Hey! Look who was on BBC Breakfast yesterday – one of our great pair Ups – Natasha and Beryl (you may remember them from another recent print feature) and a cameo by our very own project lead Murtz Abidi!
Watch the special here:
http://www.bbc.
And welcome to all new Casserolers – it’s great to have you on board.
Our current sign up map!
Yesterday, we brought together a little meeting of the minds – a mix which included community leaders, a day centre manager, a Casserole Cook and a cluster of people interested in starting up Casserole in their area (coming from as near as London and as far as Glasgow and Swansea), and the Casserole team, to discuss what should go into our currently-being-designed Casserole DIY Starter Kit.
While the workshop had been in the diary for a while, it could not have happened at a better time, as ever since The Times article came out last week, more and more people have been approaching us, asking how they can get Casserole up and running near them! The energy and passion people have shown for kickstarting Casserole has been astounding, so we want to make sure we develop something that will support people in the best way possible to make that happen.
With trays of sandwiches set and a bowl of clementines in the corner (no Casserole event is complete without food!), we were ready to start. After a quick run through of the story of Casserole, Murtz talked to the group about a lot of the lessons, from the difficulty of finding Diners, to the importance of a community manager that we’ve picked up over the last year, and how we hope this toolkit will help people navigate some of the hurdles that we’ve encountered in the past.
Once we’d gotten all our learning off our chests, we got stuck into what everyone was really there for – the Casserole Starter Kit (name still up for improvement…). We wanted to know what people thought they might need in the kit, who should get one, what support structures need to be in place, what problems people expect might crop up, etc… easy right?
The conversation that followed offered some really great feedback for us – some things reaffirming what we’d already thought, as well as plenty of new ideas that hadn’t crossed our minds. While conversations initially started with tangible things that should be in the pack (posters, flyers, magnets, ect…) we soon moved the conversation into the more strategic side of things – just HOW people will go about starting Casserole. Lots of ideas buzzed around, so to help keep things organised, here are a few of the top trends -
It was so useful for us to hear from people actually looking to use this toolkit, hear the questions they had and where the gaps where in what we’d original proposed for the kit. And having the voice of someone currently in the service, in the form of Maggie, one of our main Cooks, was absolutely brilliant and insightful. We have to give a huge thanks to everyone who came along to the workshop, from near and (very!) far, and for taking the time to let us pick their brains for a bit. The next step for us is to take all of these ideas forward, and create something useful. Our hope is to have a prototype of the kit ready for people to try out in the next few weeks so that we can start getting some feedback on what’s missing, what needs improving, and what works well.
If you are someone who is interested in receiving a kit, drop us an email at hello [at] casseroleclub.com and we’ll put you on the list!
We’re literally jumping in our seats surrounded by a flurry of emails, tweets, facebook messages and more thanks to an absolutely wonderful article written by Kaya Burgess in The Times today!
Sandwiched in between Caitlin Moran and Andrew Llloyd Webber on the homepage!
We were lucky enough to be highlighted as one of the projects in the Technology Strategy Board’s Tomorrow Together programme – which is working to start conversations and support innovative ideas to help people stay independent for longer. The article follows one of our star Pair Ups – Natasha and Beryl – as Natasha cooks up a beautiful looking chicken and tarragon casserole (check out that top picture – it looks like it should be in a cookbook!), and delivers it round to Beryl, both talk about their reasons for joining Casserole and the friendship that’s sparked from their meals.
The perfect casserole model
We’ve been working hard in the Reigate and Banstead area with the help of both Reigate and Banstead Council and Surrey County Council, and will soon be expanding to get more communities involved in Casserole – the responses from people who want to share a meal have come from every corner of the UK today, which is beyond what we’d expected and hoped for. It means so much to hear people’s support and passion for the project, and to encounter people who believe as strongly as we do that Casserole can make a difference.
So please! Grab your copy of The Times today and check us out in Times2 – or if you have a subscription, check it out online. Don’t forget to try out our very own Casseroler, Natasha’s tasty Chicken and Tarragon Casserole recipe as well!
Thursday evening, settled into a corner of very comfy chairs at UrbanNine in Reigate, we met up with 6 local Casserole members to chat about the service, plans for the future, and hear their honest thoughts on where things are headed.
We talked about everything from how they found out about Casserole and why they decided to sign up, to the future of the service in Reigate and Banstead and how Casserole might be funded. Everyone who showed up had some brilliant and insightful things to say – some of which confirmed ideas that we’d been thinking about already, and others which opened our eyes to some new opportunities within the community.
Maggie, Natasha and Liz listening intently
“I want someone down my road who I can pop round and visit on a saturday morning” – Ruth
“I would love for [my grandmother] to have this type of service, and that’s why I signed up.” – Natasha
We talked about the potential of connecting with local churches, primary schools and nurseries (where parents are most likely seeking ways to get involved in the neighbourhood and word can spread quickly across the playground), and sheltered housing to reach more potential members. When discussing the idea of expansion and scale, we talked, and all agreed in the importance of having someone dedicated within the community to help manage members and be a face to the service in the area. We chatted about how Casserole could be a source of great comfort and assurance to adult children who may live far away from their ageing parents, and how there shouldn’t be set criteria for who qualifies as a Diner.
I can’t fit everything we talked about into this blog (otherwise you will be here for ages) but one of the greatest moments of the whole evening was watching as new members asked one of our more veteran cooks, Maggie, about her experience in Casserole – what it’s like delivering meals, how does she arrange them, does she enjoy it, etc… Maggie’s accounts of getting on with her Diner Pam, the laid back way in which they arrange their meals (Maggie cooks once a fortnight, and just rings Pam up at the beginning of the week and says “Do you fancy eating ____”) seemed to appease some of the apprehension new members may have had about arranging their first meal and by the end of the night, you could tell they were inspired to get cooking as soon as they can.
While most people who sign up to Casserole are avid cooks, one of our members signed up in spite of the cooking – “Even though I hate cooking, I think the idea is amazing, so I signed up.” So no excuses – even an aversion to the kitchen doesn’t have to be a reason to not get involved in something good!
One final word – our Casserole members are bloody supportive. Every ounce of challenging questions, local advice and words of encouragement they supplied were exactly the type of constructive feedback we thrive on to improve and develop the service. When we spoke of the difficult nature of finding Diners, Ruth immediately piped in, “It’s a slow burn, but you will get there,” with a circle of nods and comments on how a service like this, one built on trust, inherently takes longer to grow, but that it becomes all the stronger because of that. So a huge thanks to those members who took time out of their evening to drop by and talk to us – we couldn’t do it without you!
Come meet us and tell us your thoughts!
We spend a lot of time exchanging emails, phone calls, and texts with our members, but nothing beats face to face conversations. We’ve met many of our members face to face at events, talks, and market stalls when they were first introduced to Casserole, but there is such a huge value with continuing those real interactions as people discover and use the service – getting the feedback we need to improve. And unlike email, texting, and even sometimes phone calls, casual conversation often brings about realisations and comments that we could never grasp in a regular list of feedback questions – an opinion that was solidified with the conversations we had with the members who came to our Indian Cooking to Share cookery class the other week. These meets ups give us the opportunity to hear your thoughts and share our ideas for the future, but it also gets members together – more established members encouraging new members to get involved, telling the stories of why they joined, and meeting other keen home chefs in their area.
With this in mind, on Thursday, 9 August, Murtz and I (Rachel) will be settling into a table at Upstairs at Urban Kitchen in Reigate from 6pm to 8pm to meet, and chat about your thoughts and opinions on Casserole.
Whether you can come for 15 minutes or an hour, if you are in the Reigate area this Thursday, it would be brilliant to see you!
During our 8 or so months (and counting) working in Surrey on Casserole, we’ve been lucky enough to discover, befriend and partner with some pretty awesome organisations and businesses that are doing great things with food and cooking in the area. Since we are all about sharing the love, here’s a little run down of some of our favourite food-related finds and why you should check them out!
Local Food Surrey - This is THE place online to find everything you want to know about local food in Surrey. They have lists of top food producers, small businesses, farm shops, restaurants, foodie events, recipes, and articles to inspire home cooks to buy local and celebrate the culinary delights that Surrey has to offer. Find out what local delicacies are available near you and support Surrey’s food businesses!
East Surrey College - We’ve been chatting to East Surrey College since almost the very beginning of our time in Redhill about how the college and Casserole can work together to support our members. Apart from having a beautiful new building, the college runs a brilliant series of adult cookery classes (ranging from one off evening courses to longer multi-week sessions) that are perfect for any avid cook looking to pick up a few new tricks and recipes and have a bit of fun. Just the other night, we ran a special Indian Cooking to Share class for a few of our Cooks which went swimmingly (given the positive response from this first one, there are sure to be plenty more i the future!), and was a great opportunity to get Casserole members together doing what they do best.
The Art of Living CookShop - Need that perfect baking pan or the best spatula you will ever use (seriously, the best!)? Art of Living is a family run shop in Reigate (they have another shop in Cobham too!) that is a bit of a wonderland filled with every type of cooking supply you could possibly need, are always experimenting with new gadgets (the food results of which they share with their customers). They helped spread the word about Casserole amongst their customer community when our Beta site went live, and we hope to do more with them in the future!
Chalk Hills Bakery - Chalk Hills Bakery is our favourite place to grab an artisanal loaf when we are in Reigate. Chris, the owner, went above and beyond when we asked for some help with our pop-up Lunch Table in Redhill a fewmonths ago,donating two whole bags of beautiful, freshly baked bread to accompany our free lunch feast. They bake all of their bread at Priory Farm (another wonderful place to visit!), use organic flour, and follow traditional, artisanal baking methods – their seeded sourdough is out of this world!
There you have it, a few of our favourite foodie friends in Surrey. We hope you take the time to check them out, pop round for a visit and say hello!
Well we had fun last night!
Despite flooded roads and heavy traffic, eight of our Casserole members made it to East Surrey College for a class on Indian Cooking to Share. We’ve had the idea to run a cookery class for our members for quite a while, so we were so excited to finally get the opportunity to bring some of our community together to do a bit of what they do best – cook!
Our menu was one of Indian curries made completely from scratch – no curry paste here! After a quick introduction, we got to work on our Chicken Curry and Potato and Pea Bhaji. The room quickly filled with the clattering of pans, smells of fried onions, cumin, chilli and ginger. The reason we chose to do a class on curries is not only that it’s something most people might not know how to make from scratch at home, but it’s an ideal dish to share with others!
One of the most wonderful things about bringing people together in a kitchen, especially in a situation like a cooking class, is that strangers become fast friends. Within minutes of getting started, we heard laughter and banter between Casserole members as though they were old chums – once again, we saw food creating a glorious bridge between people and breaking down those barriers that might make getting to know someone a challenge.
Murtz and I spend a lot of time seeing people’s names on the website, reading their emails and hearing their voices on the phone, but nothing beats meeting them in person. Getting the opportunity to hear people’s stories, find out why their signed up and what they hope to get out of the service, and see them bonding with other members straight away is so invaluable to us, and makes all the hard work very well worth it.
In no time, our collection of ingredients were transformed into some top notch dishes that would give any curry house a run for it’s money! There were no kitchen disasters (although I *may* have overdone it with the chilli…) and everyone’s food looked absolutely delicious!
This first cooking class was a bit of a test run to see if people would actually be interested in attending, find out if it was a good way to get feedback from members, and help get members together to meet and make connections beyond the people they cook for – we’re chuffed to say all of the above seemed to work! After the fun of last night, we’ll definitely be looking to do many more of these, particularly as part of the thank you rewards that will be part of our new Plates feature.
Thanks to all the Casserole members who came along last night – it was an absolute pleasure to put faces to names and hear your enthusiasm for the service. We look forward to many more shared meals to come!
Now I’m off to enjoy the rest of my curry 
Casserole launched in Beta at the end of May with our very first version of a full site. We have had some brilliant feedback from members so far, and are back with a few tweaks, changes and shiny new features to take Casserole to the next level of development. So without further ado, here are a few new things you will spot across the site:
About Page: In light of clarifying our message and how Casserole as a service works, we’ve revamped our About page to you a more thorough look at what Casserole is, where it came from, and how to use it best for you.
Neighbours: In our feedback, a few people mentioned how they would really like to be able to see what’s happening with Casserole, even if its not in their area – well now you can! You will notice in the there is a new section on your toolbar called Neighbours. With Neighbours you can see more easily what members are in your own area (and if you click on the Casserole icons, you can see a preview of their profiles), but you can also zoom out to see what’s happening with Casserole in areas both near and far!
Edit Profile: Huzzah! While before we had a bit of a clunky system where any changes to your profile needed to be made by us, you are now fully capable of managing your information yourself! Want to change your picture or fix your misspelt road name, not a problem.
Prices: When we launched the Beta site, we added in a function that gave cooks the option to charge a small amount for the meal they were sharing – this was met with some confusion and resistance from the Casserole community. By adding money into the mix, it seemed to muddle up our message a bit, which is the last thing we wanted to do. So, from now on, ad hoc meals shared on the site will be served up for free. For those people who decide to Pair Up (read the next section to hear more about that!), you will still have the option to charge, but for general meals shared openly on the site, those will be free across the board from now on.
Pair Up: This is a special new scheme set within Casserole for those of you looking for a more long-term, regular pairing with someone in your community. While the site is great for meals you want to offer up to the whole community, we learned through feedback that that’s not an ideal situation if you are cooking regularly for one particular person.
So, we’d like to introduce you to Pair Up – a scheme that matches a local cook and local diner and helps support a regular meal sharing arrangement between the two. These could either be a pair who met through an ad hoc meal on Casserole who wish to start sharing on a regular basis, or new Casserole members who would rather be matched with someone from the get go. Once a match is made, we will help you sort out a rough meal schedule (whether that is on a weekly or fortnightly basis), as well as whether you wish any money to be exchanged for meals (usually in the form of contributing to ingredients). After everything is set, we will send you gentle reminders before a meal is meant to be served, and ask you to let us know what you’ve cooked (more on why we want to know what you’ve cooked in the next section).
Part of the reason for Pair Up is to make sure Casserole can be used in a way that best suits you – whether its for an occasional meal or a regular schedule.
Plates: Every meal a cook serves through Casserole is a small action that can make a big difference in a diner’s life – and we want to make sure we track and celebrate those actions with what we like to call plates. For every meal you share, you will get a “plate” – this serves two purposes – 1) it helps us keep track of all the meals being served through Casserole to help measure social impact and growth and 2) it helps you mark some brilliant milestones in your involvement in Casserole. For every milestone (5, 25, 50, 75, and 100 plates – for now) you hit, Casserole will give you a celebratory token of appreciation (we’ll share more details on what those will be soon!) for being an active member of the community.
There you have it – a little tour of the shiny new things you will spot on the Casserole site today. As always, please let us know your thoughts – what you like and what you don’t – so we can keep improving Casserole.
Happy Cooking!
Did you know that this summer, Surrey residents are set to throw away an Olympic sized swimming pool worth of salad? Or that every day, the same residents could fill a double decker bus with binned bread?
Surrey County Council’s Love Food Surrey Campaign is on the mission to raise awareness about just how much food we waste in our daily lives, and help provide people with helpful tips, tools and tricks to reduce the amount you throw out, and save you money in the process. The programme is run by Surrey Waste Partnership, which includes the County Council, and the 11 district boroughs within the council, working together to help better manage the area’s waste.
The Love Food Surrey site features plenty of useful information and features to help you plan and manage your food better. There are recipes for optimising your leftovers or slightly tired ingredients, a meal planner to help you shop smarter (which could potentially save you up to £50 a month!), and facts and figures on just how much food we waste and what effect that has on the environment, waste services, and our own purses.
There are plenty of simple, easy things we can do to help reduce the amount of food we throw away (including sharing those extra portions on Casserole!), so have a look at Love Food Surrey to see what you can do in your own home to fill a few fewer double decker buses next month!
As you may have seen, last week we did a call for feedback, asking for your first impressions of the site – what you liked and what you didn’t, and where you thought the service could be improved. After many a phone call and email with Casserole members new and old, we’ve compiled a collection of first impressions to help us move forward with Casserole’s development.
We think it’s really important to get honest feedback from our members, and to be honest with ourselves about what’s gone right, and what’s gone not so right in order to grow Casserole into a great service. With this in mind, we want to be as open as we can about our thinking, admitting our mistakes, and working together with the community to keep the service on the right track.
Now, onto the feedback! We have to thank those of you who took the time to chat to us and tell us your thoughts. Lucky for us, pretty much all of you were on a similar page – we saw a trend in things you liked, as well as a trend in things you found confusing or lacking – which means what works and what needs work at this early stage is pretty clear to us. For this first bit of feedback, we asked people about their first impressions of the site, how they found the sign-up process, what they thought was missing from the site, and what they wanted to get out of Casserole on a whole.
We are chuffed to say that there was an overwhelmingly positive response to the look and feel of the website. People liked the design and how clean and straightforward it is (we have our incredibly talented design/development duo Jase and Ed to thank for that). Given that this was one of our key goals for this Beta site, we’re glad to see people generally think we got it right.
They found the sign-up process easy, and not too tedious – although there was some question about how much and how little information should be required (one argument being that more information helps foster more trust and community, with the other being that asking for too much information can create a barrier for people signing up).
In terms of the functionality of the site, most of the people we spoke to had yet to share a meal, so they commented mainly on more general aspects of the site. For those who aren’t currently in an area with many Casserole members, there was an overwhelming desire to be able to see a big map of all of Casserole’s activities – something visual that shows that even if there is little or no Casserole activity in your area, it is happening elsewhere! The other main comment we received is that while members are prompted to cook a meal on a regular basis, how to order a meal from a neighbour is less prominent, and there is a need for a bit more clarity on how exactly people should use the service.
When it comes to content, this is the area we received the most confusion, and definitely the space we can improve on the most. While our aim with this Beta site was to trim down our message into its simplest form, we seem to have missed out on communicating some of the most important bits of what Casserole is about. We received some initial criticism from a few people who have been along for the Casserole ride from the start – pointing out that the new website had lost sight of our social message and core value of connecting communities, and especially older people, through shared food. The launch of our website does not mean that we’ve pushed our community and social ideals to the wayside – on the contrary, with the new site enabling people to sign up and serve meals themselves, it has freed up more time for us to work more closely with older people and those offline who can benefit most from Casserole. However, our website does not currently reflect that, and it’s absolutely right that we need to make this a much larger, and clearer part of our online message (and we are already working on a new about page that expresses this!).
Another pitfall to the new site is that there is yet to be a space or option for people who want to be involved in more regular, one-to-one relationships between Cook and Diner, rather than offering up meals for anyone and everyone. We designed this Beta site in the hope that it would become a gateway into more regular involvement in the service and in creating a space where communities can come together. In its current form, it is a space for people to “give it a go” on their own terms, and in that sense, we think it’s doing alright. That being said, it has left little room for these more lasting relationships, where uploading dishes to share is an unnecessary task when the meal is already meant for a specific person.
Given this, we are looking to develop a branch of Casserole that will help foster and support these one-to-one relationships in a much more offline and light touch way, which will hopefully let those who wish to take part in Casserole in a more ad hoc way through the site, and those that wish to build individual relationships to use the service in the way that is best for them.
