The main topic under discussion in the Catching Lives kitchen on Wednesday 1st July was Health and Safety. The Inspector had visited! I was there in April last year when he paid his visit, and he is actually a really nice man, sympathetic to what we are trying to do in far from ideal conditions – but he has a job to do. We are expected to meet the same standards as any other restaurant in town and are inspected in the same way by Canterbury City Council. Last year we got a Food Hygiene Rating of 4, and felt quite disappointed, as we had hoped for a 5. I haven’t seen that report, but we were told one of the difficulties was recurrent mould on one of the outside walls in the larder – since painted with special mould-proof paint. It was also pointed out by the Inspector that our baked bean mountain was too high! The baked bean harvest seems to occur between September and Christmas, when schools and churches have harvest festivals and collect food for local charities – and our supply of tins multiplies daily. The result of this was in April last year, we had hundreds of tins piled up, and the Inspector was of the view that this was a potential safety hazard, in case a shelf collapsed on someone.
We started work fairly soon after last year’s visit on re-arranging our tins of beans two high, instead of three, as recommended by the Health and Safety Inspector, and it was while I was up the ladder working on that, that the worst accident I have witnessed in the kitchen happened. Paula was cooking something at the stove, when her pinny caught light and the flames rushed upwards. She rushed over to the sink, frantically pulling at her pinny to try and get it off, while Christine, was was nearby, splashed water on to it. I jumped down from the ladder to help and managed to untie the pinny at the back. We were all quite shocked, especially poor Paula. However, amazingly, although her eyelashes, eyebrows and hair were all singed, she was otherwise unharmed. As Maureen quipped, Paula was not meant for the eternal flames that day – or probably ever! Immediately afterward, Catching Lives invested in a large number of proper flame-proof kitchen pinnies and we usually all put one on the minute we arrive in the kitchen.
Another problem we became aware of last year was the amount of filth and grease which accumulates on the panels in front of the extractor fans in the cooker hood. It looked like the panels hadn’t been cleaned for months. The Wednesday gang decided then to take responsibility for cleaning them and we have taken them down and done that on the first Wednesday of each month for over a year now. That isn’t as easy as it sounds as the panels are about eight feet off the ground and have to be lifted upwards for removal. We are always on the lookout for a tall person at the beginning of the month – anyone over about 6’4″ can just reach up and remove them. If there are no giants around, one of us lesser mortals has to climb up the kitchen ladder and stand on top of the cooker to remove and replace them, after a thorough scrub.
We had been asking every week this year since the beginning of April, has the Health and Safety man been yet? This week he had. Had he noticed the beautiful cooker hood? It seems not. Perhaps he did notice that we have hardly any baked beans left: by July the mountain is greatly diminished, awaiting the next harvest. How did we score? Another 4 – oh dear – we would love to get 5!
I have a friend who used to run a very successful restaurant in Canterbury, and he said it is pretty impossible to get a 5 in an old building, and perhaps he is right. The Catching Lives building is hardly purpose built: since I have lived in Canterbury, I can remember it being used variously as a biscuit warehouse, a newspaper wholesale outlet and for many years by the forerunner of Catching Lives, as a night shelter for the homeless. It is the structure of the building that has let us down again this time – happily neither hygiene nor management in the kitchen. The Inspector’s eye lighted upon a small broken window, which has been patched up with a piece of cardboard ever since I have been volunteering. It was like that when he came last year, but he can’t have noticed it then; he was unhappy with it this time. The staff have already attended to that by putting a piece of wood over the hole.
He also noticed a gap at the bottom of an outside door. That too has been promptly dealt with by attaching a draught excluder to the bottom of said door. What is harder to deal with is the surface of the kitchen floor. The floor is covered with an appropriate surface, but there are breaks and patches in it, which is unacceptable to the Inspector, it seems.
The other, and for us, potentially most time consuming point raised by the inspection, is the requirement for all foods to be labelled with details of any allergens they may contain. Everything we use now has to be carefully scanned for details of any such ingredient and we are required to write the menu on the chalkboard giving relevant information about all allergens.
Happily, we have Christine in our team with her super sharp mind and she was straight away on top of the game as you can see from her menu. We really went to town on the salads this Wednesday – such hot weather – but happily not too many allergens in them!
Perhaps if we achieve our target of raising £5,895 by climbing Kilimanjaro – and our kind donor matches it – Catching Lives will be able to afford to recover the kitchen floor – and we can hope for a 5 next year!
NB If you have, or know someone who may have, a few hours a week to volunteer at Catching Lives in Canterbury, please check out this link