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!

Foodival features ...

A Grower 2018

This year's Tooting Foodival includes some new features alongside some familar favourites. We start this coming Friday evening with donations of fruit and vegetables from local growers. Can you spare anything from your allotment, window box or garden? These donations are used by our chefs to cook up a great sustainable feast in the Hereward Rd on Saturday 14th.

Here's where to find the Foodival

The Top Tooting Cook Competition is an annual keenly fought tussle between local cooks to rustle up the best home made locally sourced dish. Follow the link to find out how to enter.

This year we have several special guests including May Webber from Butterfly Conservation and Ocean Plastic Warrior Mermaid Jasmine Seales. Don't miss the chance to catch a selfie in a sea shell!

Of course we have a good array of sustainable and foodie stalls plus a long rosta of dance and music action via Dermot's Meltdown.
In a late change to the running order we expect to hear Dermot himself opening the show with his eclectic trug of homegrown songs and lovingly plucked instrumental covers!

So we look forward to seeing you this Saturday for what should be a great event. Friday evening for the much needed produce donations at Mushkil Aasaan 222 Upper Tooting Rd, SW17 7EW.

A full schedule of events will be posted shortly.

A Magical Festive Feast

St Marks United Reformed Church in Balham festooned with vine leaves, fairy lights and candles, offered the perfect backdrop for a magical festive evening at TTT’s Christmas Dinner last night. The invite to “Norah’s Magical Feast” promised a festive culinary celebration and what a feast it proved to be!  Norah won the overall Top Tooting Cook competition at Tooting Foodival in September scoring not only for the taste and look of all her entries to three categories, but also for her exceptional use of locally sourced ingredients including fruit, vegetables, eggs and honey.

In true MasterChef style, Norah delighted the guests with a sumptuous three course meal starting with a platter of sharing plates of courgette and haloumi fritters and three different kinds of homemade vegetable dips. Generous mains of roast salmon, lamb shank or a winter vegetable tagine followed. Dessert was a splendid affair of sticky fig pudding with salted caramel & coconut topping, roasted fruits with black cherry sorbet or a selection of artisan sheep & goats cheeses served with a variety of chutneys and oatcakes.

Aided by her assistants Dani and Chris, Norah gave us a Christmas dinner to remember for years to come. If you want to sample the delights of Norah’s Kitchen please get in touch with her here. 
Thanks to Bryony Williams #findmeintooting for her photos.

Tooting Foodival 2018: Congratulations to this year’s Top Tooting Cook competition winners!

Thank you so much to the competition entrants, the judges and to the local enterprises who donated prizes for each class in the 'Top Tooting Cook' competition.

We had fabulous entries made with love and delicious fresh local ingredients...all adding up to good tasting and decision-making challenges for our panel of judges. The panel judged several classes as well as the overall 'Top Tooting Cook'.
Thanks loads to Bryony Williams for her beautiful photos in this post.

Overall 'Top Tooting Cook' Winner: 

Norah Jane Brasington - not only for taste and look of all her entries to three categories, but also for her exceptional use of locally sourced fruit and veg, eggs and honey. 

Her choices symbolised the fundamental reasons of this festival which are encouraging the community to consider sustainable living by Growing Local and reducing the air miles our food travels -  thereby reducing carbon emissions.

A fabulous example of a community action response to addressing climate change!

Winner in the Savoury Class:

Farhana Wahab who made delicious Spinach and potato burgers from locally grown vegetables. The judges commented that 'they are amazing and have great texture'.

Winner in the Dessert Class:

Rachel Crosby who made a blackberry and mint cake using locally grown fruit and mint. The judges were impressed especially by her beautiful presentation.

Winner in the Apples and Pears Class:

Norah Jane Brasington for her “beautifully moist" gluten-free apple and honey cake from locally sourced apples, eggs and honey! 

Winner in the Jams and Pickles Class:

Debbie Morey of Good Sorts won with her “delicious" Damson Jam with fruit sourced from a local allotment.

Special Commendation to ‘Baked Bean Boy’ for his hot kale and tomato salsa with “great heat”, all ingredients sourced from donations to Foodival 2018. 

The judges cogitate!

The audience enjoying a taste of the entries

Why not enter 'TTC' next year in Foodival 2019!

Yum!

Top Tooting Cook 2018 at the 11th annual Tooting Foodival - all welcome to enter!

 
Top Tooting Cook, the Tooting Foodival's fun local cooking competition is ably co-ordinated by 'firm but fair' Belinda. Using locally-grown fruit and vegetables which you can collect from us on 14th September, you make your dish overnight and then bring it to the competition at the Foodival on Saturday 15th. See the details of how to enter by clicking here and checking the Top Tooting Cook info in the menu at the top. You can also follow us on Instagram: @TootingFoodival.

In 2017 we had a record-breaking number of entries: do join in this year!
 

This is Imira, who won the overall award of Top Tooting Cook 2017 with her squash compote! It's a Brazilian recipe.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

All 2017 competition dishes are in this photo - crying out to be tasted (some people had to be held back...) 

 

 

 

There was a wonderful variation of international cultures, ingredients, skills and why-not-have-a-go represented. So - how about entering the Top Tooting Cook competition this year? All welcome!

 

Here are some local pickles at a secret location - maybe you’ll see them again on Saturday September 15th at the Foodival!

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

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, Top Tooting Cook, Soup Disco

Don't miss the Foodival 2016 Soup Disco at Tooting Market this evening. Low food mile sustainable veg peeled, chopped and cooked up into a community feast to the sound of classic dance beats.  You couldn't make it up!  Well you can if you come tonight ...

Optional checklist: peeler, glitter, apron, platform shoes, wig, chopping board, friend, inner Travolta

Before that, check out the Top Tooting Cook competition from 4pm at Mushkil Aasaan.  Still time to plunder the vegetable patch (or your neighbour's!) and enter. Cooking demos and taster dishes from Minestra.  All sorts of other malarkey.

Soup Disco ... What Are You Wearing?

This year's Foodival culminates in a Soup Disco in Tooting Market on Sunday night at 7pm. What are you wearing and what veg are you chopping?  Send us a picture inspired by veg and disco (see above!). Bring a peeler and your dancing shoes, DJ till 10 pm, Unwined and Graveney Gin will both be open, too.

As usual the Tooting festival of sustainable food starts with donations of locally grown produce at Mushkil Aasaan on Saturday 10th, where you can enter the Top Tooting Cook and Ugly Vegetable Competitions, learn about bee-keeping and sample some taster dishes.

All the info you need is HERE on the Foodival blog.  We look forward to seeing you this weekend.

Counting Down To Foodival

This year's Foodival is nearly upon us as next weekend we will run our 9th annual celebration of all things local and sustainable in Tooting's food culture.  For the latest news head to the Foodival blog.


As usual we will be collecting donations of locally grown fruit and vegetables at Mushkil Aasaan on Saturday and there'll be a chance to enter the Top Tooting Cook and Ugly Vegetable competitions, as well as check out many other food related goings on.

On Sunday we have the truly marvellous concept of a Soup Disco where you can help wash, chop and cook all the fantastic locally grown, donated produce to make an enormous soup, before cutting up the dance floor with your vegetable-themed moves!  

Other dance styles will be perfectly acceptable and our resident DJ will be keeping you grooving till 10pm.  We hope to see you there!

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 grow fruit, vegetables or herbs, share what you’re growing for Foodival on the Transition Town Tooting Facebook page or post it on our local growing map.
  

• If you like cooking, sign up to enter the Top Tooting Cook competition with a chance to win some fabulous local prizes. 

• 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.  

Email: malsaraw@gmail.com