It’s April and time for our third meeting of the Suffolk Love Food Champions!

Read the first entry for this Love Food Group


This month’s topic was food preparation and storage. But before we got started we shared our thoughts on how we felt we had done at attaining our goals from the last meeting – it seems to me that all their cupboards and fridges would put mine to shame, but I have made a start upon this task! Shopping lists are being used far more and portion control is certainly better than before. One of the main obstacles seems to be husbands who do not check the cupboards if they are embarking on the weekly shop!!! Bit more training needed here, I feel!

Having played with pasta-portion-control and using up those “tempting-to-throw-away” bits last month, we decided to carry on with the theme of using up bits and pieces, but this time Hannah very kindly made three pizza bases for us to decorate with the “offerings” the others had brought along to finish them off. We had a mixture of red and white onions, mozzarella and ordinary cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes, leeks, peppers, Italian sausage and ham slices, artichokes, and some different dressings which all sounds very disparate but let three different groups get their heads together and you come up with some very scrumptious pizzas for all to enjoy – along with a glass of wine which complimented the flavours!

Once the food preparations had been carried out we could then get on with the main objective of the evening, which was to talk about food storage and preservation. Whilst the pizzas were cooking we went through the activity table in the booklet and decided that we could all do more, with a little forethought, about keeping food fresher – we had a hilarious few minutes talking about refreshing limp carrots and other things!!! Good old common sense is what it comes down to and the workbook certainly covers the basics we all need to brush up on to make our food use more effective and less wasteful. We shared some very spontaneous hints and tips for using up food and, hopefully, will end up with some tasty ideas on the Tips and Favourite Recipes form, which they have all taken home to fill out along with their last Caddy-bin test!

Then came the taste-test to try out what we had concocted – it went very quiet – the anticipation was overwhelming and the smells wafted around us as the pizzas were brought to the table – ummmm……… Need I say more – no! This was followed with a delicious chocolate mousse and guess what we are doing next time??! The Chocolate Fountain is getting an outing and we will have fun with different things each person brings!

Watch this space for next month’s thrilling finale!

Fran Saltmarsh