An eyeful from Forkful: great food gets its starring role

Aoife McElwain and

met almost by chance. Duggan, a photographer, was assigned to go to McElwain’s house to take photos of the meatball recipe she was creating for her husband,

to taste-test for a magazine article.

The pair now collaborate on Forkful TV, producing video recipes with a focus on “simple recipes, deliciously shot”, however at the time, Forkful was just an idea Duggan had been playing with in his head.

"I was in Greece with my fiancée Cherie and we were talking about how incredible Greek food is and its simplicity . . . I guess this was the catalyst for the idea. In our post dinner/holiday euphoric state, we laid out the bare bones to what would later become Forkful. It was Cherie who recognised where I was going with it before I did," he says.

Meanwhile McElwain was working on her food blog, I Can Has Food?, which Duggan was familiar with. He approached her with the idea for Forkful. It just so happened she had been trying to figure out how to develop her blog beyond writing.

“I had been looking for a different direction in terms of blogging and ways of sharing my enthusiasm about food. I started writing my blog in 2009. It began as a way to tell my personal journey of learning how to cook, sharing silly stories about kitchen disasters, past and present. In 2012, I was looking for a way to challenge myself more in terms of recipes and food styling. So Mark’s idea for creating the Forkful videos couldn’t have come at a better time,” she says.

"I was ready for a collaborator. . . working with Mark has really helped me up my game in terms of food styling, and helped me focus on the parts of the process I'm most passionate about, which is writing the recipes and celebrating the food. We also work with editors like Killian Broderick, illustrators such as Kathi Burke (fattiburke.com) who did our logo, and my husband Niall also picks all the music for the videos."

“The use of music in our videos is really important to us. We don’t use any voice-over. Instead, we use captions that give the viewer an idea of how the recipe works. They can then follow the step-by- step recipe on our website.

“We choose our music carefully, and almost always use Irish music. Working with our music supervisor Nialler9 [McElwain’s husband], we select music from Irish bands we love that sit well with our videos. I don’t think MMOTHS created his tracks with carrot cupcakes in mind but his music works beautifully with baking. We have also been loaned tracks from musicians like Little Xs for Eyes, Embrz, Bantum, Enseble Ériu, and Somadrone. As we focus on Irish ingredients, we like to reflect that by focussing on Irish music too.

“We have only used one non-Irish track in our videos, when American band Hundred Waters soundtracked our parsnip fritter video.” This video was filmed in September 2012, but didn’t go online for another eight months. “We needed the time to figure out what we were doing, the name – back then it was still called EAT – the music, the pacing. Once we were editing that initial footage and seeing it come together with the music, I knew it was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was a really exciting moment,” says Duggan.

Since then, the two have created over a dozen videos, some in collaboration with other companies and foodies, and McElwain has shelved her blog to focus on Forkful. She is in charge of the recipe content, and she says the first port of call before any video is to start with what’s in season, rather than what’s trendy.

“I’ll look at seasonal calendars and write down all the fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood that are in season. Then I’ll start to think about what kind of occasion the recipe might be for. Is it for a simple supper? Is it a special occasion cake? I look at other blogs and websites and see what they’ve done with the ingredient. Or I’ll think about how the ingredient might be served in one of my favourite restaurants. Pretty soon, a recipe starts to form. There is often a lot of scribbling and crossing out, and I have notebooks full of recipes in development,” she says.

Ingredients are central to the recipes McElwain chooses to do, not least because she's inspired by ingredients she works with. "I'm inspired by my upbringing in the Middle East, and when I smell za'atar it transports me back to the souks of Saudi Arabia that I loved exploring. I am inspired by ingredients themselves, and by the need to do something special with them. I am inspired by overcoming negative food associations. I thought I would never eat cauliflower again after witnessing its severe mistreatment in boarding school. I became intent on discovering its good side and I have succeeded," she says.

At the heart of everything is a desire to keep things simple, from the recipes to the video style itself. “I love cookery shows and programmes about food but they have a tendency to adhere to certain tropes, the presenter or chef tends to overshadow the food,” Duggan says. “With Forkful, we’ve reduced what a cookery show is and made it just about the food. We’ve purposefully not featured Aoife, with the exception of her hands. . . We tend to embrace imperfections. It mightn’t be perfect but it feels real, and cooking isn’t always about perfection, it’s about creating and coming together.”

“I used to be a bit afraid of cooking, thinking that it was something I couldn’t do or that it was too hard or there were too many ingredients,” says McElwain. “When I’m writing a recipe, I have the 21-year-old me in mind. I want the recipes to be accessible and easy to follow, to help someone else find their confidence in the kitchen.

“I love our current style because I never have to brush my hair,” she jokes. “The focus is entirely on the ingredients. I’m happy to let the ingredients be the centre of attention.”

Now, the duo has created a series of five videos in partnership with The Irish Times. "In the last year we've focussed on still photography, so this is our way of getting back into videos," says McElwain.

The recipes, which will be posted on irishtimes.com/food every Saturday from today until November 28th, include a roasted cauliflower salad, a naked cake with meringue buttercream icing, and beef cheek tacos with Korean barbecue sauce.

Two of the videos in the series are mini-documentaries – "The recipes we've done have always been based in kitchens so we wanted to take Forkful outside" – and were filmed on location with some of the Irish producers whose ingredients form the basis of the recipes. "One is on Hell's Kettle farm in Wicklow who grow hazelnuts, and another is on the Red Bank Food Company who export oysters from the Burren," says Duggan.

“There’s a common theme between them because they are both small operations,” says McElwain. “One is a husband and wife and one is a dad and a daughter, and that’s it. They do everything themselves, so we thought they would be really good to highlight.”

“They’re little vignettes on the people, the process and the place the food comes from. It was genuinely inspiring to spend time with these producers and growers, to see how and what they do and how it permeates their lives and the lives of their children.

“There’s so much talent in this country when it comes to food and to be involved in that through Forkful is a privilege,” Duggan says.

[ forkful.tv ]