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Nursery & pizza chefs up for top food awards
Bristol once again punches above its weight in the prestigious BBC Food & Farming Awards with two of the shortlisted entrants this year.
Nursery school chef Jo Ingleby (above) who has changed the lives of children and their families in Redcliffe, and Bertha’s Pizza, a street food business that cooks sourdough pizzas in the back of a Land Rover Defender, make up two of the 20 nominations.
The awards ceremony on April 30 will for the second year running be held in Bristol and will launch the Food Connections festival.
Nominated in the Best Street Food category is Bertha’s Pizza, an Easton-based business whose sourdough pizzas with often foraged ingredianets can be found at many of Bristol’s best markets.
Co-owner Graham Faragher said that he and his wife Kate were “incredibly chuffed”. The pair are currently scouting the city for their first permanent home.
Jo Ingleby of Redcliffe Nursery School is in charge of a team that not just cooks healthy lunches for youngsters but runs experimental cookery workshops for children under-five.
Jo walks with the children several times a week to nearby Windmill Hill City Farm where they pick food from their own allotment and return to cook them together in a kitchen with miniature child-sized appliances.
Jo first walked through the doors of the nursery as part of an arts project. That was eight years ago and she has yet to leave, although she has now swapped her artist smock for chef whites.
“I absolutely love it here,” said Jo, as Bristol24/7 paid a visit to the nursery in the shadow of Redcliffe’s tall high-rise blocks of flats.
“It’s different every day. The children make me smile endlessly. I’m always amazed by what they eat and how much they will eat. If I don’t serve salad for lunch now they ask me to go and get some.”
Jo says that how she teaches children about food has also influenced how she teaches adults at Demuths in Bath.
“I love the imagination of a three-year-old and their sense of fun, with no worries about how things are meant to look when they come out of the oven.”
Read the top-five Bristol favourites of Bertha’s Pizza co-owner Graham Faragher