Soul Food Project unleash new menu

I was excited last week, to be invited to attend the ‘gastro evening’ launch of Soul Food Project’s new menu, the cheffy equivalent of an album launch if you like. Soul Food project occupy the kitchen upstairs at The Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath, and serve up southern-style food to discerning eaters, and drinkers with an appetite. That’s the essence of proper pub food I suppose, you have to attract a few people that would normally head to a restaurant, but maybe want to save a quid or two, but also feed the tipsy reveller who suddenly gets the munchies. The question then, I suppose, is does the Soul Food Project’s new menu hit the mark?

During an enjoyable evening comparing oven temperatures and bakery start times with the smiley Sarah Frost, we were given samples of 7 or 8 dishes off the new menu as we washed it all down with pints of Purity’s finest. The first, and finest of them all, was the Sierra Nevada hush puppies, a moorish deep-fired savoury doughnut made with corn and Sierra Nevada pale ale. Next out came the burgers, chunky locally made beef patties in a sturdy bun with a punchy soul sauce, good stuff. We sampled the consistently good Jambalaya, a great sunburst salad with halloumi and sweet potato, veggie gumbo (I thought gumbo had to have peanuts in it – am I thinking of somehting else?), and SFP’s SFC (southern fried chicken), of course. The thirty-strong crowd were visibly stuffed by this point, but when chef’s Carl and Matt emerge with trays of the famous brownies and stunning churro’s to finish us off, who can turn that down?!

Their repertoire has massively expanded and now fills a glossy A3 menu (complete with photos!), and there are many intriguing dishes that I still want to sample (pork crackling with a bourbon sauce for a starter? yes please!). So have they managed to hit the hungry-boozer/gourmet-diner-on-a-budget balance? I think they pretty much have. The dishes are certainly good value – starters are £3-4 and mains just £5-7. The dishes aren’t refined and showy like a flashy restaurant, they’re hearty, which is how soul food should be, and perfect for fuelling-up for a night out. The resounding thing that struck me though is that there’s no one else really doing this kind of food in Birmingham, so although there’s no smears of chestnut puree or embellishments of pea shoots on the plates, I urge foodies, gourmands, and anyone wanting some honest, original pub grub, to head down and check out the new menu. I know i’ll be returning soon…

Abundance Birmingham

apples going to waste — Apples going to waste - Northfield, Birmingham

A month or so back I heard on twitter about a new project called Abundance Birmingham. I’d been following the progress of ‘Abundance Sheffield’ for a few years now, so I wondered if these were connected. To my joy I discovered on their website, that Abundance Birmingham is indeed a community fruit distribution project in the vein of the Sheffield project. This is taken directly from the about page:

“Abundance Birmingham is a voluntary run project that collects and distributes soft fruits that grow unharvested around our city on trees and bushes in both public and private spaces.

Fruit is distributed to groups, volunteers and the local community. Damaged fruits are turned into juice, preserves, jams and chutneys. Any money raised is put back into the project to help with running costs. We are also creating a detailed reference map of Birmingham with location and tree information for future harvests.

As part of the project we aim to raise awareness of the great abundance of local tasty and healthy food that is available for everyone and for free!”

It’s great to see this project starting in Birmingham, and Loaf will be offering any support we can to help promote it to a wider audience. If you have a fruit tree in your garden with surplus fruit, or spot one growing wild, let Abundance Birmingham know by emailing abundancebirmingham [at] gmail [dot] com, or tweeting them.

Eat Local short film

Back in the spring I had a crew of BCU media students come and do some filming with me – they were making a film about Birmingham’s local food scene and wanted to film me doing some baking, some local food shopping, and chatting about my views on local food. You can see the results in the 10 minute youtube film below. It also features my Friends Steve Rossiter, Paul Leverton and Audrey Miller. Thanks to Toby Nutter, Tobias Evans, Charlotte Percival and Hannah Quainton for putting it together:

Berries Lost in Translation

I (Nancy, not Tom) moved to England from Norway about six years ago. Norway does not have a particularly well publicised culinary tradition and boiled potatoes and white fish come in many iterations – but there are a lot of foraging opportunities over the summer. We used to collect mussels, cantrell mushrooms, raspberries, cloud berries, crowberries to make cordial and most important of all, blueberries. Or at least, I thought they were blueberries.

Blåbær, as they are called in Norwegian, are an essential part of the Skandanavian summer. They grow abundantly in the acidic soil of the forest floor and I remember many trips out with my picker (sort of like a wooden claw you draw through the bushes) and a milk pail. We would usually eat most of them on pancakes, mashed with sugar, but they also got made into jam, cordial and syrup for the winter.

When I moved away I found that blåbær were a necessary sacrifice, and was dismayed by the flaccid white fleshed blueberries I saw in the supermarket now and again. How could they be blueberries when they’re not even blue! They were imported from America and I was assured that the only blueberries that grew in England were cultivated – no wild picking sprees here!

Bring on a trip to Lickey Hills last summer. I was picnicking with friends when I spied a familiar vivid green-leafed shrub in between the ferns. I could hardly believe it – it was too early for fruit, but this was definitely blåbær. A little investigation later, I discovered that language was all that was hiding my blue bounty in this country – here they are called bilberries, not blueberries at all, and hill I was sitting on top of – Bilberry Hill. I’d been looking for the wrong berry all along.

The reason for sharing this story with you all is I suppose, something about the variety of cuisines that local food could support. Things we feel like we can only import can happily be cultivated in the UK, and without intensive agricultural techniques either (whether or not we can grow enough to actually and affordably feed people – I don’t know). My Norwegian foraging habits are naturally provided for, as are many other cultural culinary traditions. I recently visited True Food Co-op in Reading, a research trip for South Birmingham Food Co-op and saw their locally grown, organic cayenne chilli, mooli and cavolo nero. Martineau Gardens in Edgbaston is growing organic chickpeas, sweet potatoes, barlotti beans and, most exciting of all, kiwi fruit!

It’s not all root vegetable stews with a bit of creative growing and a good Norwegian-English dictionary.

Soul Food Project.2 Party

Hello Loaf Online! My name is Nancy, I’m looking after Loaf while Tom enjoys a well deserved break. Tom has enjoyed Soul Food Project’s excellent Sunday dinners in the past, so no doubt he will be excited to hear of their new menu launch and free party when he returns from holiday next week. In the meantime, I can testify to the quality of their Jambalaya from their appearance at August’s Stirchley Community Market so I thought I’d share it with all of you – wouldn’t want anyone to miss out!

Next Saturday, 18th September, Soul Food will be taking control of not just the food at Kings Heath’s Hare & Hounds but also the music.

Playing Live from 2pm are:
Jon Presley, James Summerfield, Pete Dixon (Calories), Liam Conway (Goodnight Lenin), Richard Burke, Tom Peel and Toote Toote.

There will be excellent DJ’s playing in between and after the bands. It is a free event, there will be free food samples, and you might even bag a ticket to their invite only gastro evening if you’re lucky. Local brewery Purity are supporting the event, their Mad Goose is a fixture at the Hare, I’m sure it will fuel the party.

Good music and good food – it’s a wild combination!

Come Dine With You?

Just received this email from ITV – any Birmingham blokes fancy applying for come dine with me?

Channel 4’s television show ‘Come Dine with Me’ is coming to film episodes in Birmingham this September! We are looking for fun people from all walks of life; so if you are over 18, based in Birmingham and think you are a dab hand in the kitchen get in touch ASAP!!

Casting closes very soon so the sooner you get in touch the greater your chance of getting on the show!!

We’d love to hear from everyone, but are particularly keen to hear from men so do feel free to forward information on to any gentlemen you think might be interested in taking part!

Get in touch via email or phone stating where you’re from and please provide a contact number so that one of the team can get in touch for a chat!

rebecca.dibley@itv.com

0207 157 4655

thanks

The Come Dine With Me Team

A Butchers Apprentice

I just spent an enjoyable hour with Steve Rossiter at his butchers shop in Bournville. Steve showed me around his meat hanging cold rooms, we chatted about the business a bit, and then he proceeded to demonstrate how to take apart a side of lamb. It’s fascinating to watch a craftsman at work, and even though he slowed down for me, he still did it bloomin’ quick! I’m getting really excited about our next collaboration, a Lamb Butchery workshop on the 20th October. I really like working with Steve, and love having the opportunity to put on courses like this for people, mainly because I just want to learn it all myself too! I’ll be writing the course description for the workshop up in the next few days, so stay peeled to the cookery school pages for that. In the meantime, here’s a pic of Steve at work with his meat cleaver splitting a lamb in half:

Sourdough loaves for sale today

I had lots of dough leftover after yesterdays wash-out food festival at Winterbourne Gardens, so I called up my mate Carl who has an enormous wood-fired oven in Stirchley. He fired it up mid-afternoon, and we popped round in the evening to bake the remaining dough, and turn it into these whopping 1kg loaves of sourdough bread. Wander down Dell road in Cotteridge today and you can pick one up for £3, or email tom@loafonline.co.uk to reserve one. Now what to do with all the leftover cheese and ham…

Happy Birthday to us – Loaf is One!

Well, on this day on in 2009, Loaf was officially incorporated with Companies House as Loaf Social Enterprise Ltd. It’s amazing what can happen in a year, although I had (and still have) grand plans for Loaf, I’m still staggered with what we’ve achieved in a year. In the original plan I was going to continue working part-time with the NHS until April 2011 – this happened a year earlier. I’d like to share with you a few pivotal moments as well as some interesting facts to celebrate this auspicious occasion.

19th June 2009 – Tom starts www.loafonline.co.uk as a food blog

13th August 2009 – A board of directors is formed, sworn in, and the company is officially registered with Companies House as a social enterprise (company limited by guarantee)

16th October 2009 – Tom is featured in The Birmingham Post in an excellent feature by Richard McComb. This coverage kicks off a whole load more press coverage in the coming year.

14th November 2009 – Tom attends ‘The Rise of Real Bread’ conference in Oxford, has one too many beers with Dan and Johanna McTiernan from the Handmade Bakery, and plots his exit from the NHS on the train home.

18th November 2009 – Loaf Cookery School launches with the first Handmade Pasta course.

21st November 2009 – Tom runs the first Bread: Back to basics course, soon to become the most popular course at the cookery school.

22nd January 2010 – Tom starts the Community Supported Bakery supplying sourdough bread to 10 subscribers and Capeling & Co.

3rd February 2010 – Loaf provide bread for the Soil Association’s annual conference. Tom gets to meet his bread hero Andrew Whitley, who approves of the bread – phew!

May 2010 – Tom appears in the Virgin Trains onboard magazine and cookery school bookings go through the roof!

3rd July 201o – Loaf launch the third strand of their business – the mobile wood-fired pizza oven at the CoCoMAD festival in Cotteridge park – Tom and team make 180 sourdough pizza’s in six and a half hours.

27th July 2010 – Loaf are involved in launching Stirchley Community Market, a one-of-a-kind local food and crafts market in Birmingham. 36 loaves of bread sell out in 30 mins.

4th August 2010 – Tom appears in the Guardian Society as part of a discussion on the inaugural Stirchley Market and the role of local food in community building.

August 2010 – Tom’s bread courses are so popular that they sell out for the rest of 2010.

Since January 2010 Tom has made approximately 1500 loaves of artisan bread for the community bakery. These were all hand kneaded and baked at home.

Since November 2009, 153 people have attended courses at Loaf Cookery School.

Phew, what a year, thanks to everyone for helping us make it work this year, we couldn’t have done it without all our loyal bread buyers, course students, and of course, Richard Mccomb. A massive thank you as well to my amazing wife Jane Baker of Greensnapper Photography for being so supportive and for allowing her home to be turned into Loaf HQ. Here’s to a second successful year!

Winterbourne Garden’s Outdoor Kitchen – 14th August 10am-6pm

This Saturday Loaf’s traveling pizza oven will be appearing at ‘The Outdoor Kitchen’ at Winterbourne House and Garden. Winterbourne Garden is part of Birmingham University and features seven acres of botanical gardens surrounding a gorgeous Edwardian villa. At the public Outdoor Kitchen event on Saturday you can (taken from their website)…

“Learn from the experts how to grow your own veg, with top tips on looking after your kitchen garden. Watch cooking demonstrations, take part in vegetable garden master classes and meet local food and drink producers. There will be tasting sessions running throughout the day and fruit, veg, cheese, bakery and deli stalls selling treats to take home.”

To find out more about Winterbourne Gardens, visit www.winterbourne.org.uk. Loaf will be serving wood-fired sourdough pizza’s from about 11.30 onwards – should be a great day.

BBC WM visit Loaf

Last night we had the pleasure of hosting a live broadcast by BBC WM during their Drive Time show with Paul Franks. Franksy sent roving reporter Jennie Jones down to Loaf HQ (i.e. Tom’s gaf), to see what Tom’s getting up to, to bake some Ciabatta’s, and pop open some elderflower champagne. Tom featured on the show at 6.15pm and again at 6.45 pm – you can listen again in the next 6 days if you visit the Paul Franks Show on the BBC iPlayer – skip to 2:16 and then 2:44.

Loaf in the Guardian!

Loaf had the privilege in helping launch and take part in Birmingham’s newest market last week at Stirchley Community Market. The market was a huge success with hundreds of people coming down to check out what was happening and support the fantastic stall holders that were there. Loaf took down 36 loaves of bread which sold out in the first half an hour, but fortunately we were also making wood-fired pizza’s which we sold out of a bit nearer to the end (though I promise we’ll make more next time!!). The place was teeming with journalists too, and the market has had lots of coverage this week, with the Birmingham Press featuring us last Friday, the Birmingham Post today, and the Birmingham Mail tomorrow. Amazingly the first market also made the national newspapers, with freelance journalist Chris Arnot writing a feature in Wednesday 4th August’s Guardian Society. You can read the full article by clicking here. There’ll be more to come hopefully, with a potential feature on BBC WM early next week – we’ll keep you posted!

A Tale of Two Roasts

I don’t know about you but I associate family weddings with many things – quaint village churches, posh marquees, champagne, trying to remember the names of your cousins, tipsy uncles, and oddly, the smell of pork fat dripping into an open fire. I think I was about 6 when I first saw a whole dead pig, and it was not in a happy state, a pole inserted all the way painfully through it’s body, gently turning as flames licked it’s glistening skin. A strange sight for a young city boy like me, but one I was going to have to get used to. Over the years I’ve seen many a pig roast (mainly orchestrated by my uncle Graham, a proper man of the countryside), at weddings, birthdays, anniversary’s and the like. Until now I’ve been merely a spectator (though I ‘commissioned’ one for my own wedding), but over the last two weeks I’ve got a bit more hands-on, to say the least.

Last weekend was my cousins 25th wedding anniversary , and they threw a spectacular weekend long country garden party, with the centerpiece being, you guessed it, a pig roast. This was no small roast thought, it was an epic 45kg, 10 hour long, 3.30am starting pig roast. As we relaxed around the fire on the Friday night with beer, sheesha, a digeridoo that no-one knew how to play, and anticipating tomorrow’s epic feast, I quizzed my cousin David and uncle Graham about the finer details of how they had affixed the poor swine to the spit, how long it would take, what kind of wood they were burning, and exactly how many spit-roasts they had done. These questions weren’t just polite chitter-chatter though, I was secretly petrified about the following weekend – I had agreed to roast a whole lamb on a spit for my brothers 30th birthday, and wanted to know every last detail.

My cousin David had volunteered to do the early shift and got the pig on at 3.30am. As campers awoke from slumber, the pig turning duty was passed around the party-goers. I eventually got my shift at about 10.30am. After 10 hours on the spit, the pig was finally removed at 1.30pm. Together with David and Graham, I dived in to the carving enthusiastically, taking Grahams lead of course. The pork was served with heaps of salads, homemade apple sauce and bread rolls, and easily fed the 60 or so people in attendance, with heaps of leftovers.

Onto this weekend then and my first start-to-finish, nose-to-tail spit-roast. My brother and I picked up our ‘beyond organic’ devonshire lamb from the Real Meat Company at 7.30am, and headed straight out to rural Berkshire to get our fire started. Sadly it wasn’t quite nose-to-tail as they apparently remove the head as standard. When the fire was roaring, brother and I set about affixing the 20kg beast onto an ash pole. The spit went through the abdominal cavity and out through the anus – the pelvic bone gripping the pole nice and tight (so tight in fact, we needed a club hammer to force the pole through!). We then forced the hind legs under some battening that was fixed to the spit, and nailed each leg to the battening, followed by binding round some metal wire as extra security. The same was done with the fore legs, and the neck was screwed onto the spit. Finally we inserted a metal pipe through the rib cage on either side and wired this to the spit, and wired the back of the lamb to the pipe to keep it nice and close to the pole throughout, avoiding as much movement as possible as the spit turns. I scored the lamb all over and then massaged it with olive oil, rosemary, and loads of Maldon sea salt. At 10.10 it finally went on the spit, slightly to the side of the fire, it’s belly covered in foil to prevent over-cooking. And there it stayed, turning slowly by hand (mainly mine, but also my mum’s, wife’s and my brother’s father-in-law), until 5.30pm when it was due to be served up. We’d taken off the foil around the belly at about 3.30 to colour up it’s middle and by the end it was looking proper tasty. My brother and I got stuck in with our carving knives and it easily fed the 40 or so guests, accompanying the new potatoes, abundant salad, and homemade mint sauce. It’s a great experience to have done it from start to finish, and I can’t wait for the next big family event so I can do it all over again!

The lamb soon after putting over the fire

Steve McCabe MP Visits Loaf

I had the pleasure of baking with my MP Steve McCabe today who showed a great deal of interest in what Loaf are doing. Steve’s written a blog post about his experience with loaf, you can read it by clicking here.

Quest for the Perfect Balti ends!

Well tonight, the quest for the perfect Balti, which I’ve been documenting on this dedicated blog, officially comes to an end, as I present my findings to a public debate on ‘how the Balti was invented’, at the Midlands Arts Centre. It starts at 7.30 and the full details of the event can be found on this page, but in the meantime, here’s a couple of my slides to whet your appetite: