2 months to go!
Street Feast is on Sunday 23rd June. It’s time to get planning your feast! Check out our downloadable guide on www.streetfeast.ie for great suggestions and tips.
How about a Talent Feast?
How cute is this?! Here’s an invitation to a Street Feast Talent Show that Louise Williams in Harold’s Cross recieved in her letterbox from her 10 year old neighbour Lauran. It’s great to see the young people getting excited and planning their own feast!
The kids in Harold’s Cross Cottages in Dublin 8 are already planning their 3rd annual Street Feast for the 23rd June. We love their creativity. It leads us to wonder, what events are you planning for your Street Feast? Please let us know!
Feasting on Fade Street kickstarted a weekend of Street Feasts
Dublin’s newly renovated street, Fade Street, opened on Saturday with a colourful Street Feast at an exciting all-day bicycle festival, ‘Yestival’.
Banquet tables replaced cars, as people thronged to share food and celebrate community under colourful bunting and surrounded by bikes. Food was brought to the table by guests in a pot-luck style feast and pizza & salads generously donated by a selection of Fade Street’s cafes and restaurants.
The Street Feast on Fade Street was the first of many over the weekend. Over 50 communities across Ireland sat down to share lunch with their neighbours on Sunday. Street Feast held it’s 3rd annual day on Sunday 17th June.
New initiatives such as Street Feast and Yestival aim to make streets more people-friendly. Samuel Bishop, co-founder of Street Feast explains “We’re encouraging communities to come together and redefine their streets, parks and public spaces. Street Feasts are really simple events that can inspire community action and change people’s relationship to their neighbours.”
Throughout the afternoon street feasters joined in the Yestival celebrations, including pedal- powered cinema, a slow bike race, a vintage bike exhibition, live music including a set from Luca Bloom.
“I wish every weekend was like this,” said passer-by Eimear McNally, “It makes Dublin come alive and bring people together in new ways.”
“We were delighted to bring Street Feast to Yestival”, said Peter O’Brien, who co-ordinated the bike festival, “Sharing food together is just a simple and effective way to connect people. Today not only did people have a great chance to dine together, they also were a part of this exciting celebration of cycling in the city. It is a real showcase of how we can make our cities healthier and happier places to live.”
Contact Samuel Bishop on hello[@]streetfeast.ie or 0862121492 for more info
Healthy Local Communities
We are passionate about promoting the importance of healthy food in community and highlighting how positive local business can help build healthy communities. What better way to explore that further with a short post from Stephen Flynn of The Happy Pear, the natural food market in Greystones?
By Stephen Flynn of the Happy Pear
Street Feast is a wonderful opportunity and initiative to reconnect communities and celebrate locally produced good food! It’s a brilliant idea and movement that is growing every year.
At the Happy Pear we firmly believe that to have a healthy national or global economy it all starts with having healthy local communities, where people feel connected and well nourished.
We always try to source any produce we can from local sources, we try to encourage other local enterprises and in the restaurant we always try to celebrate what’s in season by cooking with seasonal veggies.
Here is a recipe for our sun dried tomato pesto - very little of the ingredients are local but it does taste delicious! Best of luck with street feast!
Happy Pear sun dried tomato pesto recipe
Makes 3.5 tubs
- 100g of sun dried tomatoes (soak over night in water - drain before using)
- 50g of almonds (soak over night in water - drain before using)
- 300 ml olive oil
- 50g of basil
- 20g of peeled garlic
- 1g cayenne pepper
- 25ml of balsamic vinegar
- 6g salt
Blend all till smooth and delicious!
Tasty Street Feast Prizes
Make sure to register your Street Feast!
€100 GoCar voucher for every registration of a Street Feast.
The wonderful team at GoCar want to support and encourage Street Feasts to take place around the country, and to play their part, they are giving away 4x€25 vouchers for their new car-sharing service. (Think ‘Dublin Bikes’ but for cars).
Enter the draw for a wonderful Irish Food Hamper
One of the best things about hosting a Street Feast is the connections that are created within your community. Holding a Street Feast is only the start of getting to know the people around us. We hope you’ll hold many more events in your neighbourhood over the summer and into the future.
To help inspire future gatherings, we’re giving away a hamper to one lucky Street Feast team. To be in the draw, you need to register your feast. We’ll pull one feast out of the hat on Sunday 17th June, and deliver the hamper to your door a few weeks later. You’ll have no choice but to invite the neighbours out again (or into the house) to share the spoils!
Click here to go straight to the registration page.
A meal with Clodagh McKenna - Grab your camera!
After the bunting from your Street Feast has been packed away for yet another year, why not have someone else cook a meal for you to share with a neighbour, friend or partner!
We’re looking for the best creative documentation of a Street Feast - it could be a selection of photos, a short video made on your smartphone or a painting done at the feast; The best submission will win a dinner for two in Clodagh’s Kitchen.
Dublin’s newest restaurant is the cherry on the ‘Arnott’s Department Store’ cake. Two people will be invited to dine on their Italian inspired menu. With celebrity chef and business woman Clodagh McKenna at its helm, the food will no doubt be exquisite!
See ‘Homemade by Clodagh’ for more. Please submit to streetfeast@gmail.com
Two weeks to go!
We’re so excited to share this lovely, simple video inviting you to host a Street Feast in your community. We think it really captures the buzz, tastes, colour and connections that Street Feast is trying to inspire in communities across Ireland. It was shot at our Street Feast launch on the Millenium Bridge over the Liffey in central Dublin last year. Enjoy!
“We’re inviting neighbours all over Ireland to get together on June 17th in their streets, local parks or even front gardens to enjoy each others’ company and some great food. Organise your Street Feast by visiting www.streetfeast.ie”
Many thanks to Mark Duggan, Conor Maloney and Killian Broderick for their great work.
A Street Feasting ‘Ring’
The children in one area of Harold’s Cross are uber-excited about Street Feast and are determined to transform their local ‘ring’. Louise Williams, the host of last year’s Street Feast(s) explains more…
I think the people who benefitted the most from our 2011 Street Feast are the local kids. They put lots into it, bringing home-baked cakes and getting games going on the little green area where we hold our neighbourhood’s Street Feast.
The kids call it the ‘ring’, it’s got a low metal boundary around it, I think that’s how it got its name. There’s some grass there and a statute of Mary where every now and then neighbours gather to say the rosary. But apart from the kids playing and the occasional prayer, the ring doesn’t get much use by the whole neighbourhood.
Until our party last year. It went great. We put up bunting, we got tables from a local community centre, lots of people came, some brought homemade food, a few bought salads and sweets, some Muslim neighbours came loaded down with rissoles to share, despite the fact it was Ramadan- the Muslim fasting period which meant they couldn’t eat. One neighbour brought hoola hoops which went down brilliantly with lots of kids competing to turn the greatest number of loops with the rings around their waists, necks and ankles.
It was great and for me, it all went by in a bit of a blur with some rain at the end, but what do you expect?
I think because the ring is where the local kids usually play, they get really excited about Streetfeast. I got to know them better, they got to know each other better and it all led up to their brilliant idea to hold a ‘Scaryfeast’ at Halloween.
For Scaryfeast we decided to have some games at the ring after they had gone around the houses to do trick or treat and stock up on sweets.
We had dunking for apples to start with - it took forever as no-one wanted to stop dunking their head into water, even after all the apples had been grabbed from the bowl of water. Then for the scary story, my favourite part: I told a story about a long-dead neighbour who haunted our neighbourhood on Halloween, passing around bits of food to make them shriek with fear (pretend and real), as, for example, I described how we found the dead man’s wizened ears as they passed dried apricots from hand to hand. Peeled grapes for his eyes went down well although they were quick to spot the damp sponge for what it was, not his brain, as I had claimed. It was a hoot.
‘Workshops, we want workshops,’ was how they decided to contribute to this year’s Streetfeast. They may be 8 and 9 years old, but they’re super organised: they have scripts printed out, a lot of energy going into what they confidently refer to as improv, and the original idea for a workshop is evolving into a short play which they might even get filmed. Rehearsals have been held in the shade of one of the trees on the ring in the weeks leading up to Street Feast.
We’re hoping for good weather this year and looking forward to lots of home-made food before the kids create a stage for high drama at the ring.
Cake Cafe and Street Feast
The lovely Michelle Darmody is the owner of the equally delightful Cake Cafe, just off Camden Street in Dublin. She is also a fan of Street Feast. Today she shares a few thoughts on how food can help to bring people together as a community. She also shares a yummie recipe for a simple sponge cake- a perfect thing to share with neighbours on June 17th. Thanks Michelle.
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I love to eat almost more than doing anything else in my life. I love to explore new tastes, to find the strangest cheeses, the sweetest dates, the beautifully paired ingredients that make each other sing. Every new country I visit throws up more new and exciting taste possibilities. Morocco with its deep, burnt, full, aromatic cooking, Thailand with its light and fresh seasoning and gently cooked fish.The list could go on for ever and it does.
I once read about a girl who said she remembered events in her life by the dresses she wore, well i remember events in my life by the meals that I ate. I remember the first olive I tasted in the English Market in Cork. I remember not particularly liking it but thinking it was so sophisticated to be eating olives that I made myself like it. I remember sitting on a cliff top in India with fish being pulled straight from the tandoor oven red and hot and spicy being washed down with a cold bottle of Kingfisher beer, I remember the brown soda bread my father used to make early in the morning, the heavenly smells filling the house as we tore ourselves from our wintery beds. I remember chipper chips after the school disco when you had drunk a little too much and wanted to mask the smells before facing home.
Eating to me is an act to be shared, to be enjoyed with friends and family, neighbours and colleagues. Streetfeast helps you do all of these things. It brings food out in the open, to be celebrated, to be enjoyed, to be shouted about. Food is the very foundation of our bodies, it becomes us and to me it should be the most important part of our day.
Simple Squishy Sponge Cake
Ingredients
Caster sugar | 150g | 5oz
Eggs | 5
Self raising flour | 150g | 5oz
Cream, whipped | 250ml | 8.5floz
Jam | 100 mls | 3.5 fl oz
Heat your oven 180 Celsius or 350 Fahrenheit or Gas mark 4.
Mix your eggs and sugar for ages with the balloon attachment until really light and fluffy.
Sieve in the flour and then fold so the mixture does not lose its volume.
Pour into a greased and lined tin and bake for about 20 minutes until it has risen and is nice and golden.
Do not open the oven door during the first half of the baking time.
