Could you spare some time on Saturday 25th or Sunday 26th of May? We’re on the lookout for keen volunteers to represent FoodCycle and fundraise for our work by bag packing at Tesco on Morning Lane in Hackney.
If you’d like to be involved and could give at least 2 hours from 10am-6pm Saturday or Sunday then please email [email protected] – you’d be helping us to raise the money needed to serve more meals this year!
The FoodCycle Pie in the Sky Community Cafe has been working with the amazing organisation Switchback (an intensive mentoring programme that helps 18-24 year old offenders make real, long-lasting change after release) for nearly a year now, placing recently released young offenders into a kitchen space and working with them to improve confidence, self-esteem, experience and skills. We recently parted with our first trainee after five months training with us in the kitchen. Here’s a bit about our trainee and his time spent with our FoodCycle Pie in the Sky Community Cafe:
JD’s Story…
A couple of months before his release from HMP Wayland, JD began to have regular phone conversations with a Switchback Mentor. He had work experience but hadn’t been able to hold a job down for longer than a couple of weeks. He wanted to change that and saw the opportunity to work in a training café as a good place to start. After release, he worked at FoodCycle’s Pie in the Sky Community Café in Bromley-by-Bow, E3.
JD made a great start at the café, turning up on time and working hard in the kitchen. He had to make a real effort to communicate with staff as this did not come easy to him. Early starts and seeing old friends was not always a good combination and JD often lacked motivation. Friends questioned his decision to give up his time for free, but he managed to stay on top of his commitment to the café as he knew it was a stepping stone.
He also came on employer visits to restaurants all over London. One of the places he visited was a Spanish tapas restaurant in Soho. They offered him work experience to help him take the next step toward becoming a professional chef. Despite the long shifts, often finishing after 11pm, he stuck at it and received really positive feedback from the Head Chef.
JD now aspires to work in a professional kitchen. He has the skills, experience and reference from his time at Switchback and the FoodCycle café to make this happen.
How Switchback works…
To be considered for Switchback, prisoners must be:
- 18-24 years old
- from East/Central London (like Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Islington)
- have experience of catering inside
- with 3 months left to serve
A Switchback Mentor visits the prisoner regularly during his final three months inside. Together they prepare for release and make a plan. On his first day out, the Switchback Mentor meets the prisoner, either at the gate or at his first probation meeting. The prisoner is now a Switchback Trainee! It’s not always easy, but the Switchback Mentor will be there to help him move towards his goals step-by-step.
Switchback works very closely with FoodCycle’s Pie in the Sky Café; a training café in Bow, London.
Trainees start there as soon as they are released; there’s no waiting around. By doing shifts at the café, Trainees are able to practice working in a real, busy environment. This stage is very important as it means they can get some relevant experience on their CV and build up a reputation that earns them a good reference. Trainees can also complete qualifications, including those that were started in custody. Switchback provides travel costs, mobile phone credit and supermarket vouchers. The café provides meals for Trainees on the rota that day.
The focus of the programme is getting a job.
Trainees can visit restaurants and catering employers to see what different workplaces are really like. We also arrange work placements where Trainees can try out working before taking on a full-time job. Some of these are paid, some are not. Switchback Mentors help Trainees to apply for jobs when they are ready. We continue to support each Trainee once he has started working so he can overcome any of the initial difficulties that everyone experiences in a new job. We are still in touch with lots of Trainees that have gone on to get jobs and they often pop in to the café to see us and talk to the new ones!
This dish was served at our Feaster pop-up fundraiser with Love Food Hate Waste and was cooked by the FoodCycle Pie in the Sky Community Cafe team, Helena Chouchani and Nicola Corney. Enjoy!
Chocolate Dipped Poached Pears with Apricot and Pecan Stuffing served with Chilli and vanilla sabayon
Serves 6
Ingredients
Poached Pears
-1 bottle of full bodied red wine
-1/2 cup sugar (any will work as it will dissolve)
-1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
-1 stick of canela or cinnamon (or 1tsp ground cinnamon)
-1 tsp anise seeds (or 1 star anise)
-1 tbsp lemon zest (or lime, orange, grapefruit)
-6 whole pears (we used comice and blush pears – pears should be under ripe)
-parchment/greaseproof paper
Method
Stuffing
Ingredients
-2 tbsp unsalted butter
-1/2 cup pecans, chopped
-1/2 cup dried apricots, chopped
-1 tbsp brown sugar (optional)
Method
***The poaching and stuffing of the pears can be done a day before serving. The flavours intensify if you prepare this the day before***
Chocolate Sauce
Ingredients
-4 tbsp unsalted butter
-1/2 cup semi-sweet or dark chocolate
Method
Sabayon
Ingredients
-4 large egg yolks
-1/2 cup dry white wine
-2 tbsp sugar
-1/8 tsp chilli powder
-1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Method
To serve this dessert, we put a ladle-full of sabayon in the base of every dish, placed a dipped pear in the centre and sprinkle fresh raspberries and mint. The sabayon needs to be made right before serving, but tends to hold its shape and flavour for a good hour after you make it.
You will have 4 left over egg whites from this recipe – use them to make a batch of meringues, which you can dip in the chocolate sauce you may have left over!
Chocolate Dipped Meringues
Ingredients
-4 egg whites
-28.75g caster sugar
-28.75g icing sugar
-chocolate for dipping
Method
Enjoy!
We’re delighted to announce a partnership with the green energy folks at Ecotricity, who use customers’ energy bills to build new sources of green energy – ‘bills into mills’ if you like!
If you switch to them HERE then they’ll donate up to £60 to FoodCycle to help us serve more meals for people at risk from food poverty. So not only will you be joining a green energy revolution, you’ll be helping FoodCycle too! A win-win-win right there surely?
This dish was served at our Feaster event with Love Food Hate Waste and was cooked by the FoodCycle Pie in the Sky Community Cafe team, Helena Chouchani and Nicola Corney. Enjoy!
Puy Lentil Salad with Bell Pepper, Lemon and Parsley
Serves 6
Ingredients
-500g puy lentils, rinsed well and cooked until just soft
-1 red bell pepper, chopped into small squares
-1 yellow or orange bell pepper, chopped into small squares
-3 cloves garlic, minced/crushed
-Zest and juice of 2 lemons
-1 bunch fresh parsley, chopped
-olive oil
-salt + pepper
Method
Enjoy!
Read the latest blog post from the FoodCycle Bristol Hub: http://foodcyclebristol.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/sharing-dangerous-ideas-and-a-feast-for-hundreds-foodcycle-bristol-goes-to-the-edinburgh-do-festival/
Sharing, dangerous ideas and a feast for hundreds:
FoodCycle Bristol goes to @ the Edinburgh do festival
At the heart of FoodCycle’s work is awareness-building and skill-sharing around our two core issues of eliminating food waste and reducing food poverty. The Edinburgh DO was a beautiful opportunity for us to do this. With the headline ‘Make, Share, Do’, this festival was a coming-together of young people to celebrate projects working towards a sustainable, inclusive and resilient future. FoodCycle was invited to transform salvaged food into a feast for hundreds with interested young activist-volunteers, to run a ‘pollination’ session in order to spread the good word of FoodCycle and how to run it, and to discuss the big ideas behind it all – why is there simultaneous food waste and people in food poverty? What would a fairer food system look like? A small, eager team of present Bristol managers, and some of its old founding lions, ventured up north to represent FoodCycle: Anna, Dan, Louis, and Jon.
The Journey
The weekend started with us scrambling through the cold streets of Euston laden with luggage to catch the Caledonian sleeper train. We made it with 90 seconds to spare: a FoodCycle classic. It was then time for business, so we headed to the onboard bar. Introductions, plans and visioning around a midnight drink as we sped through the Home Counties.
A frosty and beautiful journey on the Caledonian sleeper.
We arrived to a biting Edinburgh morning and were greeted by the loveliest people – thanks Flik and Francesco! – with tea, enthusiasm, and impressive initiatives -Edinburgh university seems to be an amazing catalyst for social projects, especially with the foundation of Transition Edinburgh University. Transition Edinburgh is an inspiring example of how Universities can demonstrate what a positive society can look like. They work practically and imaginatively to find new ways for communities to sustain and thrive. Whilst we were there, we saw students in the process of setting up a space to give repair workshops and sell all kinds of objects that are abandoned by students at the end of each academic year. Akin to FoodCycle, they reclaimed and saved objects from across the city that were being thrown away, and turned them into something special. They used a progressive and dynamic business model as a co-operative, where students could join as members of the co-op to get clothes and equipment throughout the year at a cheap price and get credit if they volunteered hours at the shop.
After a recovery nap, we set out to familiarise ourselves with the food and kitchen. This beautiful image greeted us:
A moment of panic washed over us as our food-safety-trained selves considered the spilt pasta and salt, the halved squash, and… the floor. Things got more beautiful, and more worrying, as the lights were turned off and candles were lit throughout the mandala as outdoor shoes stepped among the carefully laid out food, brushing against the odd broccoli. What could possibly have motivated this messy, mad mandala of macerated macaroni sticks? Naomi from Embercombe explained that it’s an opportunity to reconnect with our food. So often we rush through our food, have fast food, packaged and flown from who knows where? A food mandala is the opportunity to celebrate food through ceremony, building connections to what we eat. Why is it so important to form these connections? Naomi has written a blog piece for us about it here – http://wp.me/p1m40P-bv.
A short quotation from her: Connecting with what we eat, the seasons and community feels like an essential part of how we fit into the bigger picture of the world. Thanks Naomi!
The feast for hundreds
With the ritual played out, things got serious. We had to learn a new form of measurement as our eyes tried to visually assemble the food into boxes. Then ideas rolled out.
It wouldn’t be a typical stew. We wanted to give 150 people more than that! We could do lasagne. But what about oven space? Ok, ‘lasagne assembled on a plate’. It would be something that would allow the food to cook through deeply. A root vegetable soup? Where do you get to combine parsnip and tomato? The brainstorming ended with this: Daal with multi-vegetable curry and bombay potatoes and parsnips, followed by a multi-fruit banana bread. The transport team was sent out with trailers to buy up missing ingredients from another amazing co-op (thanks New Leaf!), and the volunteers arrived.
At this point, the kitchen thermometer read 12 degrees. It was a cold day in Edinburgh. We handed out the hair nets (important for group solidarity), sat through the health and safety video (important for the insurers), and started assembling same-type food for washing and chopping. As always, things flowed from each other. Packs of spinach left over from lunch came to join the food on the menu; thus a beetroot and spinach salad spontaneously took shape. Delicious bread waited in bags. We chatted under our hair nets, as banana mush was being turned into dough and what looked like 50 kg of onions sizzled away on the hob. The fruit that couldn’t be added to the banana bread was assigned to become a ‘compote’, then dubbed a ‘jus’, before finishing its semantic journey as a ‘coulis rouge’. Trayfulls of potato chunks were coated in onion juices. The bread rose in the oven, as brave volunteers stirred away at the massive curry. Tea and tasty out-of-date cakes were circulating. The temperature had risen.
At 7pm hungry DO-ers started walking in, and the food was distributed out. Success! Everyone was fed, but the DO-ers being the great people they are, there was a huge movement of volunteers to do the cleaning up, as we suddenly realised we had about 15 minutes to leave the premises.
The dangerous ideas
Whilst all this was happening, Louis and Jon led a workshop to discuss problems and solutions in the food system, and we heard some great ideas from all those that came. How could it be that there are almost 4 million people in food poverty in the UK alone, whilst 15 million tonnes of food is wasted before it gets to the plate? Why worldwide are there so many farmers struggling to make a decent living, when food prices are so high? We discussed many ideas, including the narrative of Food sovereignty, an international movement of people reclaiming the food system.
Food sovereignty is important as a backdrop to the work of FoodCycle as it explains many of the problems with the current food system. Books like ‘Stuffed and Starved’ by Raj Patel discuss how the food system has been taken over by huge businesses. While the poor in the west are encouraged to buy unhealthy and processed food, the poor in the developing world are having their agricultural autonomy ripped from them. From the expansion of genetically modified food to the use of unsustainable petrochemical fertilisers, corporations like Cargill or Monsanto are making billions whilst world hunger prevails. The same supermarkets that facilitate unnecessary waste here are linked to the exploitation of farmers both in the UK and across the world. Food sovereignty is about the right of peoples to define their own food systems. Advocates of food sovereignty put the people who produce, distribute and consume food at the centre of decisions on food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations that they believe have come to dominate the global food system. This movement is advocated by a number of farmers, peasants, pastorialists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, women, rural youth and environmental organizations. For more information see: www.wdm.org.uk/what-food-sovereignty
After a hard Saturday of educating and sharing, Bristol FoodCyclers took the Sunday off, and used the opportunity to absorb some skills from those around them, and have some fun. Anna dabbled in some rhythmic drumming, whilst Dan, Louis and Jon were let loose on the streets of Edinburgh playing (and subsequently designing their own) urban games. We ended the day with a wonderful walk around Edinburgh, to its many beautiful sites including Arthur’s seat, where we looked over the city with sweet shortbread in our hands and cityboy Jonathan moaning about the cold, height and precarious pathways.
The Do weekend gave us the opportunity to do lots of skill-sharing and we hope we inspired the genesis of an Edinburgh FoodCycle hub – there were certainly a lot of keen, interested DO-ers. The festival fostered a real sense of community around projects working to build resilience in communities, and we’re excited and proud to be part of this community.
As Katie Roberts, festival organiser puts it: “Young people are passionate and bold and creative. We want to take hold of the direction of our future”… our opportunity is now!
Read the latest blog post from the FoodCycle Bristol Hub: http://foodcyclebristol.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/relationship-connection-and-celebration/
We didn’t write this ourselves, but here’s a glimpse of the amazing ideas of Naomi Hannam, who works at the Embercombe project, which helps connect people to the land and food we eat, amongst many other work. Foodcycle met Naomi at the Edinburgh Do festival, where she shared some thoughts on our connections with food before we cooked a feast for hundreds and shared some big ideas (blog piece coming up! – watch this space…)
At the festival, she put on a food mandala before we cooked supper, and has kindly shared some thoughts with us about food and how we connect with it. Thanks, Naomi!
Relationship, Connection and Celebration
A blog shared with Foodcycle by Naomi Hannam, Embercombe.
Connecting with what we eat, the seasons and community feels like an essential part of how we fit into the bigger picture of the world. To celebrate food and growth in all stages, from seed to fruit, from grain to bread, helps to develop connection and understanding of our relationships with everything around us and the earth. Humanity is just a small part of something much bigger and when we can stop and remember that we are part of something and not it’s manager or manipulator a greater sense of relationship, care and connection can be formed.
There is such magic in following the journey of our food and acknowledging and celebrating its existence. To wassail the apple trees in January and wake them up for spring, to watch blossom form and bees fly, to see fruits develop, to harvest and scump, to make cider and store apples in straw in autumn is just one example. To follow such a cycle – even if not physically – connects us to our food. A rich process full of stories and connection so different from picking the ‘perfect’ apple out of a plastic tray in a super market. It is much harder to throw food away if you have developed a connection to it.
People for hundreds of generations have been connected to the land, to the seasons and to the food that they eat. It feels a relatively new post-industrialised reality that has severed the connection between resource and consumption. It is with this disconnect that I feel so many societal dysfunctions stem. The plastic packaging that envelops our food, our cities and our interactions is forming so many literal and metaphorical barriers with basic connection to land and community.
Tonnes of food get wasted each year; a third of vegetables grown in the UK do not reach
our plates because they don’t look right. It is so easy to dismiss that which you don’t have a
connection with. So much of these carefully grown crops from around the globe are packaged only to sit on supermarket shelves and find their way to landfill. Walk in to a supermarket - stocked, overflowing with bounty; I wonder with dread how much of this food ends up in the bin, just to maintain this seeming abundance.
It is from these thoughts that the Wild Waste Mandala was dreamed for the Edinburgh Do.
We wanted to draw people’s attention to the theme of food waste from a place of beauty and creativity. I wondered how creativity could spark conversation and action in the opposite way that fear based information can stifle it. The Mandala, a celebration and acknowledgement of waste food, was created out of morsels salvaged from bins and skips, out of date treats given by local shop keepers; food that would otherwise have been forgotten. An astounding array of vegetables and processed food became the pallet for our creation. Circles of leaks, oranges, squash and many other delights radiated out from a centre of sugar coated popcorn and sliced white bread. Participants drew elaborate patterns with burst bags of custard powder. Conversation and thought flowed about the stories of the food and how we had found it. Candles were lit, beauty admired, songs were sung and thanks given for what was going to become a delicious feast.
That evening sitting with over 150 people eating the feast that Foodcycle Bristol cooked up from the mandala I reflected on the importance of honouring and celebrating food before it becomes waste. I thought about the importance of working from a place of creativity and connection and felt how deeply important it is to bring something of the sacred into the mundane; to acknowledge things which so often get rushed and forgotten; to always take time to acknowledge what’s on my plate and nourishing my body.
Naomi Hannam
http://www.Embercombe.co.uk
[email protected]
This dish was served at our Feaster event with Love Food Hate Waste and was cooked by the FoodCycle Pie in the Sky Community Cafe team, Helena Chouchani and Nicola Corney.
Roasted Stuffed Onions
Serves 6
Ingredients
-6 medium-large onions (red, yellow, white, or sweet)
-1 medium sized courgette
-2 leeks
-250g mushrooms (any kind – chestnut, button, field)
-fresh parsley
-smoked paprika
-salt
-pepper
-4 cloves of garlic
-butter
-olive oil
-strong cheese (we used stilton)
Recipe
When we plated up we put a small ladle full of the puree (below) at the bottom of the dish, put a spoonful of leftover stuffing into the centre of the puree, place an onion on top, crumbled more stilton, added a spoonful of the gravy mix and scattered black onion seeds and fresh, chopped flat leaf parsley on top!
Roasted Garlic and Red Pepper Puree (to serve with stuffed onions)
Serves 6
Ingredients
-5-6 red/orange/yellow bell peppers
-1 bulb garlic
-olive oil
-salt
-pepper
-smoked paprika
Recipe
Enjoy!
Hold on tight folks – FoodCycle’s set to get a whole lot bigger!
Earlier this year we received Cabinet Office funding through Nesta’s Innovation in Giving fund to support the expansion of our model to towns and cities across the UK. As part of this, we’ll be piloting growing new Hubs across the UK through a social franchising approach and we’d love to speak to organisations interested in partnering with us.
For interested organisations, we’ll be running an Information Day on May 2nd in London – if you’d like to come along or discuss this further, please contact our Head of Programmes, Kieran Daly by emailing [email protected].
By Kelvin Cheung, founder and CEO of FoodCycle
Just before Easter break I had the opportunity to journey to Bath to visit our team at FoodCycle there. They’ve been excellent on Facebook posting their wins and also their challenges for the world to see … and from all the yummy stuff they had been cooking up, I just had to go and try it.
As with all my journeys, one of the challenges of course is getting there, but I’m pleased to say that Bath is a little bit more navigable than Liverpool was on the bike. Nevertheless I did end up at the wrong church as there are two churches of the same name, and anyways, a lesson of just trusting on Google maps is well learned. Well, it could have been worse.
After a round about trip of Bath, I finally arrived at the centre – around 5ish, where all the Hub leaders and volunteers were already busy scheming about what to cook. The session was lead by Phil, joined by Yvonne, Matt, Aaron, Alexa and Maxine. It was a full crew – maybe it was too many cooks looking in from the outside, but from the inside, everyone was there not because they had to be, everyone was there because they were friends, and this was a place where they came together to meet and catch up.
It was a wondrously tight and well-run operation that had great efficiency, but not at the expense of fun and creativity which were in full, swing. On the menu was Welsh rarebit, bruschetta, two types of curry, cake, and loads of fruit salad with a side of organic apple cinnamon yoghurt. Not bad for a Wednesday night dinner.
One of the ‘illusions’ that I like to keep up (not really) when I visit is that I actually really know how to cook with surplus ingredients. That is true, but only really with the magic of an iPhone. Thus when I was asked to lead on the desserts – seeing what we had on hand – I basically typed ‘yoghurt and banana cake’ and just tripled the recipe. The cakes were made by Matt and Aaron. Matt is on the hunt for jobs right now having taken time off from school and Aaron is on his gap year from the States – and is living here for a couple of months volunteering and gaining experience. He expressed his interest in cooking as what he’s really interested in doing, and for both, it was their first time baking a cake… especially a cake of this size. Little did they know, it was also MY first time cooking a cake this large as well!
Once the cakes were in the oven, I got the chance to talk to some of the regulars that started coming in out of the cold for a cuppa tea before dinner. I had a ‘toffee’, which I think is making the British look at me in utter horror.
I had lots of interesting chats, including inquiries about if they were to visit Hong Kong, would they find a girlfriend there. I said, well, I’m sure you can, but never follow a person ANYWHERE if that is the line they use on you, or if that’s what you’re going there to look for – you might want to try this instead.
One of the questions I get asked regularly is – who do you serve? How do you know who is ‘deemed fit for the meal’. This of course, is up to the local FoodCycle Hub to decide. We make recommendations and suggestions, but it’s ultimately up to the team there. On that day, I met someone that said that his usual meals were baked potatoes with a variety of toppings. Another had been skipping from a local supermarket to survive as the job he had had fallen through and he was looking for work. Another was struggling on the new benefit changes. Others from the local community came because it was a good meal, a better meal than they could afford to have cooked themselves.
There will never be one set answer I don’t think – it’s not a simple line from ‘needy’ to ‘not needy’. One thing is for sure – everytime I go into a FoodCycle session, what I see is that it brings together a great group of people that would have never met before, and together they create a lovely meal – and over this meal, new friends and relationships are fostered and built on.
For FoodCycle, I truly believe that the value is not just the food, but it is the relationships and connections shared during that meal that happens.
At 8:10 pm, in my chatting and bantering, I realized that my train was due to leave in about 25 minutes. Luckily, Maxine, one of the volunteer leaders had driven, and kindly gave me a drive back to the station. It was a short visit, but from the impressions I got, it was a Hub that was growing stronger by the week and that’s doing something vital in the community.
Until next time…
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