Hello everyone, I hope you are great and this year's spring is treating you kindly (which is only if you enjoy rain and wind and a lot of it :)).
I wanted to send you a few updates just as it is another year for Leavened and we are entering new and big changes again.
First if all, please note that from this week, our shop will be open from Thursday till Sunday 10 -3 as usual. We had to make this difficult decision as we are simply not busy enough on Wednesdays any more and the cost of having staff in the shop is higher than the amount of money we are able to earn. We will continue to sell bread and pastries from the Market on Wednesdays so please do come, we can also make you a coffee in a take away cup. Then come and visit us in Old Town from Thursday on.
To answer your most frequently asked question - when we are going to move to the farm - we don't have a date yet but I visited the site today and it is pretty much finished from the building point of view, we should be able to start setting up after the Bank Holiday weekend. To do that without too much stress and as smoothly as we can, we will need about a month, I will be keeping you updated. For now, it already looks beautiful, light and spacious, with amazing wooden beams and warm lights which I have insisted on. The building is equipped with solar panels and air - conditioning so we are going to be very modern and posh, and there will be this stunning view that we can see spreading between the buildings. It will be a nice change from a unit overlooking the bins and back of Boots :). Also, last week a brand new, shiny oven was installed and we all can't wait to start using it, especially that our 20 year old oven is slowly saying it has had enough.
From other news, we have this beautiful aprons for sale in the shop, and I am very partial to them as they are my favourite baker's idea (young and gorgeous Kitty Tait) and all profits go towards Breaducation Britain, a charity that sponsors bread baking kits to organisations like schools, prisons, food hubs, social enterprises etc in order to enable others to learn "joyful and potentially life changing skills of making bread". We support this idea fully and we will also have some gorgeous "Gluten Morning" bags for sale shortly. From this week we will also set up a table in the market with some used cooking books for sale. You can donate what you can and pick a book and all of the proceedings will be sent to Breaducation too.
On a personal note, last week was MS week and there was a lot of talk about unseen symptoms on social media and I couldn't really help myself and thought about it every day. I also felt an urge to share some of the ugliness of MS on our social platforms but in the end I decided against. The truth is that when you see me you probably see a tired face, but there is a whole lot difficult of stuff going on behind it. I was thinking that if any of you know someone who struggles with MS or perhaps it is you - why don't you reach out and we could do something together? I was thinking of organising a meeting in the coffee shop one day, which could turn into a series of meeting and we could create a support group? Let me know if you are interested or can help, just drop me an email and we can take it from there. This year felt particularly difficult for me, perhaps I just want to have bigger chunk of that life than I can take, so I think there could be more frustrated people around and we could be angry, happy or sad together. I have all the space so please get in touch. Thank you.
On that note, I am going to say good bye, have a lovely week and spend Bank Holiday Weekend hopefully bathing in the warm sun of Stevenage (or somewhere even nicer).
Iza