day and Easter within a few days of each other!
If you are thinking of celebrating either or both of those dates with Ummera Smoked Salmon or any of our other products, then please let us know as soon as possible. Remember, that Easter Week will be only three effective working days; as St Patrick’s Day is on the Monday 17th., and Good Friday is at the end of the week, that just leaves Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for us to deliver to you.
So please go to www.ummera.com and put your order in NOW!
Last Friday, RTE’s Nationwide series showed a 6 minute film on Ummera and what and how we do it. If you missed it, or would like to see it again, you can view it online at:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2008
If you can’t view it, we can send you a CD of it with your next order!
While we are looking forward, here are a couple of dates for your diary where you can meet up with us:
March 15th/16th – St Patrick’s Festival Market, St. Patrick’s St., Cork City
April 6th: - Slow Food Day at Hosfords Garden Centre, Enniskeane, Co. Cork
April 24th – 27th – The Real Food Festival, Earls Court, London
http://www.realfoodfestival.co
June 27th – 29th: Taste of Cork, Cork City Gaol, Cork. Ummera will be there on the Saturday 28th on the Good Food Ireland Stand
September 4th to 7th: Terra Madre Ireland, Waterford. This is a major all-island gathering of Slow Food enthusiasts, sustainable food producers, preparers, providers and presenters. Details will be available on the website as they become available.
Nationwide was our coverage and Nationwide was the programme!
Click here to see who we are and what we do!
Thank you to Geraldine Harney and Seamus for spending the day here and to Good Food Ireland for suggesting us!
Technorati Tags: Nationwide, Good Food Ireland
I was reading the following editorial over breakfast this morning and felt that the editor had it just right! Bob Farrand, Publisher of the Fine Food Digest, the official journal of The Guild of Fine Food (www.finefoodworld.co.uk) wrote this editorial in the January edition:
When the entire family came for lunch over the holiday, we ordered five ribs of beef from the butcher in Wincanton High Street. The meat was from a local farm where most of the animals are sold to a supermarket, but the farmer holds a few back that are slaughtered locally before the meat is dry hung on the carcass for 28 days. It was the best bit of beef I’ve ever tasted.
The animals sold to the supermarket are transported several hundred miles for slaughter at the company’s approved abattoir and the meat is wet conditioned in barrier bags before the joints are disbursed to stores all around the country. My local branch proudly boasts it sells locally 21 day hung beef.
Now we’ve just had Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall getting emotional about battery chickens. About time too. TV Chefs generally refuse to slag off supermarket food, as do many food writers and journalists, something to do with big advertising budgets, I think. Hugh is a real food hero, as is Rick Stein, but you can’t help feeling Jamie’s’ message would sit more easily on the ear without the millions he’s pocketed from Sainsbury.
Reading the supplements this weekend, I discovered the usual collection of ‘taste tests.’ Most were results from anonymous testers exclusively tasting supermarket own label foods. Journalists get sent free food from large retail groups with big PR budgets, which means small producers rarely get a look in.
In the same supplements, recipes from Ramsey, Novelli, Locatelli et al encouraged us to get back into a kitchen we’ve hardly left since Christmas to prepare dishes of breast of chicken, salmon steak and rib of beef. Added ingredients included wine vinegar, horseradish, balsamic glaze and fromage frais.
Not one offered any guidance on selection. Would the dish taste better if the chicken had lived for 92 days scratching around in the open air rather than 41 days in a cage the size of an A4 page? Would an own label horseradish do the job as well as one made in small batches using wild roots and fresh cream?
We don’t know because they never tell us about regionality and provenance when listing ingredients for their recipes and rarely include local branded foods in their taste tests either.
If all these media luvvies are happy reaping the rich rewards of their privileged roles, they should accept the responsibilities that go with it. They should preach what they practise. If they use quality ingredients in their restaurants and at home, they should tell us so and they should stop providing succour to supermarkets. If on the other hand their weekend shopping trolley overflows with own label, they might as well admit the truth and make way for those with more integrity.
2008 should be the year when chefs and foodie writers finally come out of the closet and get proper food between their teeth. They might also expose some of the so-called ‘local’ stuff in supermarkets for what it really is.
Bob Farrand, Publisher
Technorati Tags: Guild of Fine Food, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Not a lot to do with smoking I admit, but given the amount of rain we have had over the last week or two, the frogs in our wetlands have been pretty active and www.biology.ie has a photograph of the result on their Frog Spawn Spring 2008 page.
As it’s our first first for the year, just thought you might be amused!
For humble smokers to get a mention in the newpapers is always good news! And to get a mention in the Financial Times, or FT for those in the know, is great news!
Interestingly enough they make the comment “Irish smoked salmon is something of a connoisseur alternative to the stuff that comes from Scotland or Scandinavia but stocks of wild salmon of the Irish coast are so depleted that environmentally minded smokeries are taking it off their lists until numbers recover.”
We have had a number of enquiries for wild salmon as the Chrsitmas orders for smoked salmon come in, but we have given them our position and converted most! There will always be those who won’t listen and don’t understand the pressures that the wild salmon have been under, and will continue to be so for a while yet.
I was walking along the banks of the River Argideen which runs below the smokehouse the other day; it was very heart warming to see so many wild salmon in the river, more than I have ever seen before; in recent years, to see one salmon was a red letter day. If this is replicated on many Irish rivers, and they are left alone, then they will spawn and in 3 to 4 years time it will be exciting to be beside an Irish river.
Of course, there are other real problems which must be addressed such as the quality of the spawning beds and the quality of the water which now is so adulterated with pollution from agriculture and sceptic tanks.
Technorati Tags: Financial Times, Argideen, FT, wild salmon
I gather that another farm has been effected by this swarm and it is heading towards Scotland.
Is this another result of over fishing creating a serious imbalance in the acqua ecosystem? I suspect it must be.
Many customers have called us to enquire if this will effect our supplies this Christmas; however our supplies of Organic Salmon come from Clare Island in Clew Bay, Co. Mayo on the west coast and they have not been affected.