I was lucky enough to take part in a project recently helping to connect people with where their food comes from. Enroot, a farm-to-table pop-up restaurant, is very much in keeping with my book and was an opportunity to experience the joy of preparing and eating food sourced locally.    

Set up by a group of students from New York, the project hopes to connect people with their food by hosting dinner parties on or near to the farms where the food is produced.

This summer Enroot is hosting events around Scotland and England and I urge you to go along if you can. 

Angus Buchanan-Smith was inspired to start the project by his own experience growing up in Scotland. He watched his family’s dairy farm in Balerno collapse in the face of falling milk prices as supermarkets expanded. As an adult, studying at Cooper Union School of the Arts in New York, he noticed the huge gulf between consumers and the food they eat, especially meat.

With friends from New York, DeVonn Francis and Asher Mones, fellow art students who happen to be outstanding cooks, he set up a project to spend the summer introducing people back to the food they eat. With help from kickstarter, they bought some basic kitchen equipment, borrowed a tent and set off to find the right ingredients.

Most of the food is local and seasonal, ideally sourced from farmers themselves. The vegetables were bought from Phantassie Organic Farm, including broad bean leaves, which turn out to be just as delicious as the actual beans and kohlrabi (a cross between a turnip and a cabbage).

Of course the key ingredient in the dinner parties is the meat. For the first Enroot meals at Cockburn Farm the lamb was sourced from Ben and Gareth at GB Farming in East Lothian. These young farmers are supplying lamb boxes direct to the consumer via farmers’ markets or through box schemes, ensuring the customer knows exactly where the meat is from – and can even visit the sheep. It is small scale farmers like this, supplying directly to the customer, that Angus wants to champion through Enroot. He believes it is not only good for the countryside, by providing jobs and maintaining the landscape, but the consumer by providing healthy high welfare meat that can be traced back to a single source and even educate families.

Obviously, sourcing your own meat and speaking to the farmer  is very much in line with what I am doing with The Ethical Carnivore so for the first time in a wee while I agreed to help out with the preparation and waitressing.

It was hard work but I didn’t drop any plates, well only one.

In fact it was a good opportunity to eavesdrop on the tables and hear what diners had to say…

The most common expression I heard was “magical”. It’s funny how knowing where our food comes from makes it taste better. Meeting the farmers and knowing how much work goes into raising livestock made guests enjoy it even more. I even heard it compared to Babette’s Feast!

The chefs were also inspired by the ingredients and surroundings, adding local nettles to the roast potatoes and pine tips to the pudding.

Graham’s Family Dairy sponsored the event, enabling DeVonn to make a deeply comforting milk cake brûlée with local burnt pine tips for pudding.

Lastly, even just from picking at the plates as they came back into the kitchen – and only the vegetarian dishes – I can confirm the food is delicious. I shall be watching with interests to see what these guys do next…