We're Celebrating!

We’ve had a great week! First of all we celebrated one year of writing a Substack. We have to thank fellow food writer Ali Dunworth for putting us on this path. Ali made the suggestion one morning over breakfast when we were staying in the Burren, and the idea germinated to become the weekly submission that has just celebrated its first anniversary.

Substack is a great platform, for reader and writer alike. We’ve spent the year writing, and also following the weekly missives from writers all over the globe, writing about food, and not food. Jazz and politics have their place in our inbox too.

This week we also celebrated being with our fellow food writers at the annual Irish Food Writing Awards, curated and presented by Suzanne Campbell and Paul O’Connor. To our great surprise and delight we were presented with the Outstanding Achievement Award for our food writing over the years. It was one of the absolute highlights of a long career to be honoured by our peers in this way.

So, to Substack. When we first planned this melange of food stories for and about Ireland, we had a mind to call it The Irish Stew. Nerves took over, and we retreated to the name we’d been writing under for decades, Megabites (originally conceived and published in The Irish Times). After a year we feel ready to go with our original plan, and we hope The Irish Stew is a better name for the pot of stories we’ve written and have planned for the months ahead. Thank you for being with us.

Photo from wwww.irishfoodwritingawards.ie