As much as you all feel we’re assisting Noah (and that is the goal), this drive has allowed food lovers and food bloggers to come together, share their stories and have a few laughs in the process and ultimately work together.

I wanted to treat the participants to breakfast and some goodies from Daniela’s – as you know she kindly offered a box of 20 delectable macaroons. We also enjoyed her whoopie pies, which are awesome (you can read here about a super whoopie pie  Daniela made with me later that day)

The morning was fun and relaxed and the cupcakes were adorable. No two looked alike, which can be expected with such a talented and creative bunch!

Kamini posted her write up this morning. We all chatted about doing a joint post, in the spirit of unity, but alas we couldn’t quite figure the technicalities of executing the idea. I’ll put up my post soon..

As you know we had sponsors for the cocoa, aprons, cream cheese and vanilla pods. My husband and I sponsored the groceries. With 10 of us participating, at R200 per person we raised R2000.

Best wishes to you and Noah and his family.

Ishay

As always, our heartfelt thanks!

The Nosh for Noah events appear to be happening all around the world, with Melbourne Australia excited to try our Culinary hand…and to do our little bit for Gorgeous Noah! We had our Early Christmas Girlie Catch up on Friday 19th November and boy was it an Italian Feast to remember! Four courses….. minestrone & garlic bread, 2 pastas and salad for main, casata for dessert and cheeses and chocs to nibble on afterwards. Our prior warning to wear elasticated pants was very much appreciated!

Due to the busy time of the year it was a bit smaller than hoped, but ended up being a great night, with fabulous food, wine and company! We had an anonymous donation jar at the front door, and with this event held instead of our annual Girls Christmas Dinner, we suggested that people donate the cost of our usual night out.

We have to say an extra Special Thank You to the Fabulous McGrath’s… firstly for allowing us to use their Beautiful home as the venue and for your warmth and hospitality! I think everyone would agree that a special thanks should also go to Jason, our Honorary ‘Girl’ on the night, who not only came up with the idea for this dinner, but did half of the cooking and most of the dishes!! Thank you McGrath’s!

Jo and I have been Sooo blown away by people’s Generosity, both on the night and afterwards… it actually really brings happy tears to our eyes and we are sooo Thankful and Blessed to be surrounded by such Amazingly Generous people, Thank you all! We have so far managed to raise $430! This is due to donations on the night and a few extremely generous donations since. This has far exceeded our expectations. This money should provide Noah with over 11 days of therapy which is just amazing and we hope is going to make a difference.

Thank you once again to the wonderful trio who organised this Ultra Special website  we are honoured to have contributed to this very worthy cause!

And an enormous thank you and huge amounts of love to Jo and Ro from all at Nosh4Noah

Thanks lovelies !

But we’ve been remiss.  There has been loads going on and so finally an update on what’s potting in the Nosh4Noah world.  With some long overdue thanks to some pretty fab folk.

And with chocolate cups. Nom.

Firstly, the amazing team at Massimo’s Pizza Club in Hout Bay Cape Town raised some dosh for Noah by selling delicious chocolate liqueur at a bargain price, donating the difference to Noah’s fund.  Not surprisingly, all four bottles were sold in a nanosecond!  But you can still get some at the normal price.  Brilliant gift idea for Christmas, if anyone you love is fond of a tipple.  Or chocolate.  Or both. Om nom nom.

Massimo’s
www.pizzaclub.co.za
0733901373

We also raised R700 with a hilarious, down to the wire Twitter auction of two YuppieChef vouchers.  Jeanette Verster and Lynette Botha both bid close to each other at the cut off time, and agreed to both meet the top offer in exchange for the vouchers. Which meant retail therapy for them and professional therapy for Noah.  And the guys at YuppieChef offered to add a little sommink extra from them.  Good people!

Kate George at the Food Room is also heating things up.  All the spots for her Nosh4Noah gourmet Braai night on the 18th of November are booked – the lucky lot will learn how to dial their braai’ing skills up to ‘brilliant’ AND the whole evening’s takings go to Noah.  Awesome.  You could also book for the ‘home cooked meals’, ‘no meat Mondays’, ‘Italiano’, ‘light an easy meals’ or ‘not so scary seafood’ courses and if you quote #Nosh4Noah, 10% of your booking fee goes to the gorgeous boy.  Check them out here..

The amazing @LadyRaven has been plotting a #RVCathon.  A red velvet cupcake-athon!  The guys at NoMu have donated a flippin’ kilo of cocoa, so there’s no doubt some serious deliciousness is going to happen.  And @OdedsKitchen have donated the vanilla pods and @Fairviewwine have stepped up on the wine.  What cracking sponsors.  We’ve been promised photos.  (This isn’t NoMu’s only involvement, but more of that later!)  Check out LadyRaven’s blog post here.

On the other side of Cape Town, the Quirkstars at Quirk e-marketing have organised a cake sale (Cake or Death!?) and a pub quiz night, with loads of loola raised for Noah.  Another reason we heart Quirk. Lots.

And that’s not all!  Two amazing events in the pipeline.

Firstly, @kbrowski and celeb chef Neill Anthony are plotting an amazing pasta interactive demo cooking session.  It looks like our favourite retailers Woolies are going to help out with the ingredients too.  More on that to follow when the details have been ironed out.  But @kbrowski has been a legend and we’re blown away that @neillanthony has been so generous with his time.

Secondly, notoriously Nom NoMu are cooking up another little event with the Nosh4Noah team for early December.  We’re VERY excited about it.

And the best news of all?  We’re ALMOST THERE!  Marvelous people from all over the world, from strangers to friends, have shared the Nosh4Noah message and the support, big and small, has been flooding in. 

To date, we’ve raised just over R15k.  Which translates to over 200 hours of therapy for Noah.

One of our next blogs will about just that – Noah’s therapy and what this means for him.

So to everyone who’s shared this journey so far – thank you so very, very much!  We think you’re amazing.

I’ve finally got round to transferring the “jar money” to the Nosh for Noah account!  We had a lovely lunch on Sunday 31 October.  I’m generally a slap-up woollies food kind of hostess, but I made a special effort with the food in celebration of Noah’s cause!

On the menu…

Starters…

Chinese Spoons on white platters filled with smoked salmon, chilli prawns (chilli spice from Turkey, but that’s a story all on its own) and naughty-but-nice cream cheese

Various crackers

(Washed down with ice-cold Simonsig Kaapse Vonkel)

Main…

Slow cooked lamb knuckle stew in sneaky red wine

Wild mushroom risotto with lashings of parmesan

Jamie Oliver’s favourite pasta salad with garlic, olives, tomatoes, cucumber and fresh basil  (which is not for the anti-garlic types, but perfect for the rest of us)

(Some stuck with the Kaapse Vonkel, some moved on to a motley collection of Pinotage)

Pudding…

The tiered cake stand was hauled out of its hiding place, and we covered it with a variety of chocolate fingers, chocolate brownies, chocolate cupcakes… and more chocolate.

(There was tea, coffee and some more Kaapse Vonkel involved!)

We had a glass jar in the entrance hall for anonymous donations, and we were MOST impressed when our total reached R500.  It was a good day, and I was quite impressed by my culinary abilities.  Included is a pic of my daughter, Carolyn, putting the finishing touches on the Chinese Spoons.  And a pic of the table on our patio.  We had lots of flowers in plain glass jars – always a winner.

A fabulous way to kick off the Nosh4Noah events – ENORMOUS thanks to Kim and her beautiful family!

Over the last week, we have had a far larger international response than we had anticipated. Whilst utterly delighted, we were also aware that we needed an alternative payment mechanism for those not keen on international bank-to-bank transfers. Paypal seemed the obvious way to go. Obviously, it would have been far too easy for us to be able to set this up on Noah’s existing account. FNB is the only bank in South Africa that can be linked to Paypal which meant new bank account too.

Long story short, it’s all done now and we’re feeling rather clever.  Queries happily received on nosh4noah[at]gmail.com – and please let us know if you have any concerns about donating or would like additional proof of payment. We’ll do whatever we can!

Good book!

Nick Harkaway is an author.  He wrote a cracking fantasy-esque novel call the Gone Away World which is really rather bloody good.  I’m not going to lie; I am a massive, fluffy fangirl.  You can see why here.

He’s also a flippin’ nice human.  Nick tweeted about Nosh4Noah last week.  Interestingly, almost immediately someone asked him how he knew we weren’t a hoax.  Nick responded with this post on his blog about the nature of trust and the risk / rewards about having a low trust threshold on the interwebs.

It kinda blew me away.  For 2 main reasons: 1) because it gave me a big wake up call that even love and good intentions will be viewed with skepticism and doubt and 2) that despite this, lots of people (lots) are willing to risk themselves, their reputation, their money, their trust – whatever – on a brief moment of being nice to another human.

So even though we’re getting a bit of stick, I (we) find I (we) don’t care.  Because for every person who’s assumed we’ve got some kind of nefarious reason for doing this, there are another 15 who’ve surprised us with kindness and support.

And so we’ll nosh on! Until we hit that target.

P.S. the response to Nick’s tweet showed us that we might need to make it easier for our international friends and foodies to get involved.  We’re working on a PayPal button, which should be up soon.  But it’s involving a small amount of admin.  FNB is the only local bank that allows a PayPal set up, so we’re chatting to Noah’s folks about opening a special FNB account, since Noah’s account is currently with another bank.  The wheels are turning slowing, but they’re turning.

Kate is a Cape Town based chef who’s easy, down to earth cooking style means she’s the perfect teacher for those of us who don’t know our spatula from a spatchcock chicken.

The Food Room is her latest venture – an interactive cooking venue, where guests can learn how to make easy delicious nosh, and then eat it all immediately.  Along with lashings of great wine.

Kate’s classes take between 8 and 12 people and are reasonably priced between R300 and R400 a head, depending on the meal and the nature of the course.  All recipes, and invaluable hints and tips, included.

If you’re based in Cape Town and book one of her cooking courses in the month of November, 10% of the fee will go to Nosh4Noah.  But don’t forget to mention Nosh4Noah when you book.

She’s also going to be dedicating one whole session to Nosh4Noah – a gourmet braai class – of which 100% will go to more therapy for Noah.  Rocking!

Details: NOSH 4 NOAH BRAAI NIGHT!
Thursday 18th november 6:30pm / interactive dem
cost: R350pp
available places: 12
on the menu…

• an assortment of easy dips and spreads to serve with crispy bruschetta and fresh farm breads
• pork spare ribs – the secret revealed!
• beef fillet with roasted tomatoes, rocket and parmesan
• chicken kebabs – easy as anything!
• seared game fish – simple but delish
• a few salady bits and bobs

A perfect evening to spend with some girlfriends or with your favourite braai master.

So book quick (6 places for the Braai night have already been booked up) and get cookin’!

THANK YOU KATE!

The Food Room contact details:
+27 83 700 5859
info [at] foodroom.co.za

Click here for the November class schedule

Putting the alphabet in order

Sjoe.  What a week.  It’s not confirmed, but it looks like in just three days Nosh4Noah has raised over 100 hours of therapy for one incredible little kid.  That’s pretty mind-boggling.  To think that people literally around the world – both close friends and complete strangers – have stepped up to help.

Never in a million years did we think we’d manage this.  Neither Melinda, Bianca nor I are professional fund raisers.  As we’ve said, this isn’t an official NGO or Section 21.  We just wanted to help a friend and her gorgeous boy.  We haven’t done anything like this before and we’re all on enormous learning curves.

And yet people have been patient with us and so kind, so warm-hearted and so very, very generous.

I spent a bit of Friday night with Noah’s mum.  She was telling me a little about Noah’s therapy.  A lot of Noah’s autism-spectrum related reality generates frustration for him. For example, most 3 year olds understand the concept of ‘first this, then that’. In other words, if you first have a bath, then you can watch some Bob the Builder.

Of course, some 3 year olds aren’t interested in these kinds of compromises, and will try and project their own will onto the situation.  But in Noah’s world (and please forgive my very basic layperson’s understanding), the ‘first this, then that’ idea didn’t mean anything at all.   Can you imagine the frustration?  Not knowing that you will still be able to do something, but only once you’ve completed another task?

Specialised, focused therapy has changed this.  Noah now gets it.  And suddenly his folks have a way to connect with him and guide him through his day in a fundamentally powerful way.  A small, tiny thing that makes such a huge difference to them.

So to everyone who’s helped us get more of that for Noah: thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

They donated 2 x R250 vouchers within an hour.  No questions asked.  Just said yes.

See?  Fab people.

So today, for fun, we’re auctioning one of those vouchers off on twitter.  Announce your bid on twitter OR email us on nosh4noah@gmail.com. Reference your twitter bid with #nosh4noah so we can track all bids. Cut off is 4pm SA time today (Friday the 22nd of October).  And we’ll announce the winner as soon as we’re sure we’ve got all the bids in.

Please don’t forget to tag #nosh4noah in your bids on Twitter, or we might not see it.

Now, you might have been thinking about donating R250 anyway to #nosh4noah.  This way, you donate the bucks AND you get to buy some kind of scrumptious goodie from the amazing Yuppiechef site.  But of course, if we reach R300 or R400 that would be fab, fab, fab.  Either way, the highest donation / bid today buys Noah some therapy AND a little retail therapy for the bidder.  Win win, we say.

And if you don’t win, how about pledging your bid anyway?

On your marks, get set, GO!

Nosh on!

It’s difficult to find the right words to describe yesterday… but phenomenal, awesome and gob-smacking come pretty close.

We launched Nosh4Noah on Twitter and the response was overwhelming.

#Nosh4Noah has been retweeted all over Twitter and donations, offers to host #nosh4noah events, and just plain beautiful sentiments have started rolling in.

The absolutely amazing peeps at Food24.com kicked off the day by drafting and posting an article about Nosh4Noah. Follow them on @Food24

Massimo’s Pizza Club in Hout Bay joined in the fun by offering 5 bottles of limoncello, chocolate liqueur or sugar cubes at discounted prices with all proceeds going to Nosh4Noah.  Follow the guys on: @pizzaclub_hb

Gorgeous Girl Blogger Rox in the City wrote a blog for us.

The lovely Yuppiechef donated two R250 gift vouchers. More on how we’re going to use those tomorrow!  You can find them at  @yuppiechef.

And the gals at Chilli Marketing have offered a bit of their time to help us. Follow them at @ChilliMktg

Wow!

The whole point of this is to raise a little dosh for a great kid.  And folks are also showing us the money!  Friends and total strangers who can’t hold events started donating cash directly into the account set up for Noah.

Special thanks to Julia Dunlop who made us all a little weepy with a very generous donation.  Jules, you rock.

We have also had numerous friends, family and tweeps confirming that they will be holding events for Noah, details of which we’ll post the very moment we have them.  Don’t forget to let us know what you’d like to do to get your nosh on!

The scale of the generosity has completely floored us. A balance check at the end of the day had us on just under R1500 (and that’s not including many of today’s donations which won’t have gone through yet) – over 20 hours of therapy that will be booked as soon as possible.

We’ve got a long way to go yet but, for today, we think human beings rock. Massively.

Thank you!