Recipe Time - "Protein Surprise", a Turkey and Edamame Bean remix stew thingy!

Serves 1 and a bit. Cooking time: c. 40 mins.

I've never been keen on carbs and starchy foods, which makes me naturally predisposed towards the faddy "Paleo" end of the dieting spectrum. I'm also conscious of the cost and environmental impact of meats, and of course their fat content. While this recipe won't save the planet, it's an oriental-ish dish and a great-tasting, low-fat way to get a large amount of protein on a budget, and it's great to muck around with and alter.

Ingredients:

• 250g of fresh turkey - either breast, fillet or diced turkey.
• Two or three fistfuls of frozen edamame beans (soy beans).
• One large red onion.
• Half a sweet pepper.
• Two fistfuls of broccoli.
• Four roughly chopped cloves of garlic.
• One chopped chilli pepper.
• Half a fistful of fresh basil.
• Olive oil.
• Cider vinegar.
• Soy sauce.
• Worcester sauce.
• Ginger (optional).
• 1 tsp runny honey.
• 1/2 tsp cumin.
• 1/2 tsp turmeric.
• A pinch of chilli powder.
• Ground black pepper.
• Kosher salt.

Method:

You'll have time while the turkey is cooking to prepare your vegetables, but you might want to start off preparing the onion and garlic if you're a slow chopper. 

To start the turkey, dribble a bit of olive oil over a grill-pan and whack it up to a high heat. When it's hot enough, place the turkey pieces on the griddle and turn down to a moderate heat. This will allow the meat to sear on contact, then allow it to cook slowly. Cook the turkey pieces for 15 minutes, turning them 3 times to sear evenly.

As soon as the turkey's searing, heat a little oil in a medium-sized saucepan on a medium heat. Add the spices to the oil, remembering to stir regularly so as not to burn the mix. Then add the onion to the pan with the honey, and allow it to caramelise slightly. After five minutes, add the garlic, ginger, pepper and chilli pepper, and stir-fry for a minute or so. 

By now, your turkey pieces should be evenly seared on both sides but still uncooked in the centre. Take the griddle off the heat and add the turkey to the saucepan. Also add the rest of the ingredients at this stage, including the soy beans, broccoli, basil, vinegar and sauces. Leave the seasoning until a little later when it's safe to taste. You should have a pretty sweet-smelling pan by now. It's time to relax a bit.

Depending on whether or not you used frozen vegetables, you might want to add a bit of boiling water to the pan; we're going to be simmering the mixture on a low heat until the meat is cooked all the way through and perfectly tender. It's wise to add the lid at this stage to gently steam the turkey and the vegetables. This should take another 10-20 minutes, depending on the hob and the quantity. Add any seasoning to taste, and serve in a bowl or in combination with any evil carbs you fancy.

Enjoy! This is basically my staple dish at the moment, so I'll report back with any improvements and alterations I discover.

Nutrition:

Rough estimates from WolframAlpha

total calories  710 | fat calories  283
% daily value^* |  
  total fat  32 g | 50%
       saturated fat  7 g | 37%
       trans fat  0 g | 
  cholesterol  239 mg | 80%
  sodium  1 g | 56%
  total carbohydrates  26 g | 9%
       dietary fiber  4 g | 16%
       sugar  9 g | 
  protein  76 g | 152%
   vitamin A  104%    |    vitamin C  170%   
   calcium  14%    |    iron  44%   
   vitamin E  12%    |    thiamin  15%   
   riboflavin  45%    |    niacin  64%   
   vitamin B6  63%    |    vitamin B12  100%   
   folate  33%    |    phosphorus  60%   
   magnesium  22%    |    zinc  57%   
*percent daily values are based on a 2000 calorie diet

Grow Crowd

Here's an interesting project located in Spain. Looks like it could be a boon for the organic movement. See it here.

Campaign for Local Power

It's already met its funding goal, but this exciting Colorado-based project is an inspiring success story. Non-profits have one less barrier to viral success - the suspicion of pure profit motive is gone. That does nothing to undermine this extraordinary display of people power. Over 4500 people have funded this campaign on IndieGoGo.

Only Opportunities

"There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters." - Boris Johnson

This blog is here to share my experiences of crowd-funding. It's also a place for me to share (as part of the solution to a problem I've identified) promising campaigns with a focus on crowd-sourcing and user generated content (UGC). But first, a little about my story...

What We Had

When I started Tarradiddle, my crowd-centric publishing platform, I had many things. I had ambition, a comprehensive vision for how the app would fit together, skills enough to get a working prototype ready, an idea of the costs associated with each user, and a clear idea of what was required to build it. Those requirements soon grew, as I realised the scope of the project. That was a problem.

What We Lacked

While I had a lot in the rather nebulous senses explained above, I lacked a lot more. As a student, back in my home town for the long vacation, I had very little money. The four month break was too short to do absolutely anything with, but too long to do nothing. I had no home to call my own, no office space as such, I was sleeping in various spare rooms, and the temptation was to join some voluntary organisation abroad and give up on advancing my career.

I have bipolar disorder. I don't mean to use that as an excuse, but in order to focus, and to achieve, I need a stable, quiet environment and a functioning support network. Relations with one half of my family had become difficult at this point, and I had none of those prerequisites. I felt under siege - I knew that, at 28 and struggling into my final year of studies, this year would be the most important of my development. I wanted to put all of my efforts into something truly educational. Something truly valuable. I started a company to incubate my development work, and we attracted a bit of seed capital. It was other peoples' opinion that I should go back to working in a shop. My mother's partner, in particular, wanted me to learn a lesson about earning money through hard work - somehow missing, or disapproving of, the hard work I'd been putting into the company!

But I carried on. Through all the upheaval and stress I realised that Tarradiddle was too large a project for me to complete on my own. It required dedicated story-reading technology, very secure servers, a presence on all of the popular mobile platforms, and it needed to be launched in good time. I knew I could do the coding, but it might have taken me two or three years. By that time, we'd have established competitors crawling all over us and it would've meant a waste of time and money. Things move very fast in this industry, and good, disruptive ideas are conceived independently of each-other all the time.

No matter the strengths of your idea,
you'll fail if no-one hears about it.

GoGo!

So we launched the IndieGoGo campaign. A lot hard work went into making a punchy, endearing video, and getting our costings right. So much of what we've now learnt would've been useful back then!

For starters, we aren't terribly well connected. We know some people, sure, but more often than not it can be difficult to get your Facebook friends to engage with a crowd-funding campaign simply because (at this stage) you'll likely be the first of your friends to do anything like it. It isn't for charity, and it most likely isn't even related to anything they're interested in. A core of your friends and family will support you because they love you, but they won't be excited enough about the idea to tell anyone else about it.

My initial reaction was to start a modest, targeted advertising campaign on Facebook. This translated into likes - people seemed to approve of the idea - but not into contributions. We fiddled with our perk offerings, to no effect, and kept updating our campaign in order to increase our visibility on IndieGoGo. We emailed press releases, talked to everyone we could think of, and pursued the fabled re-tweets. We climbed through the rankings but, as of today, we're still sitting at 1% of our (admittedly ambitious) $27,600 goal. Private feedback and our Facebook statistics seem to suggest that people like the idea of the project, so what's going on?

It could well be too late for Tarradiddle's current campaign, but I think it's worth analysing for future reference and to help others.

Share and Endure

I've noticed a real reluctance amongst established blogs and social media loci to share what you send them. You're competing for space with hundreds of requests per day, most of them spam. Do your emails read like spam? Are you excited to be sharing "this fantastic opportunity"? Think how your words come across. People also seem to be intrinsically wary of crowd-funding campaigns. Even if they're intrigued by the idea, they are likely to say "come back to us when you're up and running" rather than help you to get there by sharing the project!

Some people even respond with outright hostility. Our project relies on user generated content, and there are some in the world of literature - even bloggers, who you might think would be into this sort of thing - who don't trust the internet to create works of merit. They seem to enjoy and trust the concept of gate-keepers of taste. To them, this doesn't lead to innovation-less, curated catalogues - it's the only way to ensure quality. Anyone who's laughed and cried at xkcd.com, or followed their favourite YouTube Vlogger, knows that's utter rubbish. The internet creates tripe, sure, but so do published authors - the cream always rises to the top, if only you let it.

The easiest and most sure-fire way of getting your campaign to succeed seems to be Already Having a Following. That's about the only reliable way of ensuring you'll reach enough people who "get" you and your project. If that sounds unfair, it's because it is. Your idea might be amazing, but you're going to have to become a new media guru to make it happen. 

Mission Statement

And that's why I'm here. I've learnt a lot about the way IndieGoGo works, and the challenges campaigners face. I want to help. I'm going to be blogging about projects I like the look of, specifically in the sphere of crowd-sourcing and UGC. I will try to be as fair as I can and I'll post when I can. As long as you don't mind me using your campaign logos/images on this blog, tweet me about your campaign: @Shrubhill Or you can find me on Google+

Let's get busy - send me guest blog submissions and tell the world about your project. We'll try to build a community around this singular aspect of the singularity - user generated everything.