Foodival Continues ... Thank You Donors!

Thank you to everyone who donated fruit and vegetables last night. We seem to be doing well for apples, but could do with more squash! 

Head down to Hereward Rd off Tooting High St, by Mushkil Aasaan (see map) from 11-5 TODAY to see what our chefs cook up, tuck into the Community Feast, enjoy the music, stalls and creative spaces at Tooting's sustainable food festival. Late entrants to Top Tooting Cook accepted!

Sophie Rushton-Smith To Run TTC

We are delighted to announce that Sophie Rushton-Smith from The Corner Plot will be coordinating this year's Top Tooting Cook Competition at Foodival on the 14 September. 

Sophie was Top Tooting Cook in 2015

In 2015 Sophie won the prestigious TTC award for her use of locally grown vegetables to make a delicious colourful roast vegetable medley. 

Who will be this year's Top Tooting Cook? Could It Be YOU?

There are lots of lovely prizes to be won. Want to take up the challenge? 

See here for TTC FAQs and the 2019 Registration form.

Email transitiontowntooting@gmail.com with any queries.

Time to be growing for the Foodival!

There are over two growing months until the Tooting Foodival.

That's plenty of time to grow local vegetables from scratch to donate or cook for the Foodival community festival on September 14th.

What can you grow well in your garden, containers or window box in a couple of months?
Who can you get involved? There's a school summer holiday soon, and could the children be in charge? The RHS has a guide to getting children interested in gardening, here.

The varieties below will all grow fast.
Click on the vegetables in the list for more information from gardening websites.
Are some of these new to you? Try them out:

Coriander

Cress
Lettuce

Mizuna

Mustard greens

Radish

Rocket

White turnips

Kohl Rabi  and Beetroot
are worth a try too.

Click here to download a copy of these suggestions with the links to the gardening websites.

What else could be grown quickly? Please share your ideas with us all: Tooting Foodival and Tooting Community Garden are on Instagram, and the garden is on Facebook too.

Happy growing and see you at the Foodival. 
It will be great to see your produce and we'll add you to our 'I Grew This!' poster, 2019 edition

Tooting Foodival Food: the Four Wonderful Chefs, and the brilliant local donors of prizes for the Top Tooting Cook competition

All about Tooting Foodival Food:

• Four Wonderful Chefs for the feast on Saturday 15th!
• Brilliant donors of prizes for the Top Tooting Cook competition!

The Four Wonderful Chefs

 
Volker Nissen (top left) is co-ordinating the cooking on Saturday, plus Manisha from Pooja Sweets (top right), Rick Gibbs of Rick’s Tooting (bottom right) & Elisabetta Costantini from Minestra Supper (bottom left).
Thank you all for sharing your time, experience & passion! 

The Top Tooting Cook competition (for details on taking part click here - and please do enter, just for fun of it) has some brilliant prizes for the different entry classes as well as the main TTC award itself.
In the generous style that we so admire in the Tooting community, the competition prizes have been donated by the local enterprises listed below. Thank you so much!

• Abel & Cole (who are celebrating their 30th anniversary)
• Al- Mirage 215 Upper Tooting Road, SW17 7TG
• Deelicious Nazish’s Kitchen 12 Tooting Bec Road, SW17 8BD
• Meat & Shake - Tooting 47 Upper Tooting Rd, SW17 7TR
• Nando's 224-226 Upper Tooting Road, SW17 7EW
• Unwined Tooting Market
• Walker Wyatt Cafe 3 Upper Tooting Road SW17 7TS
• Bring Your Own Zero Waste Shop Tooting Market

So much to look forward to: all welcome to the Tooting Foodival 2018, 11:00 - 5:00 on Sat 15th

at 220 Upper Tooting Road, SW17 7EW!

Foodival Menu

For the 10th Foodival on September 16th we need lovely local growers to help us deliver this free menu to the streets of Tooting:

Starter: Pakoras : Onions, cauliflower, courgette, spinach 

Main Course: Vegetable Stew : Onions, carrots, potatoes, turnips, peas and any other veg including tomatoes, garlic, herbs etc.

Dessert: Fruit Crumble : Any soft fruit – apples, pears, plums, berries 

Are you growing any of these? Can you help?

Some home grown donations from 2015

For details on the Foodival and how to get involved growing, cooking, eating or celebrating please visit THE FOODIVAL BLOG

Join the 10th Foodival This September

Tooting Foodival is back this autumn.  What are you growing now that could be cooked up in 3 months time?  

On Saturday 16th September we'll be celebrating the range of low food mile food that can be grown in and around SW17.  Come along and join in, in whatever capacity you like.  We guarantee it will be FUN!

We Need Local Vegetable & Fruit Growers

And We Need Local Cooks!

Could It Be YOU? 

For more information or to get involved please email transitiontowntooting@gmail.com

Full PRESS RELEASE HERE

Vegetanuary

Chuck's Kale

So some of us went vegetarian for the month of January and, for me, it proved surprisingly fun to try an alternative, more mindful way of feeding myself. 80 people shared experiences and recipes on the Vegetanuary facebook group and a celebratory feast was held at Vegan Express last week. 

Vegan Express Celebration

Dipa's vegetable pastilla with feta

It would be great to try this again, maybe even risking Veganuary or Veganpril and I am sure there must be a recipe collection in here somewhere???  It's also a great way to kick off thinking about the 10th Foodival later this year.  

Well done Richard for organising this inspriring initiative and thanks to everyone who or joined in. Not sure I'll ever salivate over a bacon sandwich in quite the same way again!

Producing A Steak Takes A Lot Of Water

One of the reasons some of us are trying vegetarianism for January is the environmental impact of keeping animals for human consumption. The practice of rearing animals to provide food for humans is an ancient one and has been going on for at least 10,000 years. I'd argue that this has only really become a serious problem in the modern age when world human population has increased massively, ever larger swathes of land have been set aside for animals to graze at the expense of forest, and industrial production of animal product has become central in the human food chain.
Some of the effects are obvious: more carbon emissions, fewer carbon sinks, excess water usage, changing climate. Taking just one of these factors I'm amazed to see that according to Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2010) the water footprint of bovine meat is 15,415 litres of water per kg, compared to 322 litres/kg for vegetables. For beef cattle 98% of the water used up is with respect to their feed.

For more info on Vegetanuary, check out the facebook group.

Chuck's Vegetarian Risotto Tonight

Building on the 2016 Tooting Foodival at home - home-made pasta recipe, plus seed sprouting

There are new posts on our Foodival blog (click on that link) which follow up on two of the fun events at this year's Tooting Foodival: celebrating local food together as a community.
One post gives Minestra Supper Club's recipe based on Elisabetta's pasta-making demonstration.
The other shares all the how-tos of our grow-you-own home seed-sprouting crusade.
Do enjoy both. Maybe you can combine the two...?
Let us know how you get on!

 

Both these posts celebrate local Foodival themes which have been London-wide campaigns in September: Urban Food Fortnight and Zero Waste Week
Click for more information.

Foodival Top Tooting Cook entries - wow!

Feast your eyes on these amazing photos of the #Foodival2016 Top Tooting Cook entries!  All grown principally from donated home grown produce. More details on recipes and prize winners will follow ... but I thought you'd like to see this hot off the press!

Thank you to Charles for these stunning shots.  There'll be some from the Soup Disco photo booth soon too!

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)

What's that? Tooting Foodival... just a month away!

That's right. It's less than a month until South London's favourite sustainable food festival - Tooting Foodival!

Over on the Foodival blog, we're ramping up the announcements - letting you know about all the great things that will be happening over the weekend, and all the great people who make Foodival the glorious local festival that it is.

Just this week, we've announced five local restaurants who are cooking for Foodival... and there will be more to come next week!

Can you donate produce to Foodival?

As well as the wonderful cooks, we couldn't dish up over 600 servings to you hungry folk, without the generosity and talents of all the people growing delicious vegetables, fruit and herbs, who donate their produce to be cooked up overnight.

If you grow anything, or you know a grower, you can donate to Foodival... every salad leaf counts!

Add what you're growing to the map! Share it with your friends. Download some flyers and dish them out to growers all around the area.

We can't wait to see you all in just 4 short weeks!

Pumpkin power in the Community Garden

We harvested our pumpkin today:

And within an hour or so, lunch was served (looks great, Diana!):

Wonderful!
More pictures: click on GARDEN in the links at top of this page.  
All welcome any Sunday....
(to the Garden, I mean...and yes we should cook lunch there one day)

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.  

Email: malsaraw@gmail.com

Foodival 2013

Transition Town Tooting present our 6^th Foodival on the 28^th and 29^th September 2013, and this year’s two day event promises to be even bigger and better than the previous 5! 

Foodival is a celebration of local growing and cooking with a sustainable slant.  Even in the busy city environs of Tooting, many people are growing vegetables and fruits in their back gardens, allotments, in pots or on windowsills.  Foodival aims to show that locally grown food can be just as tasty and good for you as food imported from elsewhere, while of course having a much smaller carbon footprint.  We will showcase dishes with close to zero food miles. 

Competing Cooks

Foodival has always relied on donations of fruit and vegetables from local growers and this year is no different.  On Saturday 28^th Sept., at Mushkil Aasaan in Upper Tooting Road, volunteers will be accepting donations of any tasty Tooting fruit and veg from local people.  Local chefs and home cooks will then use all this lovely produce to create fabulous Tooting dishes while there will also be several professional cooking demonstrations using the donated food. 

Entrants to the cook’s competition (want to join the cook's here?) will take away fruit and veg to cook overnight for Sunday’s event at Tooting Market, vying to be crowned Top Tooting Cook. Local restaurants have also accepted the challenge to do likewise meaning that Sunday’s event will have a wide variety of Tooting food cooked up by Tooting people. All that’s needed is some Tooting Eaters to sample and enjoy the bounty! Sunday in the market will have live music, comedy, local stalls, games with prizes, the cook’s competition and a wide variety of food to sample.  

Foodival is a free event for all the family.  Come along and enjoy the fun, 

Meanwhile final plans will be discussed at a meeting at the Wheatsheaf tomorrow night (Tues 17th at 7pm).  To get involved in any way, please come along or contact Dave Mauger on foodivalttt@gmail.com.