What is happening at the Jericho Kitchen?!

What is happening at the Jericho Kitchen?

Is it possible that I love my job more than I ever did? Yes it absolutely is..

Despite having taken virtually no bookings in over 3 months. Yes despite that! Despite that people are obviously nervous about coming out again and being with other people? Yes despite even that! What this period has done is make me realise that every situation that life throws at you can be overcome.

We are incredibly lucky that lockdown came a week before we moved into our new venue in Nuneham Courtney because if I am honest we weren’t even ready to move in! Time has stood still there for weeks but now life is slowly creeping through its veins again. I appreciate it even more the space, the light and the surroundings.

It is completely different from our Warborough venue. Everything is designed to make the experience a better one. Our beautiful hand crafted reclaimed oak tables are adjustable so we can set up different layouts depending on what the class requires. No more squeezing around the counter we can spread out with windows floor to ceiling the lights floods in and overlooks our little allotment garden that we have just started to design.

With regards to the classes we have decided to wait until things return to normal for our regular scheduled classes, we are aiming for the beginning of September, as we speak! We have space to socially distance but we don’t want people to feel unsure about anything but there are still many people who feel that way.

HOWEVER, and this is maybe the twists and turns of this business, we have thought hard about ways we can share our new space with you and utilise our fabulous teachers who have all been sitting at home itching to start work again.

I was sitting in the grounds of Nuneham and thinking I really want people to see this amazing space NOW! So, several glasses of wine later and lots of scribbling then the light bulb moment?. why not Picnics in the Park that was the way forward. With a heatwave coming our way for July and hopefully August I approached Ursula, Ghalid, John and Carolina and they were all up for it.

Ursula was first with her Italian Escape Picnic themed event on Saturday 25th July. We posted this on the Friday afternoon and it was sold out by Saturday evening. Yes! ! ! People are happy to come out it is safe and socially distanced in the grounds and having a restaurant style picnic for 2 with friends and family if in a social bubble. So naturally we will be planning more of these events so more of you can enjoy an evening out and escape from the kitchen after too many weeks of having to be there.

We are also going to be holding a series of wild foraging classes with Justine Gens who is our resident expert forager. We can do this very easily on the estate and around Oxford, again with the maximum of social distancing luckily nature has ample space for this with virtually no limitations! All these classes are up on our website now. Moving forward immunity and sustainability are probably going to be our key words. Learning how to forage is a skill for life and free food for life too! ! Justine’s expertise will enable you to start your journey and we will be holding these monthly to enable you to go through, potentially, a whole year of wild food. The most natural and sustainable way of eating win, win!

2020 has thrown some very strange things at us, but we embrace change and will continue to grow as a cookery school in our new venue in any form we have to keep going, and we will. The doors will be pushed open again and people will come through them, there will be laughter and the smells of great food filling the room we can’t wait!

So, we are all here maybe in a different way than before for now, but if you need anything then please get in touch because we love hearing from you its been too long! If you want to come and visit the cookery school and our surroundings just let us know and we would love to show you around. We will be posting the photos of our new venue very shortly we just want to make sure it is totally finished to show it off in its full glory! Although the photo here is actually a small snapshot for you.

Thank you for your continued support we wouldn’t be here without you!

Emma and the whole team! X