New Year's Resolution - cooking only scratchbuilt stuff

I haven't had a microwave for a couple of years now. Our last one broke and I made a point of not getting a new one. I wasn't sure what the point was exactly, but I really enjoy not having one now.

One thing I really missed was microwave popcorn, so a couple of months ago, someone showed me to make popcorn from scratch for the first time since kindergarten. I'm now really obsessed with it and eat it all the time (3+ times per week), to the point where I can make it consistently, quickly and easily.

The point of all this is that the other day I ate microwave popcorn again for the first time in months. Without meaning to be snobbish, it's very, very bad in comparison to pot+fire+oil+heat+butter popcorn. It's on the same level of difference as a microwave burger (e.g. Rustlers) to any kind of real burger. So I tried to give the unwanted microwave popcorn to Dog, but he turned his nose up at it, at which point I realised that (a) that's the first microwaved thing he's ever been given and (b) that it must be really, really, bad.

There is also the point that microwave popcorn is 3-4 times more expensive than real popcorn, even after you factor in the butter costs.

I've also recently been inspired by Tristan's homemade drinks and syrups, which I've been trying out, and seeing that often, the only difference between store bought and home made is a load of industrial processing and flavouring.

So my resolution is:
For cooking food at home, I will only use scratch-built ingredients. This applies to anything used in the quantity of more than a few dashes.

For example, I will only use scratch-built ketchup and mayo, but I am not going to ferment my own soy sauce or balsamic vinegar. It does not apply to drinks, and I also exempt bread, as I love crusty white bread and refuse to entertain the thought of frequently running out of it.

If I eat out or take out, it's anything goes.

This shouldn't be too hard, since I usually cook very simple stuff, and don't even cook very often, perhaps 3-5 times a week. It also gives me an excuse to make more stuff, which over winter, tends to be spent more in the house and kitchen rather than shed or park.

Things I commonly use/eat in my kitchen that now need to be scratchbuilt or scrapped:
Frosties, Paté, Coleslaw, Jam, Walls Vienetta (joke), fish fingers (F*#K!!).

So there we go. I'll keep updating on new things that I make from scratch, stuff that turns out very tough, or more things that I exempt myself from.

I also have other resolutions like cut my hair, stop spooning the dog, get some proper adult clothes, and stop being a wastrel, but those are all boring.

Proximity London appear to have the same xmas viral as glue London's from last year

proximity-london-glue-xmas, originally uploaded by dead insect \ /. (I didn't write this btw, but I do think it's funny).

We love childish stuff like this in the industry - "He copied me!", " No, I didn't see yours, I swear".

Anyway I used to work at glue, so someone sent me Proximity's recent Xmas viral to look at, and as it's exactly the same as glue's one from last year.


photo from Rob's blog

Did they think of it themselves? Don't know, not fussed. It's just a Christmas card anyhow.

However, I logged on to give them some good-natured stick, but they have someone censoring it live, and also a script which auto-changes the word "glue" for "Prittstick". They also appear to have blocked glue's IP address, and now mine after a few jibes.

That's a bit lame. If you show up with a year-old idea, you should expect to take some good-natured stick. Also, as an agency that does digital stuff, they should probably know better about censoring people on the Internet - it never works, and invariably drives people to publish even more. They could have dealt with it in a number of humourous, in-the-spirit-of-things-ways, but instead acted just like old media, putting one of the their staff on live censorship duty and blocking IP's.

on the rise of fancy dress amongst ordinary man

Any of you on Facebook? Have you noticed that it seems that with each month, more and more of the pictures of you and and your friends seem to be in fancy dress? Does every major party have to be fancy dress these days? It seems so, and there are more and more fancy dress clubnights springing up and gathering momentum too.



I suggest 2 reasons for this.

The first is that simply people are getting more and more bored with going out. This is just how we are, we get bored of everything very quickly. Bored of drinking in the local, bored of clubs and DJs, bored of nice meals at gastropubs, bored of nice cocktails in a nice bar, bored of big gigs, bored of secret intimate gigs and so on. Not to say these things are on the decline, but as a bunch we continually are striving for anything different to distract us into having fun again.

The second is the rise in how easy it is to take and share digital photos. Camera phones, cheap cameras, and Facebook/MySpace/Bebo. When I first started going out as a teenager, there were very few photos of it, and you would see them maybe once, and then no-one could be bothered to get them re-copied. Now, you can't even go out without there being a 30 pictures of the night out easily sorted, tagged, and available to view on a social network that everyone checks at least once a day.

The negative result of this is that instead of nights out being just a thing to enjoy in the moment, they sometimes become goal-orientated towards getting pictures of the night. If you're in any party or club, you will see some people spending as much time posing and taking pictures as doing anything else.

This is clearly crazy - have you ever been to a breathtaking tourist spot, e.g. Angel Falls, and seen a hustle of Japenese tourists simply come in, pose, take about a million pics and then move off, without taking any of the beauty in? It's the same insanity.

Previously, it would be your memories of the night out that would be all you have to judge it by.

But now, you now have lots of accessible pictures. Since the pictures are permenantly there, and easily shared and discussed - we can, and do, look at them over and over and smile - then the quality of a night out becomes associated with how good the pictures are from it, to a point where the the pictures become a more visceral measure of quality than our own memories of it.

This is why more and more nights are becoming fancy dress, or require some other extraordinary feature that will good in pictures. Simply because the history books are being written in online conversation more than in traditional conversation, and the nights which will acquire the most notorioty are those that look best in digital, as opposed to mental, images.

blogger relations case study - handbag amnesty

I've just finished doing a blogger relations campaign. By blogger relations, I guess what I mean is that no content or assets were created by us - no video, no flash app, no 'viral widget', or anything. Just a good old competition and an interesting message.



Client (handbag.com) wanted to raise awareness of Handbag Amnesty, a charity appeal involving auctioning celeb handbags on eBay.

We wanted to generate original unique, on brand, coverage, which would also provide link equity.

In a nutshell - we got 4 key fashion bloggers to run a competition for us, where they would ask their readers to blog for the chance to win a bag.

You can get the idea of by looking at this post here on one of the host blogs.

Results were excellent - with the only equity on our side being the charitable nature of the campaign, and four £250 hangbags - we managed to generate over 150 real, user-written blog posts about the campaign.

I really love working with smaller brands and campaigns, and am consistently amazed at how ROI often grows as budgets shrink.

Some things I learned:

Bloggers can be an incredibly helpful, positive bunch. People who blog and stick at it are overwhelemingly nice. The blogosphere is a nice place. I have ideas about why this is true, which I might write about later. Our call to action of helping to spread the word about a charity auction (even a heavily sponsored one) was as powerful as offering people free bags.

In some categories, there just isn't the depth of blogs (yet) to be worth getting stuck into. If you're having to change your campaign significantly just to get it onto the blogosphere, you should probably ask yourself why you're doing this. There are many other good ways to use social media, depending on your goals.

There is a huge difference between commercial blog sites and blogs.
Blogs are 2-way, personal, conversational and link a lot to each other. This is what gives them their value to us marketers - we know people are engaging with them. We can see it from the comments and links. Commercial blog sites rarely get the conversational, 2-way thing.

Abelha Cachaça UK - my new 39% ABV baby

I haven't had a lot of time to update this blog recently, for a couple of reasons.

1. I've been working freelance - just doing half days - which means that I don't have a lot of extra time sitting in an office, which is the kind of time that you use for blogging, e.g. when you're waiting for a meeting.

2. I've been working on this exciting new project which I can finally reveal. We've created and are launching a new brand of cachaça in the UK. For those who don't know, cachaça is a sugar cane based spirit (a little bit like rum, but not rum) from Brasil. It's the main ingredient of the world famous Caipirinha cocktail.



Our cachaça - Abelha Cachaça - is very different to most the cachaça's you find on sale in the UK. It's produced in the most traditional way using 100% natural ingredients at a farming collective in Bahia, Northern Brasil.

Pretty much everything is done by hand, to create the best possible tasting cachaça - this sometimes means that our process is slower, or less efficient but we think it's the right thing to do. It's produced in the same way that cachaça was made 200-odd years ago, and as a result of all this it has an excellent full and natural flavour.

Here's a slideshow of the production process if you're interested.



(It also happens to be organic and ethically produced, but I feel a bit preachy going on about it. It's just booze after all.)



It's been ages in the works, sorting out all the paperwork and so on, but we finally have the first batch in the country and out of the claws of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

Right now, we're working on getting listings (bars, restaurants and shops to stock us), and as soon as we have a good base of them, we'll be doing lots of exciting consumer marketing. If you have any good contacts (people who manage or own pubs/bars, let me know). Or with any advice generally!

In the meantime, feel free to snoop around our website, check out our cachaça FAQ - don't laugh, I had to build this thing with my own bare hands! We have a cachaça blog here too, so stop by.

By the way, you can get in touch with me (Anthony) on anthony@abelha.co.uk or 07815 776 215.