Blending blogging and a love of food

NIAMH SHIELDS eats, sleeps, walks and breathes her passion.

By night she dreams of it, by day she scours markets for hours on end, endlessly seeking to find the best of it. She also forages for it, hopping on buses around London, looking in the most peculiar of places for the most peculiar of things. She writes about it, reads voraciously about it and maps out her year in terms of weekend breaks and longer sojourns where she can further uncover and savour the culinary idiosyncrasies of this world.

And all of this from a girl who, at the age of 21, thought it was all over. Born outside Dungarvan, Co Waterford, to parents, who “cooked because they had to” and nothing more, she first wandered into the family kitchen as she was sick of the same ol’ food being plated up each night.

“You know, I used to be a really fussy eater and then a babysitter taught me how to make fudge and I was big into making that. Then there was lemon meringue pie. Mum started buying me cookbooks after a while, as she could see that I was interested. By the age of 14 or 15, I was exploring savoury,” she said.

Niamh says she had always dreamt of being a chef, but as she was “very academic“, this was discouraged. She ended up studying physiology at UCC, where she also completed a Masters in multimedia. As she studied, she was one of those rare students who actually used the kitchens in her student accommodation.

But even when she got her first “real, adult job” in London (a project manager with esteemed scientific journal, Nature), cooking still consumed her. She would race home from the office, so she could spend four or five hours doing what she really loved — preparing dinner, trying out recipes and making enviable lunches for the following day. She did this five and six nights a week.

“I could never see a way that I could get into working with food. It’s ridiculous, but when I finished my studies at 21, I told myself that I was too old to return to train as a chef,” she said.

“It was probably so annoying for people who lived with me, as I was always in the kitchen, cooking the entire evening. The fridge was always packed with my food, too.”

In her day job she was managing the launch of new products online and so by night, she began to use Flickr to put up pictures of her latest dishes. A blog was a natural progression and she made her first posting in May 2007. A month later, the Guardian’s blog radar had picked her up and one of her soup recipes was reprinted.

The rest is blogging history: eatlikeagirl was only one of two blogs highly commended in the Observer’s Food Monthly awards in 2010. That year she was also chosen as one of ‘40 Bloggers that Really Count’ by British newspaper The Times. Two years before that, they’d ranked her in their Top 10 Food Blogs in the World. She now has 60,000 readers each month and her fan-base stretches from the US and Canada to the eastern reaches of Europe.

It was like a scene straight from the movie, Julie and Julia. In 2002, American chef Julia Child was the inspiration for “The Julie/Julia Project” a cooking blog by Julie Powell that went on to become a bestselling book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Powell cooked 365 dishes, one a day for a year, from Julia Child’s iconic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her blog was picked up by the New York Times and soon the blog and book, along with Child’s own memoir, inspired the 2009 feature film Julie & Julia, with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.

When Niamh gives advice to aspiring bloggers: it’s to blog about something that you’re really passionate about and to treat your readers with respect. Now 36, she is really serious about the integrity of her blog, refusing advertising in case it should compromise content. She believes communicating with your readers is key to a successful blog. Another natural step for her then was to start cooking for her readers. In 2009, she opened up a food stall at Covent Garden Market where she sold an array of hot dishes, soups and breads every Thursday for six months. Her signature dish was Overnight Slow Roast Shoulder of Pork in a homemade Blaa with spiced apple relish.

“This was really key to establishing myself. No bloggers had really gone out to show that they could cook. The market [people] were very surprised at the business. It brought readers down that would never have travelled to that market before. They wanted to try out my food,” she said.

It also taught Niamh how physically and mentally exhausting semi-commercial catering can be. She was spending loads of time shopping for the market, a day preparing food and she was normally up until 2am the night before. That didn’t leave much time for sleep, as she was up at 5am or 6am to bake bread for the stall. The menu also changed from week to week which meant she was forever on her toes.

“It was a really difficult transition. I wasn’t operating at a really commercial level, I was looking after about 100 people a day. But I really pushed myself. I didn’t realise how much I’d pushed myself until I finished up. I was exhausted, mentally and physically. It was taking up so much time.”

She was also doing all the cooking from a tiny “box-room of a kitchen”. Her kitchen is so tiny she says she’s contemplating putting a fridge into her bedroom, which she says isn’t much bigger.

“I realised that if I was to carry on, I would need to have an industrial kitchen and more people to help me. I was arriving to the stall at 11am and it would be 8pm before I left. That night, I would be physically sore and exhausted,” she said.

Niamh herself is like a locomotive, she talks so quickly. Her life also seems to be not unlike a juggernaut. About 18 months ago, she gave up the day job to concentrate on food and now she can’t cram enough hours into the day, there’s so many dishes, restaurants and faraway lands to discover. This past week, she was in Croatia where she fell in love with Croatian fritoles, “a beautiful little yeasted doughnuts” and this week, she also posted about being invited to her hero, Claudia Roden’s for lunch. Last year, she also published her acclaimed first book ‘Comfort & Spice’.

We spoke early in the morning and, while she was unfailingly polite and talkative, she also sounded damn tired. She says she quickly learnt that one of the drawbacks of being self-employed, particularly in a field that invigorates you, is that ‘work’ naturally bleeds from night to day.

The night before a friend had called over, she said, and she barely got to talk to him as she was three hours in the kitchen preparing dinner.

“He was just saying how impressed he is that I still love cooking so much. I was cooking wild garlic gnocchi. It was great”.

After Niamh got off the phone, she had a mission to complete. She’d got a tip-off that wild garlic was growing in a wildlife park in North London. She won’t disclose which park it is, as she says it would be all over Twitter and Facebook and then her source will dry up as fast as it sprouted — “they’ll all be there”. She’s incredibly excited about this garlic find. She loves foraging. Take for instance three-cornered leek, she finds it all over the city. I comment on how supermarket garlic seems to be such rubbish these days. “It’s all from China. The second biggest source is Mendoza in Argentina,” she says. “It’s all dried up. The European garlic is so much better. It hasn’t dried and it’s so fresh and vibrant. A-mazing,” she says, brimming with enthusiasm.

Niamh is the first to admit that she’s taken a serious income drop to concentrate on what she loves. She does ad-hoc freelance work for newspapers and magazines and has just finished an extended stint at the London Evening Standard. She also does some writing for iVillage and travels extensively — an activity that brings her blog to a new level. She also cooks at a variety of food festivals such as this month’s Waterford Festival of Food (April 12-15) where she is doing a pop up restaurant with Claire Dalton from the Dungarvan Brewing Company and Cooking for You caterer, Eunice Power. The event is sold out.

“I don’t just want to do writing. I did a tour of Maltby Market recently, bringing a group of people around and showing them the producers that I love. I then brought them for lunch in a nearby restaurant. It was great and I’d love to maybe do that twice a month. I loved it and they loved it, but I need to work on the idea so it’s good value for the customer, the restaurant and makes sense financially for me,” she says. She loves Maltby Market describing it as “cheaper, funkier, less crazy, less a theme park” than the vaunted Borough Market.

Blogging truly changed Niamh’s world.

“A lot of my friends were having kids when I started the blog and it’s not something that I’ve done or am considering doing. Suddenly, they were disappearing off the social scene, then I was making blogger friends. Now the blogger friends are old friends as many of the friendships date back five years. I have lots more people to try out new restaurants with. It’s great.”

Quick to heap praise upon her non-blogging social circle, she says they laugh at how her disposable income disappears on food shopping and trying out restaurants.

“It is very hard financially, but I am so happy, more confident and relaxed these days. I get to do so many things, so many random things. I just love what I do and so I make compromises in other parts of my life. I am very, very happy.”

* www.eatlikeagirl.com

* As part of the Waterford Festival of Food, Niamh Shields will transform the Civic Offices into a ‘Pop Up’ Restaurant on April 14. The following day she will take to the stage to demonstrate her cooking at the Town Hall Theatre. See www.waterfordfestivaloffood.com