Great Britain and NI

Here are a few British community cooking event ideas to get you started.  Download the Rhubarb Crumble recipe and Demonstrator Notes at the bottom of the page.

Click on each country’s page for more ideas and recipes.

Community crumble cooking

Make Rhubarb Crumble at a school event, such as a school fete, Parents’ Evening, end-of-term production or sporting event.  Set up a stall and demonstrate how to make the crumble topping, inviting guests to have a go.

You will need hand-washing facilities and a way of ensuring that people only eat the crumble that they have made themselves. Wash and chop the rhubarb and use individual foil containers to assemble the crumble, giving everyone their own portion to take home and bake in their ovens. Hand out copies of the recipes. Alternatively you could sell bags of pre-weighed ingredients with copies of the recipes.

Demonstrate how the crumble recipe can be adapted to use fruit that is in season, such as apples, pears and plums in autumn, cherries, peaches and raspberries in summer.   

Best of British fruit

Buy different British seasonal fruit or ask a local supermarket or greengrocer to donate some.  Hold a fruit tasting session, which is your favourite?  Can you think of a word to describe each fruit - such as juicy, tangy or refreshing? Blindfold people and see if they can identify each fruit again.  You could use fresh, canned or dried fruit. You will need to make sure that fresh fruit is ripe and some might need cooking (such as rhubarb which would taste horrible raw!)  Ask people which recipes they would make with each fruit.  

Invite a greengrocer, supermarket produce manager or allotment or orchard owner to talk to your group about how fruit is grown in Britain and when each fruit is in season.  Finish off your session with a cooking session and make the Rhubarb Crumble or adapt the recipe to use your favourite seasonal fruit.

Out and About

Visit a ‘Pick Your Own’ farm, orchard, market garden or allotment to see how fruit is grown in Britain and Northern Ireland.  If you have a farmers’ market or  greengrocers near by, why not ask the staff there where their produce comes from and how far it has travelled? Look at the food labels in a supermarket to see which countries fruit is imported from.  Which has travelled the furthest? 

Depending on where you live, you could visit a farm to see how rhubarb is grown and take some back to your school to make Rhubarb Crumble.

Key dates

• British Food Fortnight - 18 Sep-3 October 2010
• Wakefield Festival of Food, Drink and Rhubarb (2011 date to be announced)
• National Baking Week – October each year