marketing | Ramblingrose

Welcome to my blog/journal/whatever

This is the real guts of this website. The old website and its archived posts is still available at its old url. Newcomers might like to dip into it every now and then.

Welcome to you all. Amazingly I still don't seem to be running out of ideas on what to write - well occasionally - but I have my writer's block strategies to turn to - see the text on the right. Check this page for the latest posts and if something interests you just click on it. It's easy to leave a comment and I love to read them. And now you can subscribe to the blog and get emailed notifications of new posts. And sorry I just don't understand Facebook.

"We are not here for long. So let's at least make ourselves something good to eat."

Nigel Slater

"I was born hungry, not a cook."

Julia Child

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well"

Virginia Woolf

Writer's block

Every now and then I can't think of a suitable topic and so I have devised a few strategies to get around this.

Lucky dip

The first strategy I devised is to go to one of my three cook book bookshelves, close my eyes and pick a book. Close my eyes again and pick a page. It's really quite an enlightening method of getting over writer's block.

'A word from'

My second strategy is to devote a post to the thoughts of one of my favourite cooks. Hopefully it will introduce them to you

Or

I shall choose a picture I have come across and extemporise on that.

A second kind of lucky dip

I have been thinking about first recipes in cook books - so I shall choose a book not quite randomly and then look at the first recipe for inspiration.

Comments I love reading your comments. Just add a name - any name - it needn't be yours, add an email, ditto, type in your comment and hit the Comment button. Done. Wix sends me an email to tell me what you said, so I can respond if needed. Mostly I just read and enjoy. If you would like to subscribe to this blog and get notifications of new posts then click here. It's free - just a way of knowing what I wrote about today.

enjoy

to subscribe to the blog click here

A recipe, Coles and Curtis Stone - this and that

The recipe in question is from Curtis Stone, in the current Coles Magazine - Lemon-garlic fettucine with crisp chickpeas. I started out today thinking I would do a whole post on crisp chickpeas as they seem to be turning up everywhere I look these days, so when they turned up in the Coles Magazine in this very tempting recipe, from a professional chef, such as Curtis Stone - well he does have at least one Michelin star - I'm not sure how many - I thought I might look closely

Aug 23

Two quotes and a phone call

"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions" John Kenneth Galbraith I've had that quote from John Kenneth Galbraith in my Ideas list for a long time. I wasn't quite sure what Galbraith meant, and I suspect, being an economist, that he wasn't really thinking the same things as have come to my attention today, from the phone call from a friend. There is so much to say about supermarket labels, and I know I have said lots of them

Aug 6

Subtle and not so subtle advertising - which works best?

"A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself." David Ogilvy On the left an actual ad albeit Coles promoting itself in its Magazine and on the right what looks like the next recipe(s) it is publishing but which in effect is a page advertising several different things - some in-house, some from suppliers. Yes there is a recipe - and yes this is a discreet section of pages in the magazine. But it is also an ad albeit for a number of

Jul 28

Overbalanced - ads and websites

Time for a website and this is the next one on my list. I looked at it a while ago and wondered why I had it on the list, and actually decided it wasn't worth a look. However, since then I have wondered a bit at why I rejected it as unworthy of a look, but then thought, well it's relatively popular - it often comes up in the first few results in searches that I make. So I need to think more about it. And one thing that is a thing to talk about is the massive number of ads

Jul 18

A missed opportunity

A couple of days ago, this brochure arrived in our letterbox. Of course I was not excited, but I did think that it might have some information inside that would be useful for a blog. And it did but not in the way I thought it might. I should explain that Woolworths has been undergoing the same renovation process that Coles undertook some time ago, and that I'm sure is happening everywhere, with variable tweaks made according to the physical size of the store and the demogra

Jun 25

Nigella on Instagram - a sort of postscript to yesterday Nigel

"Instagram is a visual medium, no less than television, so it’s always going to favour photogenic food, but still, it can make a cook despair." Nigella Lawson Nigella is a friend of Nigel's so it's sort of appropriate to turn to her thoughts on Instagram - a visual medium, as she says - if ever there was one. And obviously she eventually succumbed, because this is her Instagram logo - 3.1 million followers - huge. Moreover - I have just thought - Nigella - the brand anyway

Mar 14

Food delivery - a sort of boy kibble postscript

"Australians are now spending billions of dollars every year on food delivery apps." Australian Financial Review There were a couple of kind of related items in yesterday's AFR weekend and they both sort of connected to the boy kibble thing - and in addition, coincidentally, an item in my Happy Foodie (Penguin's cookbook publishing) newsletter this morning also fed into the whole thing. So herewith a few rambles around GenZ and Millenials, their eating habits and the way of

Mar 1

Toblerone

" Finally, the recipe is quite simple, but paradoxically will never be equaled ... obvious ingredients, inimitable mixture" Eugénie Rousak/Now Village You may or may not remember, but quite a long time ago now, on one of my walks I decided to photograph everything with a link to food. I think so far I have tackled one, maybe two of those. Today I'm on to this one - Toblerone. A wrapper tossed away by a walker or from a car, on a semi busy road. I don't think that's a bit

Feb 11

Is anyone impervious to advertising?

"A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself." David Ogilvy I noticed that the Coles Magazine now has a new section - Coles Finds . No that's not strictly accurate. It has always - well for some time now - been there, but usually just a page, with a scattering of products. Now there is a whole three or four page section which is presented in the same way as any other of the sections in the magazine - and crucially - near the fr

Jan 21

Roast leg of lamb - a lucky dip

"How to roast a leg of lamb to rival even your mum's" Donna Hay Magazine Yet again my heart sank when I opened a page at random in my randomly chosen cookbook - Issue 10 of the Donna Hay Magazine - now discontinued. These days I ask David to choose my lucky dip books because my choices are not really random, for even with my eyes closed I sort of know what book I'm picking. He, on the other hand, has no idea. Issue no. 10 is a winter edition I think, and so a roast is a

Oct 28, 2025