All our cooking sessions up to late February have already sold out, but we are trying our best to keep up with demand by adding new ones – so keep checking the website to find regular updates and information, and of course to book the cooking sessions.  We’ll also be extending the length of some Saturday sessions soon due to public requests… so watch this space!

As most of you will know, we have been core funded by the Local Food Fund for 2 years. That 2 years has now ended. At the beginning, everyone, including the LFF, thought we were being a little over-ambitious. Here’s what we have achieved since our launch event at the Big Green Festival in March 2010 –

We said that we would aim to deliver 91 cooking sessions and 20 HOPs, reaching 1910 participants altogether. In fact we have delivered 116 cooking sessions and 31 HOPs, reaching a total of 2782 people. We said we would work with 5 local food growers and providers; we’ve worked with 12. We said that we would work with 30 different community groups and organisations; we’ve worked with 40.

A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed to this success!

But what now? We’re not about to see all this hard work come to nothing…..

Times are very tough on the funding front, for everyone. There’s more competition than ever before, as so many organisations and public bodies have seen their own funding cut and they need to find ways to plug the gaps. We’re now also up against local councils on many of these applications, and the available pots of cash are shrinking across the board. It’s been frustrating to spend huge amounts of time planning a project and writing the funding bid, and then to come away empty handed.

Our long term plan is to work with the NHS/public health directorate in delivering healthy eating cookery programmes to patients referred by their GPs, but the system for this is in a state of change until April 2013.

However, we have succeeded in getting funding from the Home Office, to work alongside the Probation Service on a 12 month project, which has been great news.

As a successful project which has reached and surpassed its outcomes, we have recently been invited by the LFF to apply for Supporting Change and Impact funding. This would enable us to spend time on evaluation and further forward planning / doing preparatory work in relation to public health contracts which will enable us to be fully sustainable and not reliant on funding.

We also attracted funding from Manchester City Council to run two 5 week programmes with residents of Nell Lane Estate, starting next month.

We have also been asked to run 4 sessions at Barlow Hall Community Centre, two with a youth group and two with an over 50s group.

We won the U Decide competition to pay for us to be at the Big Green Festival again this year, this time cooking up pizzas with Rob, in conjunction with the guys from  Stretford Clay Pizza Ovens. Please book your place here and thanks to this funding we can offer half of the places FREE for people currently unemployed / students in full time education or over 65 years of age.

Kim is continuing with the 6 week programmes at the Angel Centre in Salford  and is about to start the third programme.
Unfortunately there’s no more funding for further programmes after the 4th and final one in a few months’ time. The feedback has been very positive.

We will be continuing to work with Chorlton Good Neighbours, a community group for people of retirement age.

Finally, we want to continue our work with NACRO, a charity working with the homeless, people with substance abuse issues and ex-offenders and we will be jointly writing an Awards 4 All (lottery) funding bid for this.  We want to keep our promise to work with residents of Old Moat and the Pankhurst Centre, but this will also be dependent on funding.

We’re continuing to partner up with Manchester Museum on allotment cooking and foraging sessions.

We’ll be looking into ways of generating a Cracking Good Friends donation scheme in order to keep the community cooking alive.  More details soon.

Not forgetting now our regular and very popular programme for the public…
…and if you don’t know which one to go for, our vouchers have become even easier to buy, as they are also now on the website and are just a click away.

We look forward to cooking good food from scratch with you!

Jesper’s fantastic foraging sessions have all sold out quickly so we have just added a couple of new exciting ones:

Early Spring Forage on the 25th March

Food Foraging – Elderflower Special on the 26th May

You can also now click here to watch an inspiring film on Jesper’s Late Season Foraging on the 26th November 2011.
This is the courtesy of Rae Strong, Loveday King and Jacob Harbord, students at MA in Visual Anthropology with Ethnographic Film at Manchester University, many thanks to them!

Click here to take a look at the Cracking Good Food blog from a previous session

£35/£30 – Book online now

This year Cracking Good Food will be returning to the Chorlton’s Big Green Festival for the 3rd time, thanks to everyone who voted for us at Manchester City Council’s U Decide scheme! We successfully came 1st out of 13 fantastic projects in our bid for funding to be able run another Cooks On The Hop event at Chorlton’s Big Green Festival on 31 March 2012.

Our Cracking Cook Rob (our expert breadmaker), will give inspiring tuition in how to cook up wonderful gourmet stone oven baked Pizzas (look out for his secret tomato sauce recipe) under the wooden gazebo, learn how to make dough easily which you can then transform with your chosen toppings into your personalised veggy pizza by popping it into the wood fired oven. And all this will be done in collaboration with Mark and Graham at Stretford Pizza Ovens. 4 sessions will be available, with 8 people in each, running for 45 minutes and then you get to eat what you’ve made!

THIS IS A PUBLIC EVENT, we are offering half of all places as pre-bookable via our website and half will be available to book with us on the day. Each session costs £6.00.  As a result of our funding from U-Decide we are able to provide half of all sessions FREE to those who are currently unemployed / students in full time education or people who are over 65 years of age. We will require proof that you are eligible for a concession so please e-mail fiona@crackinggoodfood.org to state what your concessionary status is and bring proof with you on the day.

Chorlton’s Big Green Festival puts sustainability centre stage with a vibrant mix of live music and dance, food and drink, arts and swaps, and much more. There are also plenty of opportunities for festival-goers to get hands-on with practical workshops, a bike parade and a huge ceilidh. Best of all, entry to the festival is completely free! We look forward to seeing you all there!

£6/FREE – Book online now

Humans have been consuming the many and varied fruits of the sea since time began and we still are – all over the world. Fish is a tasty, easily digested and highly nutritious form of food. It has been called ‘protein without tears’ because it is such a rich source of high quality protein without all the drawbacks of fatty meat or cholesterol laden cheese. In fact, the now much discussed Omega 3, an excellent source of the fatty acids essential to healthy living, is most easily and effectively obtained by the body from fish, although there are alternatives.

The main problem with eating fish is that whilst it was all very well to eat as much of the little swimmers as we liked when they were caught on the end of a line or in modest nets from canoes, the advent of more commercial and even factory fishing methods has led to the dwindling of fish stocks to the point, in some cases, of danger.

Luckily we are aware of the problem and global organisations such as MSC (Marine Stewardship Council), Friends of the Earth and others like them are working hard to raise awareness and preserve the life of the oceans whilst still trying to protect the fishing industry. We will, undoubtedly continue to eat fish but we must only do so with increasing amounts of care.

The notion of ‘Sustainable fish’  will however undoubtedly remain controversial. As always, our fish is purchased from Out of the Blue Fishmongers, Chorlton.

For more information about sustainable fish, please visit :

http://www.goodfishguide.co.uk

http://www.selfridges.com/en/StaticPage/ProjectOcean/#/Fish

http://www.msc.org/

Book and pay online now

£40/£35 – Book online now

£40/£35 –Book online

www.jesperlaunder.com

£20/£15 – Book online now

Jackie Kearney is a top 4 finalist in BBC One’s MasterChef 2011. She is now developing her experience and reputation with pop-up dining events, as a private chef and working with a number of highly regarded chefs in the UK.

Her food passion lies with vegetarian dining and Asian street food, inspired by her extensive travels across Asia with her husband and twin children. You can read more about Jackie’s adventures with her family on her Asia travel blog.

Jackie’s ambition is to raise the bar in vegetarian and street food dining. She aims to bring something to the table that is exciting, delicious and thought provoking.

Jackie’s Website

£40/£35 – Book online now