I never realised how important Twitter etc. are!

I first started using Facebook when a friend of mine got married in Perth, Australia and posted her wedding pics on FB (hello Telly Tubby x) and since then it has been a very useful way to keep in touch with far away friends that we miss in the Caribbean .

When Twitter first started at first it sounded a bit silly to me and you know it, or some of the Tweople who use it, are Very Silly Indeed or worse.  Nevertheless I joined up, started tweeting and have a little over 1,000 followers.  Sometimes it is quite fun and sometimes useful and informative. 

I find Pinterest a great way to store photos, both mine and other people's, in the cloud - a kind of online scrapbook and also a way to publicise my work. My book "The Leftovers Handbook", the publishers felt, is so full of information there is no room for photos so I put them on Pinterest just in case anyone is interested.

Stumble upon can be a great timewaster and I used to get stuck on it for hours, in fact one day a very spooky thing happened to me on Stumble Upon see here LINK

Blogging has become a regular and enjoyable habit for me and I am trying to keep it going during this troublesome time

I did not realise, however, until my recent (and continuing)BT Fiasco quite how useful a marketing tool networking is.

Since publication sales of my book The Leftovers Handbook have generally hovered in Amazon's rank at about 30,000 (the lower the number the better the sales) give or take a few thousand until BT disconnected our phone line.  See how sales immediately dropped soon after I stopped networking and then how they shot up again after I spent a day online at my friend's house.

I thought this might just be a fluke but it happened again the following week rather more spectacularly ...

... and I fully expect the same thing to happen in the next few days (fingers etc. crossed).

Of course when I am fully operational I don't just promote my own books and blogs I comment on other people's thoughts and ideas, make suggestions, joke, retweet things I find interesting, have conversations and generally post things I think funny haha or funny peculiar.  This is all very well but sometimes I've been doing it for hours and have to remind myself to get on with "important" things and stop playing!

Hopefully I shall be back online on or around or just after the weekend, perhaps, and can get back to my tweeting and in the meantime here is a bit of heartfelt networking I saw from the bus recently ...

Press Release

Recently I have received quite a few press releases from companies inviting, asking or hoping that I will endorse them on my Sudden Lunch blog.  Some of them are completely out of the question such as one received recently about electronic cigarettes which are really not for me.  Some are interesting for instance concerning Laverstoke Park Farm's range of meaty products for summer BBQing such as delicious sounding wild boar and chorizo burgers and a lady offering to do a guest post about nutritional matters (including a link to her business client) but I say no as they don't quite fall within my ambit, aka what I want to do.

Recently  I received something  about porridge and as I have quite  a lot to say about porridge I did write a post on it here and I shall probably be doing one soon about rice - damn fine infographic they have!  Here's a sneak peek or see here for the whole thing.

All this activity gave me the idea of doing a press release myself copying the layout of those I have received and here it is ...

For immediate release ...

Well timed cookbook by LEFTOVERS FANATIC

The Leftovers Handbook ~ an A-Z of every conceivable ingredient in your kitchen, with inspirational ideas and recipes for using them.

By Suzy Bowler

ISBN: 978-1-908974-08-2

Spring Hill Books, Constable & Robinson

Paperback 288 pages

£12.99 May 2013

"Since receiving this book I have felt far more confident that I can reduce food waste in my kitchen and try new recipes at the same time. One of the major bonuses is that the recipes don’t force you into the cycle of buying more ingredients just to use up leftovers! ~ Mumtopia

"This user-friendly guide is filled with quick and easy recipes. They may well inspire you never to throw anything away again." ~ The Sun

"What this practical guide lacks in pretty photography, it more than makes up for in innovation." ~ Great British Food Magazine

"Her style of writing is just so easy to read it's as though you're chatting to a friend and one that's on the same wavelength as you too."

Suzy Bowler's comprehensive book is a real help in getting the very best out of leftovers - something we can all benefit from.

The bulk of the book comprises an A-Z of over 450 ingredients with many interesting and delicious way to use them including what to do if you have too much of an item, ways to present leftovers in a new guise, how stretch a small amount of something delicious so that lots of people get a taste or, even better, how to make yourself a selfish treat with a tiny morsel. Entries include food pairing suggestions (useful for combining leftovers), advice on storage and freezing and the occasional handy hint, together with jokes, anecdotes and quotes. At the end of the book is a chapter of basic recipes, some storecupboard suggestions and a short rant on best before dates. The whole book is cross referenced making it a very handy tool.

With food waste hitting the headlines and the cost of living soaring this is a very timely book indeed but whilst whole libraries of books have been written on frugality and being green – this isn’t one of them! The Leftovers Handbook is about getting the utmost pleasure out of every single scrap of food available; the waste it tackles is not so much about money or resources but of good eating opportunities. It’s a bonus, of course, that this will save money and may even help the planet.

After cooking professionally for many years in Cornwall (as joint owner of The House on the Strand at Trebarwith) Suzy Bowler spent 16 years working as a chef on a small island in the Caribbean. On Tortola the climate is fabulous, food supplies limited, deliveries unreliable and customers as pernickety as they are anywhere.  The use of all food available was very important to her and back in Cornwall seeing so much good food being thrown away she decided to tell people what to do with it, so to speak.

ENDS

NOTES: 

The "Leftovers Handbook" has to date been mentioned in:

•                     The Sun Newspape
•                     The Independent Newspap
•                     Great  British Food Magazine
•           Scottish Home and Country
•                     Saga Online
•                     Vegetarian Living Magazine
•                     Eat In Magazine
•                     Writing Magazine
•                     Cornwall Property News

I have sent this to a few local papers and to someone farther afield who was talking about leftovers so fingers crossed.  I've had one response so far asking for photos and saying they will mention The Leftovers Handbook in their next issue - Cornwall Property News which has a Living and Lifestyle, Food & Drink section at the back.

Has anyone got any good ideas for promoting books?  It's a lot harder than writing!

My Neverending List!

I have always been prone to list making, I even enjoy it - especially the crossing off bit when a thing is done. I like that bit so much that if I do something not on the list I add it and then cross it off.  Sad or what!

Now, with my "writing career" "taking off" I have so many things to do I have a running list which despite all my delicious crossing off never seems to get any shorter.  I use iDailyDiary a very simple and free program which means I can copy and paste my unaccomplished tasks to the next day.

 

I do highlight urgent stuff in red and that usually gets done but some things just get transferred over and over again and then when I do look down the list I can no longer remember what I was talking about, eg.

·         "Twang it into a tree" - this is a little catch phrase we use at home but why did I add it to my list?  Twang what?

·         "Wombles - I mean it this time" (I did eventually remember what this was and wrote this blog post as a result but I'm still not sure why I put "I mean it this time"!)  

·         "Laupahoehoe Position" - after some stroky chin pondering this too resulted in a blog post. 

·         "Senegalese" - no idea.

Click here!

For a while I have had "Update Lush Description" in red on the list, waiting to be accomplished and yesterday I got round to it.  This is as a direct result of reading an excellent little eBook on my Kindle; "Unlimited Books Sales Machine" which makes some really good points and from which I realised that I could probably do better than just repeating the start of the book when describing my "Lush Ice Cream without a Machine" on Amazon, it does after all have a Look Inside option.  Have a look and see what you think of the new improved description here. 

Whilst I was making changes and also, as the sun was out (note the past tense!) I decided to do a Summer Special and reduced the price by 12%!  I put at the end of the description "get it whilst the sun's out!" which I wrote in a burst of enthusiasm but there's nothing like being prepared and anyway ice cream is good at any time.  Here's one I made earlier ...

Maple Syrup Ice Cream with Sugared Walnuts

Surely it's time for ice cream now, isn't it?

Lavender Honey Ice Cream

I have been concentrating so hard on my Leftovers book I had almost forgotten my ebook, "Lush Ice Cream without a Machine - or much time, or effort or having to mash the stuff as it freezes" but now, with the weather so much improved, it has somehow sprung to mind again.

I wrote Lush Ice Cream having seen how many homemade ice cream books there are on the market, often involving complicated methods and expensive ice cream machines.  I felt it would be shame not to pass on this undemanding but excellent recipe

Cherry Ice Cream Sandwich

(recipe for Chewy Marzipan Cookies here) 

In the book I give over 100 ice cream recipes plus lots of others for accompaniments, inclusions and serving idea.  For more details and photos see the tab at the top of the page or go here and have yourself a "Look Inside".  At only £2.25 it's about the price of a tub of ice cream in the supermarket and I am sure it will give you more pleasure.

Peach Melba Ice Cream from Leftover Fruit

The thing I hadn't realised is that this recipe is superb for using up leftovers - raw and cooked fruit, broken biccies, cake crumbs, crushed meringues, leftover sauces and "unwanted" chocolate.  Bonus!

Google, Diets and Rude Words

When I was writing "The Leftovers Handbook" my Father in Law expressed the opinion that I was more like to be a success if I wrote some porn and it turns out he was on the right track; I believe "50 Shades of Grey" may have sold even more books than mine.  Now that I am published I occasionally, only every half hour or so, check how my book ranks on Amazon and sometimes it is doing quite well but I'll tell what sort of books are doing really well, possibly right up there with porn - dieting!  Especially the 5:2 type diet.

Perhaps I could write a book combining all three, hmm - something to think on. I must be careful though.  When I was writing "Lush Ice Cream without a Machine" I did some research on the competition and found that a book called "Tits and Ice Cream: Because Everybody Loves 'em!" was published by Windupbird Publishing at the end of 2011. Looking for it now it seems it didn't do well and the publication was later abandoned!  I have tried to find a picture of the book's cover for your delectation but to no avail so here is a photo of an ice cream from my own ice cream book - which requires no machine, not much time or effort, no having to mash the stuff as it freezes and you can keep your clothes on.  Mighty fine recipe, even though I say so myself!

Easy Peasy homemade Blueberry Ice Cream

I have noticed (observant or what!) that the cunning or even inadvertent use of certain words can really increase visitors to my blogs.  A fairly obvious one was the mention of naked men in my last post; I had a feeling that might help.  More surprisingly was the vast number of visitors to my blog about a delicious traditional apple dessert, Devonshire Apple Dappy, a while ago on Sudden Lunch.  I soon realised what had happened as explained here. 

So, my point is, keywords, tags, metadata and tits can all be useful tools to promote one's blog!  I use Google Adwords where one can research keywords to see which are likely to have the best effect.  This is the result of today's search ...

... from which you will see that, surprisingly given the choices, "diet" is the most frequently searched for term this month, both globally (the first column of figures) and locally (the second column). "Dappy" isn't that high on the list but it worked for me, mind you that was 18 months ago and maybe the world has moved on since then.

Once you have chosen your keywords make sure they appear a few times in your post, use them as labels or tags and it is also a good idea to title your photos with a keyword before uploading. I had actually called the above chart "keywords" but having had another search changed it to "google" which was searched for online a magnificent 923,000,000 times in the last month and so should be a good keyword to use!  As another example; the ice cream picture above was originally named "blueberry ice cream" (8,100 searches on Google this month) which I have just shortened to "blueberry" (2,240,000 searches this month).

Another good idea ...

It is possible to change the title of a post after publication. This being the case I publish with a highly searchable keyword rich title and then, immediately, change it to something more friendly and appealing.  The first title is the one that appears forever in the URL to that post - this one was originally just "Google Diets" but I thought it might be more intriguing if I added "rude words", is that cheating do you think?  Of course, people looking for porn or Dappy probably move straight on but they may just find something of interest. They have to eat too you know, keep their strength up! 

Facebook ~ mostly good but a bit irritating!

I first joined Facebook as a friend of mine had married in Perth, Australia and put her photos on FB, since then it has been a very valuable took to me in two important ways.

1.   I now live some 4,000 miles from many close friends and we can keep in easy contact this way.  Even with friends closer to home this is helpful (the girl next door and I often chat with each other rather than having to go to all that faff of standing up, going outside, going to her house, going in etc!)

2.   Through FB I have found and 'met' some interesting people, had a laugh and learnt a lot.  In fact I would go so far as to thoroughly recommend it both generally speaking and as a way to get yourself 'out there' so to speak.  I am in touch with a number of food bloggers and enjoy swapping ideas and stories with them.

I also like the way a missing person's photo can be shared to help find them, petitions signed to stop cruelty and the way warnings about scams, health problems, travel hitches, etc. are posted. I'm all for things that amuse me, info about my old homes (Tortola and Trebarwith), competitions, lovely photos, interesting events, special offers, Rummikub (within reason ie. not paying for it), long rambling conversations with my friend Debs and keeping an eye on my family's doings!  I like knowing when a man I have never met but is a friend of a friend is doing a happy dance, he especially does these on Friday.

Having said that ...

There are several things that really irritate me, not about the application itself but about some of the stuff that floats about being shared etc.  They are, in no particular order  ...

~   The way cats, and to a lesser extent dogs, 'talk' with such strange accents or speech impediments.  I have lived with and been very friendly with many chaps of both species and never have I found any that talked in that ridiculous fashion.

~   The recent plethora of things saying "Bet you can't think of a film without the letter A in it" (ET?) or "..... a word that starts and ends with N" (nun, noon, nation, noun, neuron and I don't think I've even got started).  What is the point of these?

~   Even worse, the things that show a photo and say "Press Like and you will be amazed at what happens", and nothing ever does".  I know what the point of these is but surely people must have caught on by now.

~   Those things about serious illnesses that you are supposed to share and which say something like "I know one person who will but 78% (or some such number - very scientific) won't.  What is the point of them?  I am not heartless but these surely don't to anything for anyone.  If I am wrong and they do somehow help please let me know and I'll go for it.  

~   I can't think of the word for it but all those sayings that tell you how to think and live.  I'm a great one, me, for the old positive thinking, spiritual beliefs and all that and also am very keen on equality, respect for all life etc. and so on but I don't need to be reminded every few minutes (yes - I know that's quite a high frequency rate for checking into FB!)  Just thought - I think maybe proselytising is the word.

Perhaps I am being more irritable than usual due to still being heavily under the weather, hopefully when I don't have so much time for FB, soon,  I'll be a lot calmer about it.  Sorry!

The Leftovers Handbook

The good news is that my book is still on schedule to be published on 29^th March - just two weeks and one day.  I hope I'll have my strength back enough to jump up and down in excitement.

All the best,

Suzy Bowler

Christmas Ice Cream Recipes

I am beginning to wonder if this is perhaps the wrong time of year to have published an ice cream book but c'est la vie and all that.  It was already written and I was eager to try the whole eBook publishing thing.  I have sold a few books, of course, but not a truck load so to speak!

To me, ice cream is an all year round treat, even in colder climates. As evidence I was in Moscow about a quarter of a century ago, maybe more, in December and it was quite common and strange to frequently see people eating ice cream cornets in the street.  I don't know if it is part of the Russian culture!

Me at the Kremlin!

Anyhoo - back to my theme - there are three ice creams that I traditionally make at Christmas, all based on my one simple recipe, they are ...

1.   Buttered Rum & Ginger Ice Cream

I usually make this for pre Christmas social do's and sometimes for Christmas Eve.  It is one of my real man's favourites despite it being somewhat exotic by his normal standards.

2.   Ice Cream Mince Pies

Christmas Dinner alternative dessert and to my mind, because I don't usually like mincemeat except in thes, much nicer than traditional mince pies.

3.   Christmas Pudding Ice Cream

There are lots of recipes about for this but I have been making (and selling) this version for years and years, it is both the best and the easiest I know of.  I usually make this a few days after Christmas.

I'm afraid I cannot actually give the recipes here as part of my agreement with Amazon is that the material is not published elsewhere but I can encourage you to buy the book!  Go on, you know you want to!  Right, that's enough encouragement from me, sorry about that!

If you are British its just £2.25, please go here Amazon.co.uk

If you are of the American persuasion get it here Amazon.com  for only $3.60.

Who knows what this is?

Here is a portrait of an inclusion in one of the easy peasy ice creams featured in my eBook - my cat and I used to be quite partial to this stuff but that's not much of a clue!  Any ideas?  See end of this post for the answer.

The recipe using this mystery ingredient is in the chapter headed Savoury, Interesting and Peculiar which also includes such delights as Cracked Black Pepper Ice Cream (lovely with strawberries), Werther’s Original Crunch and delicious Blue Cheese Ice Cream which I like to serve drizzled with honey - like this ...

I don't, however, normally serve it on a piece of wrapping paper as in this photo.  Having made the ice cream I was at a loose end for an appropriate dish for the picture and, as it happens, I am rather pleased with the result. Artistic or what!

If you would like to read more please go Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com and have a 

or download a sample.  I promise you that this is a really easy way to make excellent ice cream, if you are at all dubious try the Maple Syrup Ice Cream, the first recipe in the first chapter; Very, Very Easy Ice Creams.  I think you'll be impressed.  Here is some served with sugared walnuts.

Reviews

I am proud to have received the following two reviews on amazon.com ie. from the Americas.

Answer

Popping Candy aka Space Dust - I had an unusual cat!

A Spooky Stumble Upon Story!

As you may have noticed I have added some sharing buttons to my side bar, please feel free to use them.  Please!  When testing them out I remembered a strange, strange thing that happened to me on Stumble Upon a few years back

Spooky Story

My real man and I were sitting on opposite sides of the table and I was passing the time stumbling on Stumble Upon.  I used to do it so much before I thought of trying my hand at being a writer.  Well, (this is the personal bit) ...

... my darling leant across the table and looking me in the eye licked around the edge of the lid of my laptop in a suggestive manner!  At my age!  I pressed the stumble button again, you can see how addicted I was, and got this ...

Just that and nothing else in large letters on an otherwise blank screen.  I was so surprised I didn't even look at the address bar just stumbled again as quick as I could.  Since then I have tried and tried to find this again but the only references I can find to screen licking are on foodie sites and um, you know, "adult" sites.  However even if I did find this again on Stumble Upon it was still one hell of a coincidence.

Something worth licking...

Wild Berry Pavlova Ice Cream made using my basic recipe method and my fail proof meringues - picture taken in Tortola a few years ago.   

I apologise for this seemingly blatant advertising; this picture is already on the relevant page but I have just discovered that food porn sites won't accept two or more pics from the same URL,I have to put them in a post before submitted them and I'm quite pleased with this one! 

How to Make Ice Cream without Eggs

I can't believe what an eejit I am.  I've been making ice cream ("stringent testing" you understand) thinking about ice cream, eating ice cream and writing about it and yet it never occurred to me what a bonus it is that the recipe I propound in " Lush Ice Cream without a Machine" Doesn't Use Eggs.  A friend who was reading my book said, and I quote ...

"We are delighted because William can't have ice cream with eggs in it so

this gives us lots of options".

Brilliant, I wish I'd noticed that useful aspect of the easy, flexible recipe I am so pleased with before I published the book!    

Cream for Ice Cream

A few people have asked me how much they should whisk the cream when making ice cream so here is a picture of the ideal texture ...

A little too much whipping and the cream will be unworkably thick, a lot too much and it will turn to butter!  Useful but no good for ice cream.