Nom Nom Nom Charity Raffle Prize Winners Announced

We were delighted to see that this year we raised the most in a single year for Action Against Hunger - £1,307 which is really amazing given the many demands made on us for money at this time.

Without further ado the winners are as follows - names were put in a randomiser when more than one person bid for a prize (including the lucky dips).  As we were so lucky to get a huge amount of prizes this year (thanks to all companies and people who kindly donated prizes), all prizes left over are randomly donated amongst the people who made a donation :

NNN01 - Richard Hannan - Classic 19 piece Chefs Knives Attache Case worth £731 from Wusthof and Haus
NNN02 - Shirley Soon Shiong - Cookery School voucher for 2 at £90 each for a lesson of their choice
NNN03 - Steve - A wicker hamper full of Olives et Al goodies to the value of £100 from Olives Et Al
NNN04 - Carole Joseph - Dinner and drinks for two at Rocket Restaurant - Canary Wharf branch (up to £60)
NNN05 - Garmon ap Garth - Dinner for two at Trader Vic's Restaurant, Hilton, Park Lane
NNN06 - Victoria Glass - Paella Hamper from Brindisa
NNN07 - Bhavna, Anita & Gerald, Annie Mole, Tenbus_uk, Carole Joseph, Tessa Levine,  Will Beckett, Avril Fleishman, Pauline Lepissier, Lyndsey Steere -  10 x copies of Vivek Singh's Book "Curries: Classic & Contemporary" from The Cinnamon Club each worth £20
NNN08 - Richard Turner - Dinner for two at The Avalon up to the value of £70
NNN09 - Briget & James - Five day's worth of lunches at Rosalind's Kitchen
NNN10 - Elizabeth Charles - Month's supply of Total Greek Yoghurt worth £50
NNN11 - Heloise Ardley - £50 voucher to spend on Shipton Mill's website
NNN12 - Trevor Moross - A £50 gift hamper from Vanilla Bazaar
NNN13 - Graeme Armstrong - Lunch for a week at Leon Restaurants
NNN14 - Flora Dupont - Fruit basket from Watts Farms
NNN15 - Bhavna Mistry & Flora Dupont - A copy of Japanese Home Cooking and a £20 voucher to make your own Blurb book (2 prize sets of book & voucher on offer)
NNN16 - Wendy Press, Luciano Lucioli, Jon Bedford, Graeme Armstrong - 4 x signed copies of Classic Indian Recipes from Manju Malhi
NNN17 - Fiona Maclean  - Three piece Gourmet Cookerware Set from ProCook
NNN18 - Nastasha Lelijveld - A Three course meal for two at Pearl Restaurant
NNN19 - Emilia Simonelli - A side of smoked salmon from Southbank Fresh Fish Ltd
NNN20 - Garmon ap Garth - A £50 voucher to spend with Sheepdrove Organic Meat
NNN21 - Izabel_Blue- A Le Micro Mini Chopper Herb Grinder from MagiMix worth £39.95
NNN22 - Mex Ibrahim - A Three course meal with wine and coffee for two at Carluccio's
NNN23 - Sophie Hudson - £30 worth of Yo! Sushi vouchers
NNN24 - Bernice Wainer - A Hamper from Tracklements worth £25
NNN25 - Corrine Leon - Sunday lunch for two inclusive of a bottle of house wine and unlimited soft drinks from The Chiswell Street Dining Rooms
NNN26 - Victoria Glass, Richard Hannan, Flora Dupont, Jon Bedford,  Graeme Armstrong, Annie Mole  6 x sets of Seasoned Pioneers Spices - each set worth £25
NNN27 - Andrew Wong - A Vietnamese Baguette & Iced Coffee and copy of The Asian Grandmother's Cookbook by Patricia Tanumidharja from Panda Panda
NNN28 - Carole Joseph and Wendy Press - 2 x Signed copies of A Slice of Cherry Pie by one of our great judges, Julia Parsons
NNN29 - Nick Watt - Gift box of a dozen Gower Cottage Brownies
NNN30 - Wendy Press - Apron & oven gloves from ICTC

Congratulations all - we will be contacting you shortly to arrange delivery or pick up of your prize/s.  Thank you for your donations which will really mean a lot to Action Against Hunger & their excellent work.

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Congratulations to our Viewers' Choice Winners for 2011

The online votes are in and more or less from the start it was a two horse race between Hirsute Hashtag Slingers and Nice Glass.

However, Victoria & Miriam (Nice Glass) clearly led the way with over 66% of the votes to win 1st prize in the Viewers Choice, with James & Alfie (Hirsute Hashtag Slingers) in worthy second place with 24% of the votes.

Nice Glass win a  Cookery School course for ten people, a meal for two at one of Michelin starred chef Marcus Wareing's London restaurants - donated by Great British Chefs, a £50 charity donation from Justgiving  and each win a melamine platter from Primeware Ceramics.

The Hirsute Hashtag Slingers win half case of wine each from Naked Wines,  a £50 voucher each to spend at Geeta's Foods  and a copy of the Dorling and Kindersley Allotment Cookbook each, from Dorling and Kindersley.

Now Tete-a-Tea (winners of the Expert Judges Choice) along with the Nice Glass & Hirsute Hashtag Slingers will be judged by Ros Rathouse, owner of Rosalind's Kitchen and the best dishes served in the cafe on Little Portland Street, W1 for a week.
 
Once again congratulations to Victoria & Miriam and Alfie & James - we'll be in touch to arrange getting your prizes to you and watch this space for a post on the dishes that will be served in Rosalind's Kitchen!


Don't forget that everyone can still win some lovely foodie prizes in the charity raffle for Action Against Hunger, which is still open until the end of September.  Good luck in the raffle!

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Vote for your favourite team - Viewers' Choice - 2011

So the Expert Judges's Choice Winners Tete-a-Tea were announced, but now it's time for YOU to have your say.

All the finalists pairs have written blog posts about their experience and those who come 1st and 2nd are in with the chance of winning some fantastic prizes, including a masterclass for ten people from Cookery School, a meal for two at one of Michelin starred chef Marcus Wareing's London restaurants - donated by Great British Chefs, a £50 charity donation from Justgiving, melamine platters from Primeware Ceramics, half case of wine each from Naked Wines,  £50 voucher each to spend at Geeta's Foods  and a copy of the  Dorling and Kindersley Allotment Cookbook each, from Dorling and Kindersley.

Then Tete-a-Tea along with the top two entries from the "Viewers' Choice" will be judged by the owner of Rosalind's Kitchen and the best dishes served in the cafe on Little Portland Street, W1 for a week.

All you need to do is vote for your favourite team below. Their blog posts are in the links below or you can read them all here.



Voting closes on Sunday 18th September 2011 at 23.59pm and you can vote once a day if you like.

If you'd like to win some fantastic food & drink prizes yourself, bag yourself a ticket in our charity raffle which closes at the end of September.

Good luck to all the finalists!

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Nice Glass!

On 17th July, rather brutally early for a Sunday morning, Team: Nice Glass! trudged over to Little Portland Street, buzzing with espresso, to take part in the Nom Nom Noms 2011. We were greeted with smiling faces and enormous breakfasts from the excellent Rosalind's Kitchen, which we greedily scoffed during the briefing on the rules of the day (namely, don't double dip!). Before the cook off commenced, it was on your marks, get set, go! to Marylebone market and the surrounding posh nosh shops. 

Marylebone market 

When at last we arrived, Victoria hobbled over to The Ginger Pig (literally. A wedding + several pints of fizzy pop and a Ceilidh = a sprained knee.) where she picked up a delicious piece of fillet steak. In the meantime, Miriam whizzed around the market at lightning speed on her two working legs, grabbing goodies galore. Once we'd exhausted the market's wares, we made our way over to the ever reliable Waitrose, which, for one day only, seemed to have been transformed into a supermarket-sweep-come-trolley-dodgems for food bloggers. The Nom Nom Nommers stampeded in as soon as the shop doors opened, pausing only to phone up lost team mates left stranded in the maze of aisles. Our total respect and admiration went out to the Domestic Sluttery team when we spied Sian Meades with an armful of G&T cans. Good work, girls!

The journey back was a far more civilised affair as we shared a cab back to cookery school with Team Tete-a-Tea just in time for the countdown! Lovely Mecca let us stay in the top kitchen (no stairs. Thank you!) and Miriam got out her spreadsheets. Yes, that's right. Spreadsheets. It turns out that Miriam Nice is an admin wizard and something of an Excel expert. But all her carefully considered A4 pages were left oil and vinegar stained, peaking sadly and redundantly out from underneath our chopping boards. 

Victoria feigning organisation skills (the smirk gives her away!)

Having to ask for every piece of equipment we needed as we needed it took a bit of getting used to, but the Cookery School staff made the exchange of dirty chopping boards for clean as effortless as possible.  They produced sieves, whisks and knives with impressive efficiency and their kindness continued when they leapt into action to resolve one of our biggest crises of the day: our tray of meringue pies didn't fit in the preheated and allocated oven! With a little shelf swapping and dial twiddling they had us back on track in a jiffy.

What a mess!

When designing our dishes, we both agreed that it was absolutely vital that everything should work together as a complete menu, while at the same time ensuring that each dish could stand up on its own. The brief was for one soup, two salads, a main and a sweet treat and, in between gossiping over red wine, Team: Nice Glass! created a menu we were both excited by. With a strong Japanese influence running throughout, we still retained flavour combinations of recognisably classic British fare. 

Our wild mushroom broth with garlic and ginger was a big hit with the judges, who enjoyed its depth and umami richness. We cranked up the flavour punches for our salads with a wasabi and yoghurt dressed Jersey Royal and pea shoot salad alongside a beautifully colourful rainbow slaw - essentially a composium of crunchy British, seasonal vegetables, julienned and tossed in a tangy sesame, soy, ginger, mirin and chilli dressing. Our main was seared steak sashimi served on a bed of watercress and lime and black pepper dressed courgette ribbons. Our thinking here was a British Sunday roast come cold Japanese Summer's lunch - beef, spuds and horseradish with a face lift. In the panic of clearing the decks, all the extra spring onion Victoria had chopped to garnish the soup and sashimi got chucked away, but despite the last minute hitches, it was all pretty tasty in the end.

Our sweet treat wrapped up our theme with a blackcurrant and matcha meringue pie. We were very keen to use the much maligned blackcurrant in our menu and felt sure their sharpness and velvety tang would make a delicious change from the usual lemons. Lemons weren't totally neglected though, as we flavoured the shortcrust with lemon zest before rolling out the pastry as thinly as possible. A blob of matcha meringue was added on top of the blackcurrant curd and a swirl of white meringue was piped over the top - hiding the green tea treat in the middle. Once out of the oven, a quick sprinkle of matcha powder over the top was all they needed before being plonked on a plate.

Our plated up grub.

We thought we'd have bags of time, but, unfortunately, we had 15 minutes' less than we'd expected, as the staff needed us to dish up and pack up in time for the judges' entrance. In the panic of losing those valuable last few minutes, a few garnishes were left unchopped and unscattered.

Once the dishes were plated up for the judges, we scurried (and hobbled) down the stairs where the fun really began: namely, eating and drinking everything we could reach. Thanks to Top 100 IGP Wines our glasses were never empty and thanks to the delicious combined efforts of all the teams, we had a banquet fit for a king. A tipsy quiz and raffle followed and, just when we'd relaxed enough to forget we had been competing against each other, the judges made their entrance. They gave honest and thorough feedback before the winners of the cook off were announced. Huge congratulations to the delightful Tete-a-Tea who whipped up some lovely meatballs with lentils and a cheeky raspberry and Amaretto chocolate tart.

We were disappointed not to win the judges hearts completely but it will only make us more determined for next year's NomNomNoms. Pub-bound with full bellies and wine breath, we left Cookery School with several tonnes of goodies in hand. As well as walking away with an incredible knife from  Wüsthof, we were thoroughly spoilt by Gü, Total Greek Yoghurt, Schwartz, Rude Health to name but a few.

Miriam, editor of Cakes and Canapes, sporting an excellent moustache badge by Emma Bosanko from Thread or Dead.

Adrenaline from the competition was quickly replaced by strawberry Margaritas and a long day turned into a long night, as all the teams got to know each other properly over cocktails. We swapped stories of our successes and failures at the competition, while admiring the fabulous new app from Great British Chefs. We left promising to meet up for another session soon. We haven't so far, but Team: Nice Glass! is raring to go. Clearly food bloggers make excellent drinking companions as the conversation flowed well into the night. Nom Nom Nom 2011 was brilliant fun and the staff at the Cookery School worked tirelessly on our behalf. And let's not forget what an excellent cause this amazing event supports: Action Against Hunger. Please check out their fantastic work and get yourselves a raffle ticket or two before you come back and cast a vote for Nice Glass! 


Victoria and Miriam xx 

VOTE FOR NICE GLASS

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From the East.

Hello there from team Asian Invasion! While politics over in the West grinds to a halt (or grinds to something), we thought we'd talk about how we cooked and ate to divert our minds from the situation over in the land of hope and stuff.

Team Asian invasion is all about trying new and different things. Flavours sweet, savoury and just down right scrummy. We enjoy things a little bit different... unexpected you might say. The other thing we like is gadgets and we all know the Internets is just one big gadgets!

So our weekend of NomNomNom involved Farhan, slightly injured and myself cooking some soup:

a main course:

two salads:

something a little sweet:

And having fun...

The soup contained small cuts of fish (cod, haddock, tilapia, mahi mahi and hake) with carrots, leeks, onions, fennel and spiced up with turmeric, chilli powder, ginger, parsley and butter.

Our salmon was gently heated and then placed on a bed of courgette noodles, with a side of spinach and onions then finished with a generous drizzle of our parsley and cucumber sauce.

The two salads were a variety of rocket, spinach and leaves paired with either beetroot, orange and avocado and pomegranate or carrot, cress and cucumber.


Finishing off the meal was a combination of diced dates, sultanas, and pomegranate, mixed together with bit of raspberry jam, spooned onto half a date and covered with a generous sprinkling of dessicated coconut.



We really enjoyed NomNomNom 2011, were glad such a brilliant cause was behind it and prefered it to the FatDuck (that's saying something!) - so thank you to everyone who took part and the organizers :)

VOTE FOR ASIAN INVASION

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Tete-a-Tea

Ahhhh the irony, first place at the competition, last on the blog (not to mention last years' competition actually, but we don't talk about that).

Believing that nothing is impossible team Tete-a-Tea didn't set out to merely prove that there is a come back from the ultimate kitchen pandemonium (which we don't talk about), oh no we had our sights set much higher. World peace. That's right, world peace, or at least something resembling that on a somewhat smaller scale, brought about by the wonderful catalyst that is food. So when we planned (and I use the term loosely) this years' menu we decided to combine everything our respectively Lebanese and Israeli mothers and grandmothers taught us and decided to go middle eastern. And this is what we made:

Feta, watermelon and red onion salad

 

Tabouleh
Spiced kofte meatballs with mejadera and a yoghurt and courgette dip

 

Chocolate, amaretto and raspberry tart

The day was hugely enjoyable, in no small part thanks to the delicious lunch during which we got to sample what everybody made and the ensuing food coma. We also received outragous goody bags, which included Schwartz spices to last you a lifetime, a Wuesthof knife and allsorts of other deliciousness. The raffle in aid of action for hunger provided even more great prizes and there are still more to be had. To get involved please take a look here: http://www.justgiving.com/Nom-Nom-Nom-2011

Finally, a MASSIVE 'Thank You!' to Ros and everybody at The Cookery School, for providing us with a delicious breakfast on the day and for working ludricously hard all day to make sure everything ran smoothly. Also a big shout out to TikiChris and Kemey Lafond for taking all the glorious pictures and allowing us to use them.

We look forward to being back next year, to hopefully win, or more realistically not do the thing again. You know, the one we don't talk about.

Now, someone get me Binyamin Netanyahu's number...

VOTE FOR TETE-A-TEA

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Domestic Sluttery - chocolate, leopard print and gin

The Domestic Sluttery team are no strangers to Nom Nom Nom, but this was the first year that Gemma joined Sian (editor extraordinaire) to coordinate leopard print outfits cook up a storm. Here's a nice photo of the backs of our heads. Notice we have our hair tied back (health 'n' safety, innit). Yes, our dresses were planned in advance.

Photo by Kemey Lafond © 2011

For those unfamiliar with the concept of Domestic Sluttery, it's 'the home and lifestyle blog for women who have better things to do', so it's safe to say we didn't spend weeks fine-tuning our menu and testing it a million times. Instead, we turned to our archive of amazing recipes, pulled out a few old faithfuls, tweaked a few seasonal favourites, and then went down the pub.

It's not that we're lazy, you understand. We just believe that half the battle is in the ingredients, so we loved that the emphasis with this challenge was on simple, seasonal fare. Our day wasn't without issues - hunting down crayfish in Central London on a Sunday morning is something of a losing battle (why so early, Nomnomnom? Why so early?) and we completely forgot to do the dipping sauce for our Summer rolls (what? we were drunk! It was a pressure-filled environment!). These things probably contributed to our tragic downfall. But there was samphire! And borage! Not to mention these babies, which are basically chocolate crack...

Cheesecake Brownies, Sian's own creation and a recipe any self-respecting Domestic Slut can now make in her sleep. Though we promise we were wide awake this time. Look! Here's proof!


This time, we ramped them up with home-made chocolate chips (method: take one bar of expensive choccy, hack up with large knife) and a sprig of mint. Never underestimate the powers of a sprig of mint to pretty something up.

Yep, we showed you dessert first. That's just how we roll. But here's what came before...


Tom Yam Gai soup, a spicy chicken Thai broth. We based this on a recipe from our site, but made it extra special by marinading the chicken in a variety of secret ingredients (ok, mostly ginger...) before cooking.


Chickpea Salad with Orange, Mint and Feta. That's Gemma's slightly OTT presentation and orange segmenting skillzorz on show right there. And Sian's borage. We love borage. You love borage. Everybody loves borage.


Prawn and Samphire salad with Chilli and Lemon. This seemed to be the judges' favourite from our menu, and it was probably ours too. We got our samphire from the amazing fishmonger at the Marylebone farmer's market. Sadly he didn't have crayfish. We all agree this recipe would have been better with crayfish. We blame him.


Summer rolls with marinaded belly pork and king prawns. There were also noodles, mint and lettuce in these babies. Sadly there wasn't a dipping sauce. Because we were drunk on gin we forgot. Putting together each roll takes longer than you think. Luckily, Sian's a pro!


Gemma, not so much. She stuck to arranging plates in a pretty fashion instead. Here's our finished menu, ready for judging...

Photo by Chris Osburn © 2011

Don't you want us to cook you dinner now?

Of course, we did have a secret weapon to help us along. No self-respecting Domestic Slut cooks without a little additional help...

Ah, Gin. Chocolate. What's not to love?

Massive thanks to everyone at the Cookery School for being so helpful and patient all day. And to Alfie for not letting our brownies burn while Sian was outside smoking. That was dead nice of him.

VOTE FOR DOMESTIC SLUTTERY

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