Wow what a roller coaster the last couple of month have been. Very exciting but also very time consuming. Not how I'd seen this year panning out at all.
On the way home from an evening out in London, I bumped into my friend Nigel on the train. We were talking about cooking pulled pork as he's a massive fan. After a while a guy leaned over from the seats opposite and asked if I had ever cooked pulled pork on a Big Green Egg. I explained that I had in fact just ordered one and was expecting delivery the following week. We chatted for a long while and there were just some things he said that got me thinking. Eventually I confronted him and asked him if he was the owner of the Big Green Egg company. I knew that the company was being run out of Kings Lynn and this was the right train. It turned out my hunch was right and David introduced himself to me. We swapped emails and I promised to give him a buzz.
The following week the Big Green Egg was delivered and since than has pretty much taken over my life. I spent a lot of time after I first got it experimenting with dishes from simple burgers through pulled pork and onto breads. I tweeted about much of what I was doing. The team at @BigGreenEggUK retweeted some of my recipes and were very supportive of what I was doing.
I then had the strangest week. David from BGE called and asked if I could help them with some web site testing. I explained it wasn't really my forte. We also discussed the possibility of me getting involved in some events. We left it there though. Two days later Charles from Gog Magog Hills, a local farm shop, rang and said he'd had an idea after talking with the team at BGE about some of my recipes. Basically he was proposing I did some demos of the Egg's at the farm shop to try and sell them and experiment with how I might want to take my career forward.
So in early May I prepared to do my first day at the farm shop selling Egg's by demoing food on them, showing their capabilities. It turned out to be a blustery day with some showers in the morning and cool. I struggled to get my dough to rise for my Chorizo rolls. However there were loads of people interested and I was doing far more talking than I was cooking. In fact I wasn't cooking. Luckily Helena popped down at lunchtime to see how I was getting on and I roped her into the cooking.
By the end of my first day I was shattered. I was buzzing though as I'd made 4 sales, amazing for a BBQ that costs between £900 and £1700. I'd not slept the night before as I was nervous about how it would go and that night I hardly slept as I had so many ideas about how I would improve it.
Since then I've roped Helena in each weekend to help, it really is a two person job once you get busy talking to customers. My sales though haven't been as strong just ticking over at a couple a week I guess.
We've also catered for the Cambridge Food and Wine Society event that was held at the farm. Four 8KG shoulders of pork, slowed cooked for 12 hours sorted that out and pulled perfectly. A homemade BBQ sauce I made was raved about. And I got to properly meet and cook with MrCake.
In late May I was asked if I would volunteer to help out at the Chelsea Flower Show, working on the Big Green Egg stand. What a privilege. I spent just two days at the show but had a fab time selling the Eggs with a fantastic team on a stand that was truly stunning. In fact the stand won the best trade stand prize. It was really hard work, starting just after 8am and working right through until 8pm. I chose to only take a 5 min break each day as I was having so much fun. What a great experience though.
As you can see from the picture I got to meet Nikki Chapman who was working filming at the show for the daily programmes that the BBC put on. I ended up selling her and her husband, Dave Shackleton, an Egg, my first sale on the second day. They were both lovely.
Unofficially I was the most successful sales person on the stand for those two days, I think selling 16 Eggs. I loved it. I've never enjoyed sales before having been part of bid teams in my old job, however I loved this. I guess as it's a product I truly believe in which make it really easy to enthuse about and that enthusiasm sells.
One side effect of working that hard both at the farm and at the Chelsea Flower show is that I've been losing weight. So far I'm about 6Kg down, just under a stone which is great. Who's have thought that all this food would lead to weight loss.
So where is all this going, who knows? We're trying selling food from the Eggs at the farm now, so come on down and try it. I'm also in the throws of organising a pop up restaurant with Mr Cake at Gog Magog Farm in early August. Neither will make me a living if I try to pursue it but I'm having fun on the way.