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.