Joe McNamee

Food writer,  journalist, Contributing Editor with the Bridgestone Guide, Contributing Editor with Taste of Ireland

I am a food writer and journalist living in Cork city with my lovely Missus and am proud father to three beautiful children, one all grown-up and the other two, still in starter-kit mode. Formerly, Deputy Arts Editor with the Irish Examiner, I am now freelance and profoundly available for hire (my scruples usually go for an extra 10% but that’s also negotiable).

Other than my Arts writing, I have covered everything from hard news features to interviews to opinion columns to the truly light and fluffy colour pieces but in recent times, I am becoming more and more drawn to writing about what most pre-occupies me each day – Food & Drink and its preparation, consumption, sourcing, production, etc etc and a large slice of whatever you’re having yourself. While I shall occasionally stray onto other subjects, this blog, for the most part, shall be about Atin’ an’ Drinkin’.

Food, Drink and I have a long and exceedingly pockmarked history together but only really began in earnest once I left home – my Dear Old Sainted Mother (DOSM) is quite an extraordinary woman who excelled not just as a mother but professionally in a number of arenas during her  life. The kitchen was not one of them, let’s leave it at that. I began to learn about food and eating after I left home and over the years, cooking became my fallback occupation when I needed to scare up cash when no other work was available. (I wrote about it in the Irish Examiner for an article on the very wonderful Chapter One restaurant in Dublin http://www.examiner.ie/weekend/features/making-the-cut-152839.html). My last professional cooking job ended in my early 30s with me vowing that it was finally time to learn to cook properly – more than ten years later, it is really coming home to me how very little I actually know. But as I cook and bake each day for my family, I’m still having a helluva lotta fun learning!

SOME HELPFUL NOTES

Swashbuachaill – swash/-boo/-kill – to go on a skite, to enjoy an evening of carousing, to partake in copious amounts of food and drink in a celebratory fashion. Usage: ‘we went on a right royal swashbuachaill last night.’ Origin: possible Cork slang, most probably of spurious origin, picked up randomly on the internet and fancied the sound of it.

www.josephdmcnamee.com

My website address uses my full name because joemcnamee.com is already taken. The only people who ever called me Joseph were my father and my mother when she is angry. OK, in the interests of absolute transparency, the ‘D’ stands for Donald. I know, a duck and a very wealthy but extremely ludicrous hairpiece but I had no say in the matter at the time.