Starting Up with Jo Woodcock @ The Wandering Kitchen

When I had the idea for our pop-up restaurant, The Wandering Kitchen, in April 2013, I knew that the reason why the concept was good and would work.

That reason was love. This might sound a little bit twee, but stick with me. When someone cooks for you and that food is made with passion and care it tastes good, right? Like when your mum makes your favourite meal, or your partner cooks for you after a long hard day.

This was what I wanted The Wandering Kitchen food to taste like, I wanted it to have that taste of home, to be made with love. That taste that you very rarely find at a chain restaurant or in a ready meal because that food is made for convenience. Why didn’t I talk about this in my first blog? Well, because I think I had slightly forgotten about it until I booked The Wandering Kitchen to cater for my birthday party at Rosie’s Tea Room in Abingdon last month.

How could I forget such an important thing? Well, because simultaneously to launching The Wandering Kitchen, we had a baby, who is now five months old. Not only that, I also run another business called Fe-line, which is an events company and blog for ambitious and courageous women, and Ed (the other half of the Wandering Kitchen and my fiance) has another seven-year-old son who we have every other weekend. So basically we have busy lives and what this means is that my feet barely hit the ground and there is very little time for quiet reflection. It is very much ‘what next, what hat am I wearing for the next 30 minutes?’

I don’t know if anyone else knows this feeling, but when you have a little baby in the house, who needs your care and attention, food becomes just sustenance, grabbing something at the end of the long day when you are knackered, or something quick while they have a nap at lunchtime.

Cooking is one of the things I have found very hard to do as well as juggling having a baby and I can count the amount of fully satisfying meals I have had in the last five months on one hand. One of these meals was when Ed cooked on my birthday and as I sat in Rosie’s Tea Room amongst my nearest and dearest, I remembered why our food is not just sustenance. What makes it special is love.

I had the vegetarian tapenade, the mushroom wellington and then chocolate brownie and I devoured it all and with each mouthful I felt like my body was getting re-nourished. The reason the food tastes like this is: 1. Ed trained with some excellent chefs at college, he was mentored to put time and love into his cooking 2. He picks the very best ingredients, our meat and veg is locally sourced and fresh 3. There isn’t much else in it, no preservatives, no rubbish.

One of my friends is notoriously fussy and he had our steak and stilton pie and he ate every last bit of it and he gave us the massive compliment of “this is exactly the food I want to eat, it’s flavoured well, it’s simple and it’s tasty”. And that’s it, basically. We are cooking the food that people want to eat, made with love and tastes like home.

There are several places that you can try our cooking. We pop up every Wednesday evening at Rosie’s Tea Room in Abingdon and we serve lunch from our catering trailer, The Wandering Lodge, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Friday at the Old Farm Shop on Milton Hill, near Didcot. You can also book us for private functions at Rosie’s Team Room (for up to 20 people) or in a venue of your choice (for up to 50 people).

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There are more details on their website: www.thewanderingkitchen.co.uk