The Today team has launched a new competition called “Ireland’s Best Home Cook” and is searching for a new TV cook to join their team for a month. So if your family think you’re a super chef and you’ve always fancied the idea of sharing your recipes with the nation on television, then grab an apron, grab a video camera and show Dáithí Ó Sé and Maura Derrane what you’ve got!

The Today team would like you to send them a 3- to 4-minute video demo of you cooking up a storm in your own kitchen. They want people who have a flair for TV as well as a passion for food. Give them a flavour of why you think you have what it takes to be a television chef.

The winner’s prize includes a lesson from celebrity chef Kevin Dundon in Dunbrody Country House Hotel in Wexford, where Kevin will share tips and expert knowledge on how to be a successful television chef. The winner will get their own cookery slot once a week on Today during the month of March.

The closing deadline is 6pm on Thursday, 21 February 2013. Entrants can email their video to or post tapes to Today, RTÉ Studios, Father Matthew Street, Cork.

Ireland’s Best Home Cook entry rules:

• Entrants cannot have been employed as a professional chef
• Video clips must not be longer than 5 minutes in total
• Entrants must be resident in Ireland or Northern Ireland and be over 18 years of age
• Entrants must be available to travel to the RTÉ studios in Cork once a week during the month of March
• RTE Competition Voting Terms & Conditions apply
• Entrants can email their video to or post tapes to Today, RTÉ Studios, Father Matthew Street, Cork

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Create a treat with Valentine’s Day in mind and enter this super recipe competition in association with CookWithAvonmore.ie to win a Celebration Cakes cookery course with Cooks Academy!

CookWithAvonmore.ie is on the lookout for easy, romantic, sumptuous desserts using Avonmore Fresh Dessert Cream. The prize is a Celebration Cakes cookery course for 2 with Cooks Academy plus an Avonmore hamper. And that’s not all! Three lucky runners-up will each be presented with Avonmore hampers.

The competition is open to all food bloggers who come up with the best Valentine’s recipes using Avonmore Fresh Dessert Cream. To enter, each blogger must write a blog post with the recipe and an image and include a tip for using Avonmore Fresh Dessert Cream.  Please sumbit all entries to . The closing date for entries is Tuesday, 12 February.

Four recipes will be picked – one overall recipe and three runners-up. Each recipe submited will appear in the Valentine’s recipe section on www.cookwithavonmore.ie. The overall winning recipe will appear on the homepage and all recipes will be featured on CookwithAvonmore.ie Facebook page and any public relations surrounding the competition. Every recipe will be accredited to the blogger with links back to their blog.

Terms and conditions:

• Closing date for entries is Friday, 8 February 2013
• Prize must be taken on 13 April 2013 in Cooks Academy in Dublin
• Prize is non-transferable
• No cash in lieu
• By entering the competition bloggers accept that any recipe and image submitted will be used on the www.cookwithavonmore.ie website and also in various media publications both on and offline

Good luck!

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The following is a post from BuyersClub.ie:

At BuyersClub.ie our customers love good food and they love good value. We’re committed to offering both. To reflect this commitment we’re teaming up with IFBA to offer Irish food bloggers the chance to win free produce by showing us their creative foodie flair.

We’ve got an Irish products hamper filled with €100 of quality Irish product from the BuyersClub.ie store for the blogger that can create the most delicious and creative recipe, using products currently available on the Irish Products section of BuyersClub.ie. We also have €50 BuyersClub.ie Irish product hampers for two runners up as well! To enter, simply come up with a creative recipe, post it to your blog and then drop us an email containing a link to your blog post to .

Your recipes don’t have to be entirely designed using BuyersClub.ie products. Instead, we encourage you to purchase any fresh foods your recipe may need from your local small producers to compliment your BuyersClub.ie ingredients and to support your communities. Our judges will however give bonus points to the entries that use the most Irish products.

We also would like you to help us in our efforts to support local Irish producers. If you feel that any product that you know and love that is NOT on our site please let us know and we will do our best to get it onto our web shelves as soon as possible. This might be a  product that would help you with your recipe or simple a product that you love that you find hard to buy locally.

Our team at BuyersClub.ie is passionate about supporting local producers and we know that it is small and medium sized businesses, including small Irish food producers, that are key to kicking the economy back into gear. We support them through our site and we actively encourage our customers to give them support offline too.

BuyersClub.ie is all about value for money. You can use BuyersClub.ie to source great quality and great value ingredients for all of your future creations, including a fantastic range of organic and locally produced products but also to save money on international brands. We hope that by saving you money on the household products you buy every week that you will divert some of those savings to support Irish manufacturers.

To top it all off, every entrant will receive a 10% off discount code for their first order to BuyersClub.ie! So what are you all waiting for? Get cooking!

There are a few instructions below to show you how to enter the BuyersClub.ie Recipe Challenge. Competition terms and conditions:

• No purchase is necessary. All entrants are simply required to ‘design’ a text recipe and post it to their respective blogs. However as we would like to see the finished product and post pictures on our site we will give extra point for any entry that has photos of the finished product included.

• The competition will be closed at midnight on Friday, 30 November 2012.
• One winner and two runners up will be chosen before Friday, 7 December.
• The winner will receive a €100 Irish products hamper from the BuyersClub.ie store and two runners up will each receive a €50 Irish product hamper.
• The winners will selected based on a number of criteria including, but not limited to the number of Irish products used from the BuyersClub.ie store; the quality of the recipe (as decided by the BuyersClub.ie judges); the volume of local fresh products used; the quality of writing and creativity shown; and the imagery of the finished product
• Strictly one entry per blog.

Good luck!

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The Embassy of Spain (Commercial Office) has organized a Cava Seminar for professionals on Thursday 13 September. Cava, The Sparkling Stars seminar will be held at the Wines from Spain Trade Fair at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.

Speaker Patrick Webb is a Cava expert coming from Spain for the occasion. After graduating in California, US-born Patrick moved to Spain in 1993. Patrick has been a primary ambassador for Cava for many years as director of Pimecava, the association for small family-run Cava producers.

To celebrate this Cava extravaganza, the Embassy of Spain is offering three lucky IFBA members the chance to attend the exclusive seminar on Thursday 13 September at 12pm, where they can enjoy a tasting seminar with nine special cavas. For a chance to win, just leave a comment on this post. The winner will be randomly chosen and notified by email. The competition will close at 6pm on Friday 31 August 2012.

All food and wine blogger members of the IFBA  are invited to attend the Wines from Spain Fair. Please confirm your interest to:

This competition is now closed. Congratulations to the winners: Stephen O’Rourke, Odette Gill and Catriona O’Dea

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The Harvest Festival takes place from September 10 to 16 in the historic city of Waterford. This is Ireland’s biggest food festival and will be featuring top chefs along with leading artisan food producers, Slow Food tours, wine and whiskey tasting, giant street markets, an artisan beer festival, restaurant trails and variety of events for all the family.

Neven Maguire, Kevin Dundon and Darina Allen will be showcasing their culinary skills, along with BBC’s Martin Dorey, presenter of the hit TV series One Man and his Campervan and author of the Camper Van Cookbook.

The 2012 GIY Gathering will take place in the city during the Harvest Festival and sees BBC’s Alys Fowler and Mark Diacono of River Cottage join a host of Irish stars on September 15 and 16. The GIY Gathering will also include guest speaker Roger Doiron from the US, the inspiration behind Michelle Obama’s White House vegetable garden and founder of Kitchen Gardeners International.

For a full programme of events see waterfordharvestfestival.ie

The organisers of the Waterford Harvest Festival have put together an amazing trip for food bloggers and they would like to invite one lucky winner to join them on Thursday and Friday, 13/14 September, for a complimentary Harvest Festival Tour, overnighting at The Tower Hotel in Waterford City.

For your chance to win a spot on this Harvest Festival tour (see below for the itinerary), just leave a comment on this post telling us what you like about Waterford before 12 noon on Wednesday, 29 August.

You need to have a live food blog to enter the competition – and do please make sure you are free to attend this event on Thursday and Friday, 13/14 September before you enter!

One entry per person please – multiple entries will be disqualified. The winner will be randomly chosen and notified by email.

Read the rest of this entry →

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Carton House Hotel has just launched their online digital master series where resident executive chef Cathal Kavanagh gives viewers great tips from the kitchen of Carton House. Cathal gives tips and advice on how a great peppered steak includes three different types of ground pepper, why Guinness makes the perfect batter for fish goujons and basic tips like why vinegar is not necessarily needed for the perfect poached eggs.

To celebrate the launch, one lucky winner and a friend will be able to go to Carton House, where they can enjoy a master class with Cathal Kavanagh and enjoy lunch in the Linden Tree restaurant afterwards. For a chance to win, just leave a comment on this post. One entry per person please – multiple entries will be disqualified. The winner will be randomly chosen and notified by email. The competition will close at 6:00 p.m. on Monday, 30 July 2012. UPDATE: Congrats to the winner, Adrienne!

In the meantime, be sure to check out some of the videos below:

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Easy Food, Ireland’s best-selling food magazine, has launched its annual Easy Food Home-Cook Hero Awards, celebrating unsung kitchen heroes all over Ireland. Open to home cooks of all ages – from kids, to parents, to grandparents – this competition is ideal for anyone who simply loves to cook and has a passion for food. If you have a favourite recipe or a signature dish, you can enter the competition by logging on to www.homecookhero.ie and entering online or by picking up a copy of Easy Food Magazine. With ten categories to enter, including ‘Larder Luck’, ‘Fabulous Fowl’ and ‘Catch of the Day’, there is something to fit every type of recipe, no matter how unique!

Judging this year’s competition are renowned celebrity chefs Kevin Dundon, Catherine Fulvio and Catherine Leydon, as well as Vanessa Greenwood of Cooks’ Academy and Gina Miltiadou, publisher of Easy Food Magazine and co-founder of Zahra Media Group. The judges will be looking for tasty food that is quick and easy to prepare, as contestants will have to prepare it for the judges if they are shortlisted.

The competition will culminate in three ‘super cooks’ being selected from each of the ten categories, who will then be invited to cook their recipe in front of the judges on 2 Novemberat the state-of-the-art kitchens in Cooks’ Academy. The winning recipes will be announced at a black tie gala event that evening at The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin. The ten category winners will each receive €1,500 worth of prizes, plus the opportunity to be showcased in the Easy Food Home-Cook Hero Awards Cookbook.

 The entry rules are simple – contestants must have a passion for food and cooking and the recipe is required to incorporate at least one of the award sponsors’ products. Recipes should also be quick and easy, taking between 30 and 80 minutes to prepare and cook, depending on the category. Each entry must be accompanied by 50 words summarising what the recipe means to you.

This year, organisers have created a brand new interactive website, www.homecookhero.ie, where entrants can set up a personal account to manage their recipe(s) or log in using their Facebook details. Talented home cooks can go back in and edit/update their entries as often as they like right up until the closing date and can also nominate someone they think could be this year’s Home-Cook Hero. The nominee will then receive an email telling them that they have been nominated to enter.

Closing date for entries is 28 September 2012. Winners will be contacted by telephone and announced in Easy Food magazine. For further information visit www.homecookhero.ie. Terms and conditions apply.

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Are you passionate about food and love to cook? Do you constantly impress your friends and family with your culinary skills? Are you an amateur cook with amazing talent? If so, you might have what it takes to impress our judges, Nick Munier and Dylan McGrath, and become Ireland’s MasterChef Champion! The application deadline is 28 May 2012. For more information and to download your application form, go to www.rte.ie/masterchef.

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