Blogger No.6 Tonight's Menu

Hello, I'm Ewan Mitchell, creator and curator of this here Olympic Food Challenge.  Whilst not setting a group of strangers ridiculous food related tasks I blog at Tonight's Menu, a daily food blog about our evening meals at home and occasionally, out and about in Leeds.  I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into my allotted 19 countries and can't wait to see what dishes the other 11 bloggers come up with.

You can follow me twitter at @EwanMitchell

For the Olympic Food Challenge I have drawn:

Afghanistan
Andorra
Argentina*
Azerbaijan
Central African Republic
Great Britain*
Grenada
India*
Lebanon
Lithuania
Marshal Islands
Mongolia
Philippines
Russia
Slovenia
Sudan
Tanzania
Togo
Uzbekistan

*Seeded Countries

Blogger No.5 The Food I Eat

When setting up the Olympic Food Challenge, I quickly realised that the number of nations taking part wasn't divisable by the length of the games.  I would have found it very difficult to find 10.736842 bloggers, each of whom would have taken 19 nations.  Fortunatly a couple of bloggers wanted to take part but couldn't commit to a recipe a day.

Steph and Dave, from The Food I Eat, are the first of two bloggers with a short list of nations.  The Food I eat is a blog of the experience of eating in restaurants and occasionally at home.  It was born out of Steph's love of food and photography.  Whilst Steph is incharge of the blog and the photographs, it is Dave that is incharge of the cooking.  Steph also runs The Food Place, a UK wide, independant restaurant and take-away guide.

You can follow Steph and Dave on twitter at @missstephwalker and @davepullig respectively.
For the Olympic Food Challenge Steph and Dave have drawn:

Barbados
Brazil*
Guam
Moldova
Rwanda
St Lucia
Ukraine

*Seeded Countries

Blogger No.4 Geek Leeds

Geek Leeds is a blog about life in Leeds, taking in beer, cafes, pubs and restaurants.  Geek Leeds is also the second, non-food specific, blog that has taken up the Olympic Food Challenge.  When Gary, the author of Geek Leeds, started writing back in August last year, he threw away the blogging rule book, deciding not to restrict himself to a specific topic.  This way he could write about what was exiting him at any point in time.  Hopefully the Olympic Food Challenge will keep him excited.

You can follow Gary on twitter at @GeekLeeds

For the Olympic Food Challenge Gary has drawn:

Bermuda
Bukina Faso
Caymen Islands
Dominica
Gambia
Hungary
Jordan
Libia
Madagascar
Mauritania
Monaco
Montenegro
Moroco
Pakistan*
Peru
Somalia
Spain*
Sri Lanka
Thailand*

*Seeded Countries

Blogger No.3 Soup Tuesday

Soup Tuesday is the food blog of Dan and Catherine and you won't be surprised to find out that it started as a weekly blog, focusing on soup, eaten on Tuesdays.  As with most blogs, mine included, it didn't take long before non-soup related recipes posted on other days of the week started to creep in.  It was in fact an other challenge that got Catherine on-board the Soup Tuesday blog-bandwaggon, a weekly bake off.

With a combined love of food, blogs and challenges these two should have no problem with The Olympic Food Challenge.  You can follow Dan and Catherine on Twitter at @souptuesday and @KasariW respectively.

For the Olympic Food Challenge Dan and Catherine have drawn:

American Samoa
Antigua and Barbuda
Australia*
Bahamas
Chad
China*
Chinese Taipei
Cook Islands
Hong Kong*
Mali
Niger
Panama
Paraguay
South Korea
Swaziland
Tonga
Turkmenistan
Venezuela
Zambia

*Seeded Countries

Blogger No.2 750 Miles

Sam is the author of one of two non-food related blogs who are taking part in the Olympic Food Challenge.  750 Miles is a blog dedicated to Sam's own personal athletic challenge, taking part in "a bit of an assault course".  It's a 12 mile course, featuring 27 obstacles devised by British Special Forces.  Sounds less than fun to me, but then the last strenuous exercise I took was running for a bus and that nearly killed me.

Sam is also about to start guest blogging for The Globe Trotters, so she's not worried about food writing and clearly she loves a challenge!  You can follow Sam on Twitter at @vogue_ismybible.

For the Olympic Food Challenge Rebecca has drawn:

Armenia
Cambodia
Comoros
Egypt
Georgia
Israel
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Mexico*
Palau
Palestine
Poland
Qatar
Seychelles
Switzerland*
Tajikistan
Timor-Leste
United States of America*
Vanuatu

*Seeded Country

Blogger No.1 Big Spoon, Little Spoon

Big Spoon, Little Spoon is the food blog of Rebecca from Leeds.  According to her bio she's only 23, but lets not hold that against her.  She started her blog at the start of 2012 with a post outlining her New Years resolutions. These included the standards, loose weight and save money.  She also resolved to eat something new or use an ingredient that she was scared of at least once a week.  Hopefully the Olympic Food Challenge will help her with the latter part of her resolutions if not the former.  You can follow Rebecca on twitter at @eatlittlespoon.

 For the Olympic Food Challenge Rebecca has drawn:

Austria*
Belize
Benin
Burundi
Canada*
Costa Rica
Djibouti
Equatorial Guinea
Estonia
Iceland
Ireland*
Malaysia
North Korea
Papua New Guinea
Samoa
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
Sweden
Tunisia

*Seeded Country.

The Challenge Accepted

When I dreamt up this challenge I had no idea how well it would be received.  I had no idea if enough people would like the idea to make it plausible.  I also didn't know that many other food enthusiasts, who had blogs, that I could coerce into taking part.  When I posted the original idea on Tonight's Menu I really didn't expect the response that it received.

Before I knew where I was my initial tweet, asking for interested parties, had been re-tweeted across the country by people that I'd never even had any contact with.  I was awash with comments and well wishes.  Then the first of the volunteers stepped forward.  I will be introducing you to my merry band of men and women in the build up to the challenge starting on the 25th July.  I hope that along the way we'll discover new recipes and make new friends, which is definitely in the Olympic spirit.

"But what about the draw?" I hear you ask.  Well that took place today.  All 204 recognised National Olympic Committees (NOC's) have now been drawn out of a hat and allocated to a blogger.  To ensure all fairness I first drew the blogger's names so that the 12 of us were randomised.  I then drew from a small pot of nations that I considered to be quite easy to cook from.  The remaining 174 were then drawn and allocated.

L-R: Bloggers, Easier countries, The Rest of the World

Over the next few months, as we close in on the Olympics, I will introduce you to all of the bloggers who have agreed to take part in the Olympic Food Challenge.  I'll also publish the nations that they have drawn so that we can all look forward to the culinary treats in store.

If the countdown to the Olympics hadn't begun, for 12 of us, it has now!

The Challenge

During the last football World Cup, I decided that it would be fun to cook meals from the teams that were involved in the evening matches.  This was a rewarding challenge, I had never considered the food of the Ivory Coast before, never mind cooked it.

With the Olympics being held in London this summer, I decided to do the same again, but it isn't that simple.  To start with, there are 204 nations taking part in the 2012 London Olympics.  Now I like my food, but I also know my limitations.  204 meals in 19 days just isn't happening.  I started to think about drawing names out of an Olympic hat but then what if I only drew out European countries? I could seed the countries to ensure that I only cooked from two western nations over the duration of the event.  None of these ideas filled me with joy because I knew I'd miss out on something somewhere along the line.

Then, during a conversation on Twitter, I realised what the answer to my prayers was.  I needed to enlist other food bloggers to the cause and share out the countries so that food from every nation would be eaten and nothing would be missed.  Sure I'll only eat 19 meals during the event, but with the combined writing, we'll all be able to see the examples of national cookery and choose dishes that we'd like to try ourselves.

So, over the last month I have been busy recruiting bloggers to the cause.  There is now a crack team of dedicated food lovers, who are eager to discover the National dishes of nations that they have never considered before.  These wonderful people, who are essentially helping me to taste the Olympics, will be posting recipes, descriptions or photographs on their own food blogs during the duration of the Olympic games. 

I will use this blog to collate and link to all of the wonderful food stuffs that are cooked between 25th July and 12th August 2012.  I hope you all enjoy the Olympic as much as I'm going to.