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by Food24 Ed

#newfunkycoolcleverrestaurants

August 23, 2012 in Food24Ed posts, Uncategorised, Uncategorized

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Wow. Is the word.  When I see something foodie that I like I tweet it from @food24 and load it to our facebook page. (Facebook should think about a “Wow” button).  But, when I think something is Pinterest cool, and I just want to Instagram it straight away, that’s when I load it to my personal facebook page as well. My FRIENDS MUST KNOW! All of them. Immediately.

They don’t all (as they should) fan the Food24 Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, have never heard of Pinterest and one of them (really) thought Instagram was a drug delivery app. Neanderthals.

Some things though just need to be shared with your loved ones straight away. And have you guys seen the most fabulous foodie ideas popping up all around us? My oath.

My facebook page has been seeing a lot of action recently.

Monk’s – this Chinese delivery concept – check it out. You phone and order, and they deliver your food (apparently in those funky cartons you see in the movies… I’m sold)… FOR FREE. And have a gander at the menu – its cheap, especially considering the free delivery. And I’m told the food is quality. It’s only available to City Bowlers in Cape Town at the moment. *punches the air* Um, did I mention the free delivery yet?

There’s this new “Secret Pizza Restaurant” in De Waterkant (also Cape Town) – You only have to check out the hottie shoving pizzas into a wood fire oven and the sheer coolness of the place to want race over there and be the first to try it on. Cape Town hipsters must be Losing Their Shit over Ferdinando’s.

Joburg – you beat us to it! Buying sushi online… what a clever concept! Judging from the reviews the sushi is not only delivered to your home/office (on cute little pink Vespas) or wherever you might be brainstorming -  but apparently it’s great quality sushi too!

That hot chick (looks a lot like Nigella on her website – is that really her?) who sells burritos at the St Georges Earth Fair Food Market has become so blady popular that she’s opened a restaurant on Bree Street called Orinoco.

So, please let us know by commenting below, or emailing editor@food24.com if you have heard of something quirky, cool or just downright radical opening up. Sharing is caring.

Like my status!

Cath x

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by Food24 Ed

Green beers and light bulbs

August 16, 2012 in Food24Ed posts, Uncategorised, Uncategorized

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So last Friday I had a bit of a light bulb moment. What that has to do with Food24 will become clear later.

I was having a pub lunch at Barristers in the Southern Suburbs after being enticed with an invitation to come and enjoy green pints. Paddy’s Day is in March (no, that was not my light bulb moment), but something interesting must be going on. Also you NEVER have ask me twice to a pub lunch on a Friday afternoon. For work.

So, Kudu, Paddy (my car) and myself headed South to Newlands.

We walked in expecting to see a green pint or 2 waiting on the bar, instead the owner, Lance introduced me to 2 very interesting chaps from Philips. They got my attention when they told me that hey have apparently chopped a whopping 30% off his electricity bill – (it is significantly lower now than it was in 2008).

So restaurant owners especially listen up.

This is what Lance had to say about these good looking light bulbs:

“Late last year we decided to replace all our lights with the latest LED technology in an effort to reduce our power consumption. We are a big burner of lights.

I met up with Ross Blakeway (he uses Barristers as his “office”), a lighting specialist and he recommended Philips. We started to replace our normal lights with Philips LEDs in and eventually in March we received 4 special dimmable bulbs for our tiffany shades above the bar… very expensive, but guaranteed for 25 000 hours and aesthetically pleasing.

Little did I know at the time, but Philips had just won $10m from the US Government for the most advance LED for this specific bulb (it was reported in Time Magazine in May) and while I knew we were the first restaurant in Cape Town to install these, I never realized that in fact we are very probably one of the first restaurants in the world to do so, as the bulb was only launch commercially in April 2012 in the USA and was only installed into the Empire State Building in the last week in June.

The results though are quite spectacular… for example the 4 x 100 watt incandescent lamps = 400watt which we had above the bar counter, are now 4 x 12 w = 48 watt and at a quick count we have replaced 106 incandescent bulbs burning 6 520 watts with LED’s burning around 880 or 13.5% of our previous lighting power consumption.

This saving together with other management measures, including  moving to more LPG appliances in our kitchen, which we have been upgrading since November last year,  has led to a 30% reduction in our rand cost of electricity since acquiring Barristers in 2008, despite the hikes in the tariffs.

The reality is that lighting is (perhaps was?) the biggest portion of our electricity usage as we have no option but to have lights on for 18 hours a day!

Check out “the L-Prize” on Wikipedia/Google for more background info… if every restaurant converted to LEDs the savings would be huge.”

So there you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. Speaking of horses, Lance has his SAB beers delivered by horse and carriage from the SAB brewery nearby on the first Friday of every month. And speaking of Fridays – he now has his own cannon – which he fires off at noon every Friday to herald the weekend. Now that is my kind of Publican.

So that is the story of the green beer, horse drawn deliveries and energy efficient light bulbs. If you want to find out more about these cool light bulbs please email me on cath@food24.com.

PS  –  if the new lightbulbs are not enough to entice you to Barristers they have an awesome pub lunch menu with meals for R35 – and loads of great (green) beers on tap.

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by Food24 Ed

Healthy eating hub

August 7, 2012 in Food24Ed posts, Uncategorised

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I don’t know about you guys but those Olympic swimmer’s bods and those gorgeous athlete’s smiles (and their unbelievable physiques) have certainly had me looking twice at  my lifestyle and pausing to reflect… that I may in fact not be at my peak.

Now exercise is a wonderful thing. We all know that feeling you get  AFTER  you have gone for a run, or a workout or my latest craze, Bikram Yoga… BUT it’s getting to that AFTER that requires discipline. Just tie those tekkies’ laces guys and girls… it is the first step.

The other, and I think more relevant side to living healthy, that also requires a bit of discipline, is what you eat.  So, we have decided to create a healthy eating hub here on Food24. So, our very gorgeous, and very healthy (and very qualified nutritionist) Editor, Caro de Waal, is specially selecting Food24′s top recipes for a healthy diet. And they are SUCH lekker recipes.

So please bloggers – we’d like your input here. Any awesome healthy recipes you post will be pumped right into it and we are going to be giving it a lotta love in the months to come. (Did somebody say Bikini, Beach, Body …aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!).

Enough said. Let’s embrace the healthy in us as a tribute to our unbelievably AMAZING Team SA athletes. #welovegoldmedals

 

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by Food24 Ed

It’s the weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekend baby!

February 24, 2012 in Uncategorised

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Hello everyone – it’s four o’clock on a Friday… let’s hit the beach.

For those of you brraing this fine weekend check out our Weekend Braai Guide…

It’s INSANE…

So what are yo uwaiting for… get busy braaing!

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by Food24 Ed

Rekordelig Cider

December 1, 2011 in Uncategorised

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Three Swedish apple ciders arrived on my desk today. Luckily, Cath Shone can do amazing things with a spoon, so all three were ready for tasting in seconds. (What can I say? It’s December.)

Rekordelig Cider

Hello, I am from Sweden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We tasted three variants: Strawberry and Lime, Wild Berries and Pear Perry. Oh wait! The pear perry is not a pear-flavoured apple cider, it’s made from pears! Well, it was Cath’s favourite of the three, while I preferred the Wild Berries as they made me feel like I was in an Electric Kool Aid Test.

All in all? I’d rather have been drinking Everson’s, but that said… who knows what I’d like to spice up a boozy summer evening?

Reviewed by: Sam WIlson

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by Food24 Ed

BIG NEWS: Blog migration from Letterdash to WordPress!

November 14, 2011 in Uncategorised

23 Comments »

Hello beloved Food bloggers

You know how I have been promising for a while (like 18 MONTHS) to get you off the Lettercrash platform?

Well, the time has come, the Walrus said.

 

The plan is to move all active 24.com blogs across to WordPress. We’ve done testing, some more testing, some plug-in arguing, and I’ve had to sit in many a meeting with techies talking gibberish…  but we’re finally ready to begin the roll out. And we are starting this migration with YOU, our beloved Food bloggers. The rest of Letterdash will follow later.

This is what you need to know…


  • First, don’t panic. We have a plan, and I am told it’s solid. :)
  • Your current blog/24.ID needs to have a secondary email address (NOT a 24.com one), so we can keep you in the loop. So make sure that you’ve got one by clicking here and supplying a valid secondary address. Right now. (Seriously, you can come back to this post… that’s more important.)  We know most of you do have one – so this is a call out to those who have NOT yet updated their accounts.
  • We’ll be migrated as a community, i.e.: we’ll all still stay Food24 blogs!        
  • You’ll be able to sell adverts on your blog! (24.com is only going to take one ad position, as opposed to all of ‘em, like before. So you’ll be able to have both Google  and your own ads!)
  • You’ll be able to move your own Food WordPress blog back into Food24 blogs (You know how many of you moved over to WordPress and set up a “landing blog” on Food24 to drive traffic to it? You can cut out that step, by migrating your own blog across to the new Food24 WordPress community. And take out a lot of the schlep. And turn on the floodgates of SEO juice.)

The amazing new features:

  •  No more albums! You can just load up pics directly. (Can I hear a group “HUZZAH!”?)
  • Private messaging, because you don’t always want to tell everyone everything.
  • Upload videos (within limits of course)
  • All sorts of cool plugins including an easy recipe upload plugin and an awesome gallery plugin for your photos
  • Widgets – We’ve preloaded all sorts of nifty widgets for you to use on your blog
  • Comment filters = WAY better control over trolls and spammers!
  • Mobile – wordpress is fully mobile. Download the app for your mobile so long so that you can start blogging from your phone as soon as your blog has been migrated! http://wordpress.org/extend/mobile/
  • Add several authors to your blog – allow guest authors to create posts for you to edit and publish to your blog
  • A huge SEO boost to help your blog rank well on search engines.

HOW IT’S GONNA WORK:

Phase 1: Testing on ourselves


We’re going to migrate this blog, and a few other ones with “in-house” bloggers (like Chef Caro), so that we can make sure the process works.

Date for pre-migration: 25 NOVEMBER 2011

 

 

Phase 2: THE BIG MOVE!


3 days after this, we’ll be moving all the active Food24 bloggers across, all 176.

 

That’s gonna be on 28 NOVEMBER 2011.

 

Before we move… YOU NEED TO:

  •  Go to myaccount (we are saying this twice because it is so important) and click on add/edit: under secondary  email & give us a WORKING email address (not a 24.com one.)
  • Get excited by WordPress.tv to see what fabulousness is in store…

               

PLEASE NOTE THAT D-DAY IS THE 28th NOVEMBER 2011 so you will not be able to post on your blog ON THAT DAY. Until the 28th of November everything will be as normal.

We will keep you updated every step of the way, so for now you just have to watch this space and if you don’t have a secondary email yet (NOT a 24.com one) then please get on that.

Questions? Email cath@food24.com

I hope you are all as excited as we are, it’s been a long time coming!

Sam Wilson

Editor-in-Chief


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by Food24 Ed

NoMu’s grand new offering

November 4, 2011 in Uncategorised

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Hi foodie friends,

Ok we love NoMu, who doesn’t? The rubs (love, love), the fonds – oh what a product – I don’t ever have less than 2 bottles in my fridge – and now something new.

Well not quite new new, but they’ve come up with a great packaging solution. NoMu envelopes.

Nomu envelopes

I must say, I do marvel at Tracey and Paul’s fantastic energy and passion that they continually pump behind their brand. They’re constantly trying to improve and this is no exception.

They’ve brought out pouches. Funky black envelopes that get delivered to your door. Inside are 4 packets of different rubs (enough for several meals each) – for R59.99 – AND they’ll deliver anywhere in the world for free! Hallo, isn’t that just too cool?

I think it’s a great way to try new flavours that I wouldn’t usually try and I’ll just fill up my old tins with them. The envelopes and pouches are also all fully recyclable – way to go guys!

Nomu envelopes

Order through their online shop for one of these babies to be dropped to your door.

I think it’s a great gifting idea for the festive season too!

Lots of spiced up love,

Chef Caro xx

Caro de Waal

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by Food24 Ed

Olive oil, in a squeezy bottle?

October 18, 2011 in Uncategorised

6 Comments »

Hi folks,

This fantastic bottle arrived on our desks a little while back and I was enraged! How could I not be the one to think up this uber simple but oh so perfect way to deliver oil out of a bottle?

Tough luck for me, Willow Creek has done it and I am totally hooked. How often do you glug out way too much oil than you actually need? I do it often and this really is the prefect solution.

willow creek

It’s also a plastic bottle – a very chic and glass-looking plastic bottle that enables you to squeeze it as you pour. It comes out in a very thin stream and doesn’t splash or glug.

 wiloow creek

The olive oil itself is yummy too.

I am thinking that this is the beginning of the squeezy bottle!

From Willow Creek – ‘The PET bottle is also environmentally friendly and fully recyclable and the fact that it cannot break when dropped, renders it invaluable for any kitchen – especially with aspiring junior cooks around.

 

Further increasing the benefits of this new packaging is the oxygen barrier and UV filter built into the brown hue of the bottle to keep the oil’s shelf life of at least two years intact.

 

The 750ml bottle of Estate Blend extra virgin olive oil will be available at a bargain price of R92.’

 

Awesome né?

Lots of love and squeezes,

Caro xxx

Caro de Waal

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by Food24 Ed

Feel like a cup of coffee?

September 28, 2011 in Uncategorised

4 Comments »

Hi everyone,

We received a packet of dark and delicious-looking coffee a wee while back from the lovely lot at Caturra Coffee.

The team over here at Food24 just lurve a good coffee so we opened it up and WOW, what a gorgeous aroma. Top points on that!

There were mixed reactions and we’re all about bringing you good honest reviews, so here they are:

‘I loved the smell, it was really rich and inviting with a deep aroma that took me to an exotic place. The flavour was not as rich, but it was a fabulous flavour which I enjoyed thoroughly. I’d definitely buy it’.

- Caro

‘The smells emanating from the bag were well rounded and quite strong, but once the water touched the coffee, most of that aroma dissipated and the flavour that was expected to conjure flavour explosions was more like a little puff or smoke. It over-promised and under-delivered’.

- Meagan

‘We drink a lot of different brands here and I really liked it’.

- Cath


So there we go peeps – enjoy!

The Food24 team

xxx

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by Food24 Ed

The Look & Feel Good Expo!!!

September 8, 2011 in Uncategorised

5 Comments »

Hi everyone,

 

The Look & Feel Good Expo is coming to town! It is an amazing expo filled with all sorts of wonderful activities and of course healthy food.

expo

 

Chef Caro will be there showing off some of food24′s deliciously healthy recipes, so we’ll be a part of it too!

 

The awesome duo and health gurus from Superfoods will also be there, Peter and Beryn. They are raw food chefs and are constantly striving to create new and wonderful recipes with only raw ingredients.

superfoods

 

And we’re giving away 2 health-filled hampers from these awesome superfoodies, PLUS 7 x double tickets for the show. 1 for the Cape Town show and 1 for Joburg show coming up soon afterwards.

 

The hampers (worth R350 each) include:

Hemp
Lucuma
Maca
Cacao Powder
Chia
Agave
Including a Superfood Smoothie recipe & Chia Porridge Omega-3-rich breakfast recipe.

 

To enter

Answer this simple question: Why would you like this superfoods hamper?

 

Mail me your answer here.

 

 Dates:

Cape Town International Convention Centre on 16 – 18 September 2011.

Johannesburg from the 7 – 9 October at the Coca-Cola Dome.   

See you all there!

Caro and the Food24 team.

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