5 December 2022
This is the weekly newsletter from Loaf in Stirchley, keeping you abreast of our bakery and cookery school, and other news we think you might be interested in.
This week the Weekly Loaf moves to Mondays as we’re open every Tuesday starting this week.
Also, pre-orders are now open for all days right up to Christmas Eve.
We’ll have plenty of bread and pastries on the shelves all day, with lunches served from noon on weekdays.
Scroll down for this week’s lunch menu, cookery school spaces and community news.
Our opening hours are:
Tue - Fri: 12 - 6
Saturday: 8 - 1
Bakery orders open for all December
We’ve opened orders up for the whole of December so you can reserve your bread for every day up to Christmas Eve. We strongly recommend you gets your bread reserved for the 23rd and 24th as we will be baking to capacity and expect to sell out.
If you have any problems with your order please do email us at info@loaf.coop and we’ll sort it out.
Please note: we won’t be doing stollen this year as costs have increased and it wasn’t so popular last year. Instead we’ll be putting that time towards a wider range of seasonal sweets and pastries in the final week. Watch this space!
Now open Tuesdays again
We are delighted and relieved to finally be back to our pre-pandemic opening hours. From this week we are open Tuesday through Friday from 12 to 6pm, along with Saturday 8am to 1pm. These will be our hours going forward with no further changes planned or anticipated.
The Tuesday offer at Loaf is broadly the same as other days with a couple of differences.
- No croissants, as they need to be prepared a day in advance and Monday is already too busy.
- No wholemeal sourdough, for similar reasons.
We’re also shifting the Tarka daal curry back to Tuesday as it needs less prep than our other curries.
Loaf: once again serving you fresh bread on both of the days that start with a T!
£250 raised for the B30 Food Bank in November
We passed on £250 worth of cash donations from those of you that were able to last month, alongside the many tins and packets of food left with us. We’ve been asked to pass on our thanks, so thanks!
We will continue to support our food bank as long as it is necessary, but it’s important to remember that it shouldn’t be necessary. A society where people are going hungry is a broken society and we should be working to eliminate the causes of this, not picking up the pieces again and again. Thankfully the Trussell Trust agrees.
But it seems we are a long way off this goal and people are suffering. This report of five months at a food bank is eye-opening and quite disturbing. It’s terrible that food banks are necessary, but they are.
You can make a cash donation with your Loaf purchases at the counter or online, or give directly here. And we continue to be a drop-off point for needed products.
Advent treasure hunt returns
If you’re an aficionado of Loaf’s Instagram Stories, you’ll know Rachel’s advent treasure hunt is back for a third year!
Every day between now and Christmas she’s hiding a bread voucher somewhere in Stirchley and posting a clue at different times of the day. It’s then a race to get there first, and competition is often fierce.
Each voucher can be exchanged for a loaf of bread, and the final ‘golden ticket’ is for a big bag of goodies.
(The whys and wherefores of Instagram are a mystery to us greybeards on the email newsletter team but we think you can see an archive of the clues at this link.)
Stirchley Market was a blast
Neil and Pete had a great time at Stirchley Community Market on Saturday. It was rammed full of new and familiar faces and can safely be described as a success. It was great to have a bit more time to chat with people about what we do and why, and Neil did some in-depth sessions with struggling bakers.
The volunteers who manage the market are hoping to make it a quarterly event so we guess we’ll be back in the spring with trays of hot cross buns. See you then!
(Market pic by Kerry Leslie)
The Breadcrumbs
🥖 There’s a Freelancers / Coworkers Christmas party at the Old Post Office on Friday 16th December from 4:30pm. Who needs an office to have an office party?
🥖 As a fermentation-based business we found this piece by George Monbiot on precision fermenting interesting and not a small bit challenging. On the one hand it’s the very definition of industrially processed food, on the other it’s a solution to world hunger. Hmm…
🥖 Food bank Britain: five months on the frontline of the new emergency service. Yes, we mentioned it above but it bears repeating. A necessary document.
🥖 We might be late to the party but we recently discovered we can order our cookbooks from Hive.co.uk and nominate our local bookshop, The Bookshop on the Green in Bournville, to get a share of the sale. This in turn helps support Bournville Hub, a registered charity supporting the community. Nice!
🥖 The Cotteridge Park newsletter for December has a lot of activities listed, which might surprise you given the time of year. Catching our eye is Shed Soup on Monday and Wednesday lunchtimes.
If you’ve got news or an event in Loaf’s wheelhouse (some variation on bread / community / cooperatives), let us know at newsletter@loaf.coop
Lunches this week
Tuesday
- Curry: Tarka daal with sourdough (Ve)
Wednesday
- Soup: Roasted mushroom and rocket with sourdough (Ve)
Thursday
- Soup: Roasted tomato and red pepper with cheesy (V) or rosemary (Ve) focaccia
Friday
- Curry: Potato, cauliflower and spinach with sourdough (Ve)
- Salt beef on challah
Tue — Fri
- Sourdough pizza: Stilton, tenderstem broccoli, hazelnut dukkah
Wed — Fri
- Ham and cheese croissant
- Pine nut pesto and cheese croissant (V)
Tue — Sat:
- Sausage rolls
- Vegetable rolls (V)
Lunches are made fresh on weekdays for 12 noon.
Our menu for the week — with ingredients and allergens — is on the website.
Cookery school classes
That’s it for 2022 — thanks to everyone who attended a class!
Dates for the new year will be released on or around Thursday 15th December. You can sign up to alert lists for specific classes here.
Thanks for all your continued support. See you next week!
Team Loaf: Rach, Neil, Sarah, Ian, Pete, Dave, Nancy, Molly, Martha & Dorit