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Say hello to the new Stove Cafe!

The Stove Cafe is the social heart of our social enterprise to bring new life to the town centre through culture and the arts and supporting community activity and career development for local people. Last year, we started to put together plans to make changes to The Stove cafe to improve on the look and feel of the space and to open up the space more to allow for more customers. 
The Stove’s Project Manager, Graham, led the Cafe refurb, along with Duncan Clowe from Duncan Clowe Joinery. The work Duncan did, along with the help of his dad, was superb and we cannot thank him enough! Make sure you check out his Facebook page and get in touch with him if you’re needing joinery work done! Check out the Stove Cafe refurb process photos below:

Since we’ve reopened the Cafe, we have been overwhelmed by the response from our customers and have been lucky to welcome some new ones in too! When you buy a coffee at the Stove, you are being part of a new vision for your High Street. Your support helps us to create opportunities, run projects and an events programme for everyone. To keep up to date with news from The Stove Cafe, follow their Facebook page here or their Instagram page here.

And don’t forget – become a member of The Stove Network and receive 10% off all food and drink in the cafe! Sign up to become a member by clicking here.

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News Project Updates

ONS Market & Recipe Swap

Looking over the next few weeks on Our Norwegian Story so far – The project kicked off on June 17th the with a wonderful array of specialities from Norway as well as this side of the ocean for our Recipe Swap and Market. Those who turned up shared stories over warm waffles with Norwegian blueberries, Kransekake and some scotch favourites like Chranachan, writing down some recipes for you to enjoy at home.

All of the Recipes have now been up-loaded to our project page here: http://www.thestove.org/portfolio/our-norwegian-story-recipe-swap/

Saturday the 17th June saw us join Dumfries’ annual Guid Nychburris celebrations with more waffles, cinnamon buns and a special Norwegian Market kindly put on by Alex of Edinburgh based Nordic Affar – www.nordicaffar.com – where you can buy all the Norwegian classics from Brown Cheese to Salted Liquorice.

More food to come at Septembers Scottish/Norwegian film Shorts and Pot Luck night on September 15th at 7pm, information to follow.

Norwegian food swap at the Stove , Dumfries
Recipe Swap gathering
Norwegian food swap at the Stove , Dumfries
Sharing our Recipes
Norwegian food swap at the Stove , Dumfries
Enjoying Norwegian stew
Norwegian food swap at the Stove , Dumfries
Hjortetakk
Norwegian food swap at the Stove , Dumfries
Chranachan
Norwegian food swap at the Stove , Dumfries
Waffles and blueberries
The stove
Norge Hus at The Stove
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Cinnamon buns!
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Our Norwegian Market
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Nordic Affar joins us at The Stove
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Sharing Stories
Categories
Musings News Project Updates

Feeding Creativity in Dumfries

From Andrew Gordon

Many have suggested simple solutions to the French Paradox—the apparent contradiction that the French can eat rich, fatty foods while maintaining a lifestyle much healthier than many of their counterparts in the Western world. Could it be all the red wine? Or maybe it’s something in their genetics?

The answer, as Will Marshall explained in his introduction to the Open Jar Collective’s Feeding Creativity event, is likely far more complex. It highlights the idea that our attitude towards food has a fundamental effect on our everyday lives. From how we socialise, to how we interact with our surrounding landscape and, importantly, how we create, Will understands that our relationship with food shapes us both as individuals and as a community. It has the power to bring people together and spark what he calls “unexpected interactions” across various social and cultural boundaries.

For him and the rest of the Stove team, the prospect of opening a café in Dumfries town centre is much more than a simple business venture. On the contrary, the Stove envisions its future café not merely as a place to enjoy good coffee, but as a lively hub that will unite the community—whether through participating in events and activities facilitated by the Stove Network or simply enjoying high-quality local produce sourced from across the region.

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The Project Cafe in Glasgow, one of the cafe’s cited by Open Jar in their exploration of Creativity and Food

To fulfil this vision, The Stove has enlisted the expertise of the Open Jar Collective, a group of Glasgow-based artists who specialise in all things food. Open Jar has been conducting extensive research to formulate an operational plan and identity for the café, analysing similar projects undertaken by other arts organisations in the UK—Glasgow’s Project Café was offered as one such example—and meeting with local producers such as the Loch Arthur Farmshop.

Feeding Creativity represented another stage in this process—a two-hour event held at 100 Midsteeple, where they invited anyone with an interest in food and creativity to share their thoughts on what they’d like to see from a new eating spot in the town centre—and to enjoy some tasty soup and bread in the process.

Attendees included caterers, health workers, business owners, and civil servants, amongst other professionals, all keen to leverage the café’s prime location and the region’s ample culinary resources to enrich the town and the lives of its residents. Splitting into groups, they identified problems currently affecting the town and proposed ways to address them, ultimately shaping a mission plan that could inform the café’s operations once established.

Chief among these concerns was the need for a place to meet after shopping hours that isn’t a pub—giving young people a chance to spend time outside the family home and offering community groups a welcoming space to convene regularly. Another key aspiration was to create a knowledge centre, where townsfolk can share their passion for food, be it through cooking skills, growing techniques, or healthy eating advice.

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The Bakery at Loch Arthur Farmshop

All in all, Open Jar received an enthusiastic response and left with plenty of ideas to work with, concluding the night by assuring attendees that further public consultations are in the works.

With the café set to open in time for Guid Nychburris, The Stove is eager to get as many people as possible excited about food’s potential to bring about positive change in the coming months. Ideally, this will result in a space where the people of Dumfries feel invested and responsible, giving the town centre a whole new lease of life.

If Feeding Creativity is any indication, it’s off to a great start.

Categories
Musings News

What Did We Eat Before Baguettes, Toasties and Panini?

From Open Jar Collective

Dumfries, like most Scottish towns, has a distinctive lunchtime snack—the toasted Panini.

First referenced in a 16th-century Italian cookbook, Panino (derived from the Italian pane, meaning “bread”) is traditionally a grilled sandwich made with slices of porchetta, popular in Central Italy. Panini became trendy in Milanese bars known as Paninoteche in the 1970s and 1980s, and later gained popularity in New York.

The term Paninaro came to describe a fashionable young person who was highly image-conscious.

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Through the dominance of American fast food culture, Panini have become ubiquitous in Scotland, alongside white sliced bread toasties and French baguettes. All of these breads are made from highly refined strong wheat flours, which are difficult to produce in Scotland. Due to the country’s shorter growing season, locally grown wheat has a much lower protein content—suitable for baking but lacking the elastic gluten needed for conventional bread-making.

Scotland’s most successful cereal crop is barley, once commonly used in homes to bake bannocks.

According to NFU Scotland, of the two million tonnes of Scottish barley produced in 2013, 55% was used as animal feed, 35% went to whisky malting, and only a small proportion was sold as pearl barley or milled into flour for human consumption.

Bere (pronounced “bear”) is a six-row barley variety that has been cultivated in Scotland for thousands of years. Quite possibly Britain’s oldest cereal grain still in commercial cultivation, Bere was likely introduced by Viking settlers. It has adapted to growing in soils with low pH and in regions with extended daylight hours, making it particularly well-suited to Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles. This hardy grain grows rapidly, sown in spring and harvested in summer. Beremeal was among the earliest flours used to make bannocks.

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Robert Burns once described southern Scotland as a “land o’ cakes.” He wasn’t referring to desserts, but to oatcakes and barley bannocks, which would have been baked on an iron girdle over the fire.

“In Scotland, amongst the rural population generally, the girdle until recent times took the place of the oven, the bannock of the loaf.”  

F. Marian McNeil, 1929

In The Scots Kitchen, F. Marian McNeill suggests that the name bannock appears in records from 1572 and derives from the Latin panicum, possibly due to the influence of the Church. It may originally have referred to Communion bread.

Bannocks can vary widely—from soda breads, scones, and pancakes to a sweet, fruity tea loaf, as seen in the famous Selkirk Bannock—but they typically contain some barley meal. After testing numerous recipes, I found that the best result was F. Marian McNeill’s “Modern Method”, using Beremeal from Barony Mills in Orkney (which is available through Greencity

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Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.

Wha, in a brulzie, will first cry a parley?
Never the lads wi’ the bannocks o’ barley.

Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.

Wha, in his wae days, were loyal to Charlie?
Wha but the lads wi’ the bannocks o’ barley!

Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.

Robert Burns, 1794
Categories
Musings News Project Updates

‘We Are Nourishing Soup’

As part of our AGM last Friday at #ParkingSpace, we were keen to discuss some of the broader issues surrounding the Stove’s values, the relationship between The Stove, Dumfries, and the role of public art.

We kicked off the debate with Open Jar Collective and Dot to Dot Active Arts and started to work on a ‘recipe’ for the Stove. This has felt like the somewhat experimental beginning of a process, which we are hoping to develop more fully over the next few months. We will be looking for more input from our Stove members during this time – more details to follow on this in the near future.

In the meantime, we’d like to share some of our considerations regarding vegetables…

The Controversial Pear: Controversial, Supportive, Non-hierarchical, No Prejudice, No Judgement
The Controversial Pear: Controversial, Supportive, Non-hierarchical, No Prejudice, and No Judgement.
The Honesty Jar: Honest and Clear, Communicate, Inclusive, and Generous.
The Honesty Jar: Honest and Clear, Communicate, Inclusive, and Generous.
The Critical Thinking Scissors: Critical Thinking, Prepared to Take Risks, Visionary Work, Make People Feel Good, and Getting to the Point.
The Critical Thinking Scissors: Critical Thinking, Prepared to Take Risks, Visionary Work, Make People Feel Good, and Getting to the Point.
The Blender of Fulfilment: Surprise Integration, Accessibility (Conceptual), Fun, Flavour, Cake, Fulfilment, and Hungry for more Challenge Yourself.
The Blender of Fulfilment: Surprise Integration, Accessibility (Conceptual), Fun, Flavour, Cake, Fulfilment, and Hungry for more Challenge Yourself.
The Catalytic Convertor Carton: Catalytic Convertor, People, Locality, Pride of Place, Openness, Inclusiveness, Eventfulness, and Joined-upness.
The Catalytic Convertor Carton: Catalytic Convertor, People, Locality, Pride of Place, Openness, Inclusiveness, Eventfulness, and Joined-upness.
The Unexpected Fish, The Banana Amongst Us, and The Partership's Tongs: Partnerships and Working Together.
The Unexpected Fish, The Banana Amongst Us, and The Partership’s Tongs: Partnerships and Working Together.

More vegetables available on our Facebook page here.

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