The Pickle Pot

It has been almost seven years since Melissa met me with the words “you can hire a hall kitchen!”. She had previously asked if I would cook for her beautiful café The Pickle Pot, but I had told her, that as I didn’t have a commercial kitchen, I was unable to. She then went on to explain how others were hiring commercially registered hall kitchens to prepare food for their small catering/food businesses. So off I went, I did my research, talked to people, did some study, applied for, and received council registration, and we were off – SBA’s Kitchen gluten free catering was in business – who would have thought…

The Pickle Pot in Maffra

SBA’s Kitchen

Since then we applied for, and were successful in having our home kitchen registered for commercial food preparation, which I am sure lengthened the life of the business. We were able to continue to work during COVID (all halls were closed during the pandemic), and it provided us with more flexible working hours, and all through this time, while we have had other clients come and go, The Pickle Pot, has remained our main client.

As we all know, nothing is forever! Sadly the beautiful café is closing its doors. Fortuitously, the timing was perfect for me, for us, and today we made our final delivery of homemade gluten free food, prepared and baked from our kitchen at Tranquility.

The Final Order

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Not long after we returned from our lengthy visit to France, I was asked to consider locating a commercial kitchen in order to cook for a local business. We thought about it, discussed the idea, and the search began. We needed a public hall with a commercial kitchen available for hire on a daily basis. It took a little while, but finally we located one just 20 minutes from our home. The next stage in the process was training. I enrolled in an appropriate course and this was done on line. Then there were council applications to be submitted and meetings/inspections held, along with a plethora of other issues to deal with, and then of course the testing of recipes and menu planning …

This week we finished our fifth cook. It has been a crazy and hectic journey, but we are now becoming far more efficient and time savvy. We are very proudly using locally produced ingredients and it is around these ingredients that our recipes are created. At this point, the beef, eggs, cheese, olive oil, and the majority of our veg are produced very close to home – within a 25 kilometer radius, and our milk is also local, but from a little further away. How lucky are we to be able to source such beautiful ingredients so very close to home.

For me, our packaging needed to be environmentally friendly, and with some advice we ended up with a beautiful product, in fact the bases are fully home compostable and the lids can be placed in your recycle bin. On top of this, I think it looks amazing.

So what are we cooking… We are preparing pre-packaged meals in single and family size, such as