good cop bad cop

Today we had a meeting with Environmental health. on the whole it was a positive meeting, with a couple of juicy decisions to make.
stopping short to watch glee...

first outing...

Today Louise, John and I attended Collessie Coffee morning, one of those low key but valuable community events, but it had started to snow again!!
 Unfortunately the bread we made at Jeans yesterday had been awful, I reckon the yeast had failed to work, being a little old and also stored in the NHTT shed which is perhaps too cold...anyhooo, what happened was we were all texting each other last night saying the same thing... we got to make more bread and quick! So the three of us baked off some loaves in the evening, but the real star was John who got up early in the morning to bake.
As it turned out the turn out was lower than anticipated so we had enough samples and everyone loved the bread, so a big sigh there.
this weeks lessons were... operating out of a domestic setting is fun but not nessessarily productive, it will  be good to have an established place to work from with all our kit on hand and secondly, make sure the yeast is active, in fact best use fresh yeast.

making progress

Met with a member of Colessie village hall comittee last night to talk about the possability of using thier hall kitchen area to creat a start-up bakery site. all looking good, lots of paperwork and officaldom to be satisfied, but local community appear to be supportive and looking forward to fresh bread made locally.
a number of physical issues to be sorted, like getting our commercial sized oven through the door!
At this point we are looking at the possabilities of launching in late May.

Today the team were making bread in preparation of attending a Coffee morning event  in Collessie hall, our first real outing! So we will be decked out in our new aprons & T-shirts. We will be offering our White & Brown loaves in return for a donation, which we plan to use to cover our costs. Our current funding dosen't allow us to sell anything so we are being careful not to cross this boundary.

first steps...

On Monday 28th Feb 2011, i went along to Resourcing Communities at Strathclyde Uny. the idea of the day was to scope out some pathways to helping communities develop the capacity to carry out actions, if that's too much jargon... we looked at ways of getting finance together... issuses of trust from both the investors and the communites perspectve... where the power in decision-making lies,do we operate on real democratic principles, probably not! ...Who leads communities and how do we maintain their energy & enthusiasim.

This is the first in a series so i will feedback to you our unravelings over time.

At the moment i am heavily involved in the start-up of a Community Bakery; have a look at The Doorstep Bakery on the nhtt.org.uk site. We have just completed a feasability study, that included giving away bread to twenty homes in return for their opinions on the products, I had managed to obtain access to a local family baker in Cupar (Fisher & Donaldson) to bake the breads for the trial, thanks Eric! So far all is looking good.So now we need to find a place to bake from.
I approached both Letham village hall & Collessie village hall, Colessie has made a tentative 'yes', so we are very excited that we may have a space from which we can launch our new Community business.
I plan to bring you regular diary updates on the bakery as things progress.

neil

In the beginning...

On Sunday 27th Feb 2011 I met Sandy. He talked about snowdrops and scottish landscape, about where he grew up (Anstruther) seventy years before. Mostly he opened a whole new world of interconnectedness through the medium of blogging.
I had thought i was too busy for that sort of thing, but he made me see that perhaps there is value in creating an open diary that i can share with folk around the world who might find my musings intresting.
So, here I am reader at the start of an adventure into the world of blogging, I hope you enjoy it as much as me.