In our final Food Month podcast, Lilly Higgins chats with her fellow Irish Times food writer Aoife McElwain. Listening to their conversation is like eavesdropping on two well-seasoned food bloggers sharing experiences and tips.
McElwain is also a creative events planner, a food stylist, half of the duo behind forkful.tv, and the founder and host of Sing Along Social, "a zero-commitment choir for people who can't sing".
They chat about that and about how McElwain came to write her book, Slow at Work: How to Work Less, Achieve More and Regain Your Balance in an Always-on World. "I never used to prioritise time for myself or friends or down time," McElwain says. "Now I think of recovery time as part of my job, a workaholic's way of insisting on taking a break and not feeling guilty, to realise I need a break to be good at my job."
McElwain started I Can Has Cook? – "Tackling the culinary and grammatical arts in simultaneous mouthfuls" – in 2009 , when "blogging was new and exciting"."I came to cooking late enough, in my early 20s, so I felt couldn't really cook," she says. "It was too hard." Her friends and family were fed up with her one dish, a chickpea ratatouille, and her boyfriend, who had a music blog, suggested she set up one about food.
As well as learning about food, she found it a great way to practise writing; she also learned about photographing food – "the dark art of food styling" – which then became one of her jobs when she started forkful.tv with Mark Duggan.
In the podcast McElwain and Higgins also talk about psychobiotics and fermented foods – “I find the effects almost instant” – the joy of asking questions and finding the answers, biscuits (especially Mikado), loving salt (“I have eight pots on the go”), her favourite products and cookbooks, and enjoyable nonalcoholic drinks.
