Transition Town Tooting

Tag: Top Tooting Cook

  • Celebrating Local Food Together as a Community: Preview of #Foodival2016 on the 10th & 11th Sept

    We’re very excited about TTT’s ninth annual Tooting Foodival which is all about Celebrating Local Food Together as a Community. 
    We’re planning the details now – here’s a snapshot preview.
    Plenty more information to come later on.

    ‘Local food plus local community’ is the weekend’s theme:

    I Grew This! (Foodival 2015)

    Saturday 10th Sept activities run from from 1pm to 5pm and are based at Mushkil Aasaan, 222 Upper Tooting Road SW17 7EW. 

    On Saturday we welcome all local growers to share and donate some of their local produce – maybe a bag of potatoes, or a single chilli pepper…whatever you would like to share.

    Mark where you’ve been growing on our Growing Tooting Map.

    We’ll take your photo proudly holding your fruit or veg for our 2016 I Grew This! poster and we’ll display what’s shared.

    Where will all this wonderful donated local produce go?

    Top Tooting Cook! 
    First, donated produce goes to anyone who wants to enter our fun Top Tooting Cook event. Take some produce or recipes away (or cook with what you have grown at home), and bring back what you make on Sunday for the light-hearted judging and more at Mushkil Aasaan from 4 to 7pm.

    The TTC hat – not the only prize you might win

    Show off your culinary skills using fruit and veg grown locally and you could win a prize… and the coveted title “Top Tooting Cook”!
    Find out all about the competition here and get in touch with Belinda to enter.
    For inspiration, look at these delicious dishes – sorrel soup, risotto with cavolo nero, fava bean toast with egg – cooked by visitors to the Tooting Community Garden, using produce picked that day!

    Thanks Naomi, Charles and Janine.

    Soup Disco!


    Second, local produce donated on Saturday will go to Sunday evening’s Soup Disco party from 7pm to 10pm in Tooting Market, 21-23 Tooting High Street SW17 0SN.

    From 7pm, we will all starting chopping the veg to make our delicious Tooting soups for a shared meal. And throughout this collective cook-up, our top local DJ will be spinning the tunes so you can show off your dance skills as well as your kitchen skills.

    Beginners welcome throughout… fabulous outfits very welcome!
    Plus, some Graveney Gin and Unwined will also be open for business – it’s going to be a memorable night!

    Other activities for all ages on Saturday at Mushkil Aasaan from 1pm to 5pm will include:

    Celebrate reducing waste and having fun by displaying your Ugly Veg. Or as it’s called in the USA: Produce with Personality.

    Learn about urban beekeeping, taste SW12 and SW17 honey and get close to bees. Local beekeeper Richard is bringing a demonstration hive of live bees. He can chat about bees & honey – and about sources of info for planting and gardening to encourage bees and other pollinators.

    Sprouted teff seed

    Practice being a successful home farmer by sprouting seeds – easy and delicious. Fresh seeds sprouted at home only have to travel a few inches ‘from plot to plate’. 
    NO food miles!

    Play our fun low carbon living games including exploring food’s footprint and much more.

    Get hands-on and creative with crafts linked to food and the Soup Disco – all ages can come and enjoy making.

    In the garden…

    Explore the local network of community gardens which can offer you fun, exercise, friendship, time outdoors in nature and a place to grow healthy local food.
    Plus, you will pick up plenty of growing advice and encouragement to grow your own fresh food on window sill, a balcony or in a front garden.

    Discuss the other local sustainability projects that Transition Tooting facilitates with many different partners, find out how to get involved – and we welcome your suggestions and new ideas.

    All welcome to #Foodival2016!

  • Foodival Stories

    Over on the Foodival blog we have been rounding up the stories from this year’s sustainable food event in Tooting.  There’s a Balham woman who grew bananas …

    Bananas grown by Susan in her Balham back garden

    And Sophie was the new face winning the prestige title of Top Tooting Cook 2015 with her beautiful culinary creation.

    Top Tooting Cook Sophie with her prize winning dish

    Pooja produced the tastiest dish according to the judges and Jenny Shand from SHARE Community Garden managed to cultivate the ugliest vegetable!  There’s more on the prize winners here. 

    Dave says: “Gimme Fracking not Solar!”

    Meanwhile, the Prime Minister tried to persuade us that subsidies for those dodgy polluting, diminishing, ever harder to reach fossil fuels are much more important than those for renewable technology.  Indeed this government plans to make community solar power generation unviable by slashing solar feed-in tariffs.  Sign the petition here to try to get this folly debated in Parliament.  Thanks to Furzedown Low Carbon Zone for highlighting this issue.

    Then there was the mysterious Giant Pea spotted up and down Tooting High St and featured in this Wandsworth Guardian video. 

    Children show off the Ugly Vegetables – the red pepper was voted the winner!

    Keep an eye out for more stories from the Foodival, some great pictures and a video over the coming days.
    Meanwhile what did you think of this year’s Foodival?

  • Foodival 2015 Rocks!

    Thank you to every veg and fruit donor, every restaurant cook, every great musician, every ugly vegetable, every volunteer, stall holder, artist, sponsor and Top Tooting Cook who made Foodival 2015 a fantastic celebration of home grown food cooked by local cooks. So many great connections made in a melting pot of south London’s food community. A mountain of photos and video will be sifted and we will report back on who won what. 

    But it’s back to the real world of (non-Foodival, non-Transition) work for most of us this morning, unfortunately, so bear with us! Keep an eye out of the Foodival blog for more in the next few days …

    If you missed the action over the weekend, you can see what you missed in the PROGRAMME HERE

    Roll on Foodival 2016 (10th/11th September 2016)

  • Growing for the Foodival

    Are you growing for the Foodival?  Unfortunately so are the caterpillars! They are causing havoc on the local cabbage patches!

    Foodival is TTT’s sustainable celebration of local growing, local cooking and all things food related, taking place this year over the weekend of September 12th & 13th.

    There will be a competition for weird looking vegetables, something on fermentation, a schools cook off challenge, plenty of entertainment, including I am reliably informed a giant pea, as well as the usual features such as Top Tooting Cook and dishes to sample cooked by local restaurants.

    Keep an eye on the Foodival blog for the latest information and keep growing for this year’s event despite adversarial critters! 

    No, not these people … they are donors of home grown veg & fruit snapped at a previous Foodival.  Recognise anyone?  Fancy joining in this year?

    Yes You Can!

  • So Much On At Foodival 2014!

    The 2014 Foodival looks set to be the biggest yet. In its seventh incarnation, Foodival now involves a presence at both the BATCA Funday and Foodcycle (both on Saturday 13th) where you can drop off food donations, have your photo taken in our photo booth and maybe be a late entry for Top Tooting Cook.

    On Sunday 14th at Samaj Hall, 26b Tooting High St, the line-up of bands and performers is incredible and we are really grateful for all of their offers to entertain us.  Similarly we are very grateful to the particpating restaurants cooking up your donated produce, the fabulous array of local groups who will be there, not to mention the special input of fanSHEN, Mark Watson and Tooting’s Phantom Knitter.

    Follow these links to head over to the Foodival website for more details.

    We hope to run into you enjoying yourself this weekend in the cultural food village that is Tooting.

  • Foodival 2014

    This year’s Foodival on the 13th and 14th September will, as ever, be a celebration of locally grown food showing how it’s possible to grow local, eat local and be sustainable while also having fun! Now in its 7th year, we hope this will be the biggest Foodival yet and of course it’s FREE to attend. 

    Here’s how you could get involved:

    • If you like eating, (which should include most!), come along on Sunday 14th September from 11am and try some locally grown and cooked food.
    • If you want to get involved as a volunteer, stall-holder, restaurant, cook or chef, please contact us at foodivalttt@gmail.com
    Vegetables Growing Right Now in Tooting!
    Food donations from 1pm Saturday 13th Sept at Mushkil Aasaan on Upper Tooting Road or at the BATCA Fun Day on Broadwater Road, Tooting

    Foodival celebration from 11am – 5pm Sunday 14th Sept 26b Tooting High Street (by Broadway Studios) SW17 0RG

    For full details please see the Foodival Website.

  • Top Tooting Cook 2014

    Could you be the next Top Tooting Cook?
     
    Last year the culinary talents of many local cooks were on display in Tooting Market at the hotly contested inaugural Top Tooting Cook competition. This year we are expecting the competition to be even hotter with even more local cooks taking up the challenge.

    It’s all in the name of fun, but also to show how locally grown, locally cooked food can be tastier and a whole lot healthier for you and for our environment. As part of the annual Foodival event, taking place this year on 13th/14th September, local growers donate produce from the gardens and window boxes of Tooting that we then distribute to cooks and restaurants to produce some truly local sustainable dishes.  

    You can collect some of this home grown produce on Sat 13th or use anything tasty you have growing to create your Top Tooting Cook entry.  Bring your creations back on Sun 14th when the tastiest dishes with the lowest food miles will win some fabulous prizes, with the winner crowned “Top Tooting Cook”.

    Please get in touch with Mal if you are interested in taking part or in finding out more.