citrus celebrations

If you're wondering why the shop down the road's out of lemons and panicking about what to put on your pancakes tonight, then you'd better hot foot it over to Menton, in the South of France, where if you're very careful and exceptionally good at Jenga, you'll be able to pluck a couple from one of these constructions.

national apples

Today is National Apple Day

So go and celebrate by eating one

the fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the fruit

 

hot and bothered

...that's how some of our indian mangoes have been feeling of late.  When it comes to climate change, the majority of conversations still use words like 'when' - when it happens, when the temperature rises, when the seas rise etc.  Of course the reality is that our climate is already changing, and more so in some regions than others at this point in time.  The Western Gatts of India is one of those regions, and that is where some of our delicious alphonso mangoes come from.

 

When our indian farmers started talking to us about the problems, we decided it was important to make sure we did our bit to help cool the mangoes down, and keep the farmers in the mango business.  Fast forward through many many conversations, and we had a set of recommendations from a local agricultural institute, a consultant and 18 farmers working with our supplier, ready to trial some new techniques in the world of mango growing.

We have just received the first report from the project, and despite only being able to implement 2 of the 5 techniques this season we have seen some great results. Farmers participating in the trial were able to use less agrochemicals on the trees and still managed to have a lower incidence of pest and disease attack than a standard farm (saving them lots of money as well as protecting the environment).  Plus, the trial farms also found that they had a higher yield of mangoes per tree.

 

Next season we will be implementing all 5 of the recommendations, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that we get even better results.  Needless to say the farmers participating in the project are pretty happy that they can still produce great mango in a changing climate (and save some cash at the same time), and we are thrilled that we still get great tasting mango and have managed to help out in tackling this challenge.

A big thanks to our suppliers, and everyone involved in the project so far.  I'm off to grab a mango passionfruit smoothie to celebrate.

a proper feastival

The excellent Anna Jones (who created the recipes for our new family recipe book, Hungry?) came along with me to Jamie Oliver’s Feastival on Clapham Common last weekend to talk about the book, make some recipes with kids and dust off the old Blendavenda smoothie bike.

 

Here we are before the carnage ensued

Fruit prepped, ingredients laid out and head mikes donned, we got kids making the old bread and squashed tomato salad and fruit mess recipes from the book and then followed it with a bun fight to see who got to pedal the smoothie bike first

Though the fighting was mainly amongst all the mums and dads trying to have a go.

Thanks to everyone who came along, squashed, pedalled and ate the results.

Hopefully we'll be going along to more things like this over the summer and we'll be sure to give you plenty of warning the next time we do

cook-a-long

Not sure what cook for dinner to tonight?

Need something to whet your appetite?

Why not feast your eyes on these short but informative videos of the excellent Anna Jones (who helped us come up with the recipes for our new book, Hungry?) and some short but exceptionally talented commis chefs making some of the recipes out the book?

Veggie burgers for mains

Accompanied by a tasty chop chop salad

And finished off with a fruit mess.

x

Which is exactly what is sounds like.

Happy watching, cooking and most importantly, eating.

fruit fight

We were having a debate in the kitchen the other day. If all the fruit in the world got a bit lairy and had a scrap, who would win? And who'd be knocked out first round? Unable to agree which fruit was the 'ardest, and which fruit was the weakest, we thought we'd ask the nice folk that follow us on Twitter & Facebook for their opinion.

Here's a selection of some of the things people said.

Warning: these pictures contain a blend of bad jokes and utter nonsense, and don't contribute in any way to your five a day.

Happy Friday.

 

 

spreadable line up

At the end of every summer, my mum sends a massive pot of her damson jam to Fruit Towers for toast duty

It's been in the kitchen less than a week now but has already taken over as king of the breakfast spreads.

Here's a rare early morning sighting of two Philippa's by the toaster, about to engage in some homemade-jam-on-granary action

 

Thanks to Mrs T for making stolen re-homed damsons and breakfast taste so very good.

 

come along to our cafe

We're going to be opening a little cafe in Shoreditch, East London for 7 days this October and we'd love you to come along.

 

We've called it the innocent 5 for 5 cafe because from the 1st - 8th October (closed Monday 4th), we're aiming to serve 5,000 people their 5-a-day for a fiver.

Which is 25,000 portions of fruit and veg.

 
 

For just £5, you can choose a 2 course lunch or dinner from a tasty menu which has been specially designed by our guest chef, Gizzi Erskine.

  

We've got a special kids menu too and a handy takeaway hatch round the side where you can pick up a veg pot and smoothie for £5 if you've only time for lunch on-the-go.

 
 

The 5 for 5 cafe is bookings only, so to bagsy yourself a seat or find out a bit more, just click here and we'll hopefully see you down the cafe.

kenyan mango safari

Most people associate a trip to Kenya with a safari adventure, but last week Atha and I were hunting a different kind of beast - the ngowe mango.  It's a african variety of mango that we think could taste nice in our drinks, and it would allow us to make our first purchase of fruit from smallholder farmers in Africa.

The ngowe mango tree looks like this.

We want to make sure that our trade with these farmers is more than just a sales contract - we want to work out how we can help to make a material difference to their lives, even if it is just a little bit.

We visited a number of farmers to learn all about the ngowe mango and the challenges they face to earn sufficient income.  We also talked with great organisations like Technoserve, Fintrac and FARM Africa to learn how they work with these farmers to improve their productivity and help them to gain greater access to markets and finance.

A lot of the farms are in remote areas which makes it very difficult to transport the fruit to markets.

 
 

The farmers usually grow a mix of cash crops (ones which can earn them an income) like mango, papaya and banana, and then grow food crops like maize for the family to eat. If they can afford it, the farmers will also keep a goat or a cow to provide milk.

We hope to make our first purchase of mango at the end of this year, so we will keep you updated on our progress and how we will be working with these farmers.

Many thanks to everyone we met for spending time with us and teaching us so much, and to the Technoserve team for showing us around in Kenya - it's a beautiful country.

Jess and Atha