Last night I was contacted by George from Feast Anglia to share his new pop-up Sunday lunch event. Wow – this thing looks good! I wanted to share it with you all as there may well be some interested ones amongst you.

Feast Anglia is a new pop-up Sunday lunch event in Essex promoting the best of East Anglian produce, cooked by innovative and talented chefs right at the source where the food was produced.

George says on his website, “Most of our produce and goods end up in London restaurants and markets these days, so we’ve decided to bring chefs back to the source to cook a great Sunday lunch where it’s grown and made.”

Their first event is on Sunday 27th May at Herons Farm in Coggeshall, home to The Rare Breed Meat Company and will cost you £40 for a full on foodie’s feast cooked by Martin Kroon, head chef at London’s Butlers Wharf Chop House, with the promise of unlimited Bloody Marys and a lunch bag to take home to keep you going right the way through to Monday lunch time!

Anyone interested should check out the menu on their website.

I won’t be at the first one but I certainly plan on going to the next one and getting myself a nice full tummy!

I’m very excited to share the Food Exchange Market with you! Think of it as an online Farmer’s Market. Great produce, from local producers, with minimal food miles – is that not how all food should be?

The Food Exchange Market is made of up local sellers and their produce – you buy through us but it comes directly from the people that make it. They set the prices, they set the terms – fair trading at its best.

We want to reduce the amount of ‘food miles’ wherever possible and prevent your purchase from going 100 miles in the wrong direction to a sorting office before coming back again, so if you’re local to the producer please do consider collecting your order at our next event or local collection and contact them after placing your order to arrange.

If you’ve seen something at one of our events and want to get hold of some, chances are it’s in our Market! Head in to the Market now to see what we’ve got.

If you’d like to apply to sell in our online Market, please get in touch.

Great speakers, great people and great grub! A crackin’ night I say.

My Updates

The night kicked off with a few updates from me, as usual! I said a bit about the local food events that we could potentially get a stall at and sell our homemade wares as a group and anyone interested in joining in put their names down on a list to let me know what events they’re interested in potentially doing. For anyone that didn’t get a chance to do it last night , there’s an online version you can fill in too! I’m still looking in to the possibility of getting access to a community kitchen where we can all get together and cook our wares together before selling them – should be a good giggle!

I also reminded the group about submitting the recipes they use for their dishes to me so I can add them to the website and people can use them for their own cooking at home. It’ll give those not lucky enough to bag your dish for an exchange on the night a chance to still taste some of the goodness by cooking it themselves!

My Chorizo & Butterbean Stew in the making

Chocolate Studio

I’m looking in to doing something slightly different for either the next event or the one after. The theme for June is Cakes & Chocolates and the Chocolate Studio in Colchester has given us the opportunity to hold an event there and for a fee of £10 per person we can do some hands on Chocolate stuff and keep some bits to take home and indulge in. I’m finding out more about this at the moment so watch this space for more details and to let me know if you’d be interested.

Danny, Bennison Farm

Danny Brooks-Steele from Bennison Farm came along to give the group an insight in to Community Supported Agriculture projects and the one he is establishing at Bennison Farm in Great Bentley. Essentially, the project is about getting local veg to people and cutting out the middleman -so, getting your veg straight from the farmer that grows it. The consumer pays a flat monthly fee and in return gets a weekly box of the harvest. Danny is also giving his members the opportunity to get involved on the farm and will be arranging social events such as bonfires & BBQs to bring people together. For more information or to get yourself on the mailing list then drop them an email.

Sally, Colchester Allotment Assoc.

Next up, we had a chat from Sally Young about allotments and home veg patches. She gave some very useful tips about what to do and avoid on your patches aimed at all levels of ability. She took some questions from the group and really encouraged people to give home growing a go as it’s very hard work but also very rewarding! Sally will be doing our updates each month, which is great for the group to get someone with her knowledge that they can *dig* in to! Take a look at their website to find out more about the Colchester Allotment Association.

Cindy, Poppy’s Pastries

As is customary, our last speaker gives the group some inspiration and tips to help them with what they prepare for the next event. So, last night we had Cindy from Poppy Farm in Lawford. Cindy has a small holding and grows her own veg, which she then uses to make her own pasties and pies to sell at local farmer’s markets in the winter months. All the meat she uses in her produce is also locally sourced from within about 20 miles of her home. She shared some of her tips on pasty and encouraged the group to give making your own a go, rather than buy the “Just Roll” variety! Her main tip was to make sure you handle the pastry as little as possible and put it in the fridge for an hour after making it and before using it. Some of the group asked Cindy to share some of her recipes with the them, which she is very kindly happy to do – so watch this space again and I’ll post them up on here. For anyone that missed out, her Scotch Eggs are sublime! The best I’ve tasted.

The Tasting and Exchange

So this is the main part of the evening – the bit it’s all building up for! Members bring along two tubs of a dish they’ve prepared for the event – one is heated up for being tasted and the other is kept to one side ready for the first person to exchange it when they taste and love it! The members bought along some very varied and interesting stews and casseroles – all of which, I can safely say, were delicious! I bagged myself Matt Beales’ Chicken and Sweet Potato Stew. It didn’t last long as I appear to have eaten it already! There were also Beef Stews, a gorgeous Pork Casserole, an Oxtail Stew, a Chorizo & Butterbean Stew amongst others. A great variety as you can see.

Matt Beales' Chicken & Sweet Potato Casserole on my plate!

Thank you to everyone that came along – I had a great time and hope to see you all again next time at Pasties and Pies on May 21st! If you are yet to sign up on the Event site (Meetup), it would be great if you could – it enables me to keep you informed and updated via email and also lets you RSVP to events to give me an idea of how many people to expect etc – very useful to me

One of the things receiving the most positive response from the group was participating in local food events such as Farmer’s Markets and Food Festivals. This would involve members of the group producing some of their own wares and selling them on a Food Exchange stall alongside others from the group.

I’ve been interested in Farmer’s Markets for a while now and would love the opportunity to get involved and sell at an event but I just couldn’t commit to putting the time and money in to producing a whole stall’s worth of stuff to sell, and that’s why this is perfect. Being part of the Food Exchange group means we can get a stall as a group and sell our homemade wares is smaller, more manageable quantities for us people treating this as something other than a business. It seems the members of the group are up for it to – great!

There are costs involved with getting stalls at the various events – those costs would be divided up and shared amongst the sellers and any money you make on what you sell is yours to keep! I can see me getting a bit of a buzz from seeing money come in from my homemade food…

I’ve put a form together to help me gauge interest in the individual events and try and get something up and running. Where it says “Cooking” this means preparing some of your own produce beforehand rather than actually cooking on the stall! If you’d rather not prepare anything but you’d still like to get involved then I’m sure there’ll be room for you to come along and sell other people’s stuff and spread the word about the group.

It has been suggested that instead of all preparing things seperately in our own kitchens for the events that we all get together somewhere in a communal kitchen and spend some time cooking together – a lovely idea that I will try and take forward.