Our best selling toastie is the ham and cheese. When we first started toasting it represented roughly half our sales, and was the cheapest savoury toastie. A year later and the cheese and ham share has fallen behind at many events in favour of goats cheese and other, more interesting alternatives.

Goat’s cheese has a mysterious hold over people. In a straight up battle of the cheeses I would expect brie, fresh basil and slow roast tomato to beat it every time, but regardless of which goat-based toastie we put forward, the same reaction will follow: “Ooh, goat’s cheese”, followed by a purchase. Even meat-eaters will go for the goat, and seem mildly surprised to find out it doesn’t have any animals in. Curious. I apologize to those of you who are not fans, but we feel obliged to make the most of this spellbinding effect on the general public.

Back to my point about the way our sales have changed: People are trusting us with larger sums of their lunch money and increasingly trying more exciting toasties. The questions is: Why?

Here’s our theory: Back in the days of street food, to keep things simple, everything was the same price. Portion sizes were adjusted accordingly meaning that sometimes the plate was a pretty small one, because the ingredients were expensive. Everything seemed to sell at roughly the same rate. When we started to toast sales jumped, but focused around cheese and ham. Classic, but not really a gourmet toastie even with our fine-ass ham and bitchin’ Cheddar in it.

Many experiments and toastie tastings later and we have 30-ish toasties in circulation, with price points from the simple but elegant banoffee at £2.50 up to the magnificently beastly 5-meat 3-cheese Manwich at £7.50. Evidence suggests that a variety of price points make the menu look more reasonable and ourselves more capable, so people are more likely to be tempted towards an adventurous choice. That’s the big theory. Allow me to submit data:

Last time in Birmingham we had 3 savoury prices. Ham & cheese and the brie were £3 each, Chorizo, mozzarella, garlic and jalapeños was £4 and the crab, chive mascarpone and wilted spinach was £5. Chorizo sold best that day.

This week we had the ham & cheese alongside the goats’ cheese, onion marmalade and rocket at £3, the chorizo as above and the salmon and cream cheese as our premium toastie at £5. However as Barny is now on the mend he’d been able to slow-roast some new season Lighthorne lamb, so that was on the menu with creamed feta and spring onions at £4.50, and people went figuratively nuts for it.

I think a range of prices gives people a better idea of quality, and people are more likely to spend the extra for an upgrade. We didn’t sell a single salmon toastie today, even though it was our highest scorer at the most recent tasting and only an extra 50p. Either that or lamb has the same effect on people as goats cheese. For the sake of the universe I think it’s probably wise not to combine the two. We might accidentally, literally, figuratively cause a paradox.

One of the goals I set myself, way back in the early days, was to try and make a mark on the street food scene. I’m not sure I ever mentioned it here, as in my head it sounded way too close to me saying “Our street food will make us famous”, but the desire was there. Now we are two years older, especially the van and Barny, and we are actually getting somewhere.

Shortly after Brum Yum Yum we were woken up one morning by a feature writer for the Birmingham Mail. Barny was feeling grotty, so I gave her an interview and she then arranged to get a photographer out to see us. We have never done a photo shoot before and are officially one experience better off for it. It mostly involves smiling and holding things in positions that do not feel natural or sensible. There are possibly exceptional photo shoots when this is not the case, but most of the afternoon was spent either watching Barny waving toasties at Mark the photographer from under his arm or waving toasties at the photographer myself.

Our efforts were later published, but circulation doesn’t quite get out to Leamington so we had to try and arrange spare copies. You can read the full story here, but we are still working on a print version.

It seems like we are gradually finding ways to spread the word of the Wocky and help him make a name for himself without too much advertising. We have many others to thank for this, not least your good selves, who tweet and spread the word and, in the case of two lovely locals who we met on twitter a while back, come and try the food as a result. I’m going to count you two as the first toastie sales made though the blog, by the way. That’s conversion, baby!

We also had the BBC Good Food Show come back to us and announce we had won, meaning we have an exceptional pitch for free at their food show selling to as many of the 90,000 people as we can manage over 5 whole days. To put that in perspective, you pay somewhere in the region of £850 for a festival of 7000 people over 3 days. There is some serious maths to be made at that one.

It’s exciting to have so many bits and pieces finally start to work out, especially as Barny is still recovering (thanks very much for all your support on that one) and the jobs are now nearly a comforting memory of the past. If things could just stay fixed for a few weeks, Beast I’m looking at you here, then we can actually make this happen.

Turns out though that our various menu tweaks and a bit of warmth were all the people of Birmingham needed to get out into the street and eat toasties. Not only that, but the mood has also lifted and, most excitingly of all, we had visits from some of our lovely regulars, Mai Wong and Andy Systematik among others, which is one of the best possible compliments you can get. Even more so when they tweet about it to say it was tasty.

So overall it was a thoroughly worth-while Wednesday, which is what we will need as a matter of urgency going forward, because as of this week I have started to reduce my hours at the day job, with a view of soon being able to Wocky full time.

If you have ever been on that ride at Alton Towers with a sheer drop – Oblivion – then I’m currently at the moment when it stops, and you look over the edge into the black hole below. Only the difference is that this is real life, so rather than a massive harness, a boat-load of electronics and more safety shut-downs than you could shake a badger at there is just me, with a rather unreliable van and a husband who can’t stand up for more than a couple of hours.

Luckily the husband is gradually improving, and hopefully he will continue to do so if we didn’t break him today with all the driving. It’s probably bad timing, something we seem pretty good at, for me to be dropping hours now while Barny is still not fully fixed, but we can’t stop the summer. At my last count every single weekend between now and August was booked, so there really isn’t any going back now.

Hypothesis: It is possible to make a living out of Street Food.

More specifically, it is possibly for us to make a living out of toasties. This summer will be the test. We have to earn enough over the next four months, the busiest time of our year, to see us through the winter. If we do this without dribbling away into an exhausted mess then it goes much of the way to proving our hypothesis. If we can’t then we need to take a very long, very hard look at what exactly were doing.

On my mark. Right, bring it on Summer.

One of the things to precipitate forth from the sacred heart of the internet in recent weeks have been the BBC Good Food Awards, a genuine award that a lovely local blogger, Midlands Gourmet Girl, nominated us for and loads of our twitter and facebook followers have backed us up on. Nominations are now closed, so if you missed your chance I can only advise you to go out there and find another award winking smiley. After the initial shock had passed that someone we had not wheedled a vote out of wanted us to win something we began casually, carefully analysing – in no great depth – the likelihood of us being able to win. Just in passing. Thoroughly.

Short version: Good food, good customer services, locally sourced and seasonal.

These are pretty much the criteria that I think defines Street Food as a whole, with the possible exception of seasonality. In my mind the alfresco dining provided by ourselves and others is about perfecting one particular food, so you will be serving that food all year round, and if it is not something that especially lends itself to the seasons, like beef for example, then you really shouldn’t have to compromise on the product just to jam some topical ingredients in it.

The noble toastie, however, is a multifaceted old thing, and experiments have demonstrated that it lends itself happily to getting the most out of what’s available. The lovely thing about seasonal ingredients is that they are simultaneously local, fresh, tasty and cheap, making them a match made in good-value-heaven for us.

We struck a deal with Barny’s ever-understanding restaurant and got hold of a few dozen pigeon breasts, allowing us to create the magnificent Wood Pigeon, Spring Onion, Red Leicester and Red Currant Sauce toastie for a price that the public could actually enjoy. Game in general, like the epic Venison toastie from a few weeks earlier, is not something that you can buy out of season unless you are planning to ship it in from miles away, at exorbitant prices, but makes a b-e-a-utiful toasted sandwich.

It also gives us a starting point for new toastie development, one of the greatest parts of the job, where we get an ingredient in – say, asparagus (may-june) – and then play with it in different combinations until the results are better than the original. And yes, we eat a lot of toasties.

As the game season has now largely closed we’re working on a new vegetarian toastie as veggies are easier to catch. Plus you don’t have to skin and gut them. Sometimes I’m really glad I have a chef for these things, but on the other hand I’m happy to eat them, I should be happy to get my hands dirty. But I might start with root veg on that one.

It would be nice to be able to call ourselves award-winning, it being one of those long-lasting accolades that you can keep forever and wave at people around application time, but regardless of that we will keep trying to serve the best street food we can, and hope we can make toasties great again.

Barny had a back operation on the Tuesday, meaning the toastie prep, van cleaning and packing were down to me, so Barny just had to drive the van down there and then kip in the car for the rest of the day. We’d even organised a sleepover in Birmingham for the Beast with Jack, organiser of Digbeth Dining Club and long-time sympathiser of temperamental vans.

Friday was hard. As always the customers and atmosphere at DDC were fantastic, but it was the busiest night since the launch, and Barny was in increasing amounts of pain, unable to take morphine because we needed to get the van moved before home time. The following morning we should have probably stopped when he couldn’t sit up straight in the car, but he’s got more determination than sense, so on we went.

As we arrived in King’s Heath the van sprang a core plug on the engine and emptied his radiator. While this is would normally be a sizeable crisis all on its own at that stage I didn’t even care; I was more concerned I’d only have pieces of husband to take home that night. We got on to prepping up toasties for the day then all of a sudden there was a queue, and that queue remained, varying in length, for the rest of the day.

A note about queues. As a food van they are one of the trophies. To those outside the hatch they mean a half hour wait until you see the warm side of a toastie. To us they mean that our customers, our lovely, lovely customers, like our food enough to wait for it. That day we had the longest queue we have ever had, and sadly, because we were only running at half capacity, the longest waiting time as well, but folks, you have no idea how good it made us feel. I promise we went as fast as we could, but from the bottom of my heart, thanks ever so much for waiting.

Several crates of bread later Barny was looking pretty grey, quietly not having fun anymore but still managing to banter with customers and still just about staying upright. We sold our last toastie and turned the presses off, had our first meal of the day – because you just forget – and sat down.

A note on selling out. This is both the best and worst thing that can happen in street food (if you exclude operations three days before big festivals). Selling out means: “Hooray, we have sold all the food we expected to sell” and, in exactly the same breath “Bugger, we missed out on selling a load more”. As street fooders we toast because we love what we do, but it’s business; it has to be about money as well. For every event you have to make a call on the stock levels, and especially in our end of catering, where freshness is key and freezing leftovers isn’t often an option, you have to make that call very, very carefully. Every single thing that you don’t sell isn’t just wasted (a crime against food in itself and avoided wherever possible) it’s deducted of your profits, because you have already paid for the stock.

This is why in street food, much more so than with freezer-to-grill style catering, there will be sell outs that happen when the judgement call you make in advance was off. With an unknown entity like Brum Yum Yum, that guess has to be made with very little to go on, and that’s why most of the traders sold out. In our case we had to stop there, because Barny was quietly disintegrating and we still had to call the AA out before we’d be able to go home.

The drive home felt longer than most, but once we were back and had installed Barny on the sofa with a cup of tea things began to get better. It’s not just about feeding people, it’s about making people happy with food. As we read through the twitter comments and added those to the feedback we got from people coming to the hatch and thanking us the whole thing came into perspective, and the entire universe started to get that golden shimmer of happiness.

A Note on feedback. Being told that you like our food is the world’s greatest compliment. Especially when you tell the whole world. For us it is a warm, fuzzy feeling as if everything is in autumnal soft focus. This is why I want to share it with you, and with my future self. We’re a business, but we’re also two people who just like making food. Thank you.

This blog post is dedicated to the undersigned, for saying what you did. It made us happy.

Thoroughly enjoyed my “Manwich” (5 meats, 3 cheeses) courtesy of @jabberwockyfood at the @brumyumyum street food market in Kings Heath today

— Nick Drew (@nicktheowl) April 13, 2013

Brilliant first @brumyumyum in Kings Heath, can’t wait for the next one to try the awesome sounding banoffee toastie#kingsheathlove

— Fine fingers (@littleemc) April 13, 2013

Just been to @brumyumyum in Kings Heath. Deffo recommend people check it out! @jabberwockyfood made the best toasty I’ve ever eaten! #food

— DOODULL (@doodull) April 13, 2013

Enjoyed my @jabberwockyfood toastie @brumyumyum !

— Helen Fielding (@positivefridays) April 13, 2013

Had a delicious rhubarb and custard toasted sandwich from @jabberwockyfood @brumyumyum earlier. I could eat it again!! #brum #Streetfood

— Jo’s Kitchen (@Jos_Kitchen) April 13, 2013

Smoked pigeon from @jabberwockyfood then lamb & chicken curries from @thecurrystall. At @brumyumyum street food market of course =) #delish

— Dine Birmingham (@Dine_Birmingham) April 13, 2013

@jabberwockyfood Doin their thing and doin it well @brumyumyum twitter.com/NCASS_UK/statu…

— NCASS (@NCASS_UK) April 13, 2013

@stegabyte Had the most satisfying Chilli Dog from @themexicanbean1 and a luxurious Rocky Road toastie for ‘dessert’ from @jabberwockyfood

— Charlie Spotted (@charlie_spotted) April 13, 2013

Great lunch @brumyumyum, pulled pork by @margoandritas, The Ruben by @jabberwockyfood, Lamb & salsa verde by @rossandrossfood Well done all!

— Iain Sayer (@BigIainS) April 13, 2013

Scoffed @thehungrytoad @themeatshack @jabberwockyfood…all brillz #streetfood #birmingham @brumyumyum

— Las Paelleras (@Las_Paelleras) April 13, 2013

Massive hello to new foodie chums from #kingshEATh today – @jabberwockyfood @fundipizza #BournvilleWaffleCo @deliatedgbaston (@brumyumyum )

— Word In Veg Ways(@WordInVegWays) April 13, 2013

@jabberwockyfood was great seeing u guys with such big Q’s. the manwich was really nice too. See ya soon.

— Food Yule Love (@FoodYuleLove) April 13, 2013

@sewsmith @jacklinstead @brumyumyum @rock_and_droll Yes I managed to get a yummy rhubarb & custard brioche sandwich twitter.com/glamourcounty/…

— GlamourintheCounty (@glamourcounty) April 13, 2013

The week is busy because after a lovely but hasty weekend with Barny’s side of the family he went into surgery on Tuesday to have a chronic back problem operated on. Bad timing in some ways, as next week is our only holiday of the season and this weekend is his transition from 20-something to old. As it stands though, the summer is nearly full, which is fantastic but does mean that we don’t really have room for two week recuperation periods anywhere, especially not in a tent at a festival in the middle of nowhere.

So he is currently parked on the sofa in a daze of prescription drugs working his was through Netflix with strict orders not to move any more than necessary, and this week the toastie prep is down to me.

It’s a big week, with our latest visit to Digbeth Dining Club on Friday followed by the much anticipated launch of Brum Yum Yum on the Saturday where, if twitter is to be believed, every single food blogger in a thirty mile radius will be descending on Kings Heath to sample the Midland’s greatest street food. They will possibly also be accompanied by secret shoppers on behalf of the BBC Good Food Show, who are the judging this years award for best street food in the Midlands. So, you know, no pressure.

Tomorrow then, I will be solo-prepping 100 toasties, while trying to stop Barny helping and getting the menu ready. This will include a brand new toastie for DDC with some smoked wood pigeon from the local hunt and two new toasties for BYY, the Manwich and the newest in our gradually growing collection of sweet toasties: Rhubarb and Custurd. In development terms the sweet ones are the hardest, so the last week has seen most meals followed by a rhubard and custard in some form or other.

I think the issue is that there is no point putting food into a toastie unless you are going to improve it. While melted cheese fundamentally improves every savoury ingredient from a standing start, there is no such formula with desserts. Cheese won’t help us here.

We have had a fair few abandoned concepts because although we can make them tasty, they wouldn’t actually be any better than the original. This weekend the R&C will make its début and, after much selective testing, will be the first sweet toastie served on brioche.

Hence the anticipation. Generally for all of the above rather than just the brioche. All in all I’d probably put in in my top three least disconcerting breads, but there we go. Bring it on Friday, I’m off to bed.

Obviously in our line of work, what with most of that line being exposed the the elements, the weather can make or break a festival. Our usual nemesis, rain, has been unusually quiet since we got our magnificent food van back, because we are now immune to it once again, even if our customers are not.

Instead we are faced with this endless winter. Admittedly the sun was shining today, but speaking as someone who spent the entire day outdoors watching people forlornly scurrying between shops while dodging the omnipresent charity workers I can tell you it was not a pleasant temperature to be outdoors. We were about as central as you can get in Birmingham, parked on New Street right in the middle of shopping, but as temperatures didn’t appear to get above -7 all day I can totally understand that anyone in their right mind would not want to eat outside.

For context, we mostly took this picture because of the bizzarre Land Rover body kit.

You were just thinking that it really has been pretty chilly, because you still had to de-ice the car for work this morning and you’re just really glad that the weather has promised warmer temperatures later in the week.

Ah, I chime in, but with the warmer weather they are apparently also forecasting rain.

We have a bit of a joke – neither of us are sure which is better, but we can both laugh it off because it’s weather, and there is not much else you can do. You mention one of the statistics about the last few months, probably the one about the coldest March on record, and we both agree that it certainly felt like it.

Glad we covered that. I do like our chats.

Let me tell you about wind as well. It’s not really a weather we notice much of the time, but today it wanted a piece of our van. Initially this involved playing silly buggers with the hatch. We angle it down, to keep what precious heat we had inside the van, and the wind wiggles it up. We pull it back down, duct tape it into position, the wind moves it back up, eventually with such force that it managed to fracture one of our supports.

At this point, we decided the bath and some second stage toastie research for the Manwich probably couldn’t wait, so while we were sure rush hour traffic out of Birmingham would miss us, we hoped it would understand that there are only so many cars we can hold up by trundling along the motorway at full speed, and they would just have to wait till next time.

There and Back again.

The Jabberwocky is now better off by one new second hand radiator, one clutch, a half set of spark plugs and a Frankenstein’s Monster-style reconstructed engine, made up out of bits of old engine, bits of new second hand engine and the occasional brand new piece. We discovered, during this process, that the old engine, which last recorded it’s mileage at 145,000, has been re-bored three times in the past, which probably explains some of the characterful cloud of smoke that liked to engulf passers by.

Re-boring, I have learned, is when you take the thingies out because they have worn out and no longer fit. You then drill the hole again, and put bigger thingies back in. I imagine by the time you’ve done it three times you’re probably into “yo mama” jokes about the size of that hole. At any rate we’re all very excited to learn that the smoke, while it has lessened, is by no means actually gone, and will still be entertaining guests up to several streets away for many years to come.

With the great green food van back in our lives we can once more think about the future, and how we are planning to go about it. I’d pretty much forgotten that we redid most of the kitchen in the new year, and we get to test it tomorrow for the first time at the Walsall Night Market. Not only that, after the rather clunky service in the gazebo, based around the sideways location of the cooker, we will finally be back up to full toasting capacity, facing our customers, rather than with me standing around wondering what to do with my hands while Barny frantically throws toasties through the press.

There’s a system, you see: I take the order, get the toastie out, put it on the press and tell Barny what it is, he looks at the customer and registers face and toasted sandwich selection in his freakishly good memory. I take the money, usher the customer gently to one side while they watch their toastie like a hawk (everyone does). Barny flips, toasts again and serves to that customer, while I’m already adding more toasties from the other side. It’s food poetry. Or edible music, or something equally delicious sounding. It’s going to be so nice to finally toast properly tomorrow for the first time this year.

One Star Wars reference, as promised.

BYY will be held for the first time on 13 April, 12-6pm in Kings Heath, outside the church on the main road.

This puts it pretty much slap bang in the centre of Kings Heath, in the same location as the farmers market (physical not temporal) and right on the main shopping street. It’s officially licensed by Birmingham City Council, and it will involve a lot more street food folks than Digbeth Dining Club. An evening at DDC will see three traders all do comfortably. This show is set to host ten of us.

Last week’s preview event was a chance to meet the press, talk about the product and generally get all PR or the situation. Now clearly the Wocky is awesome all by himself. But it doesn’t hurt to make sure he is in the right place at the right time, and then let the toasties do the rest. Currently, however, he is still in bits, in Leicester. 4 weeks after he was due to be fixed. So with neither toasties nor Beast we didn’t have a whole lot to show for ourselves, and with only two days notice, we decided to play our final trump card.

Yes, like everything else, miniature cold open-faced toasted sandwiches look better on a cake stand.

As it happens, due to a series of unfortunate events that were thankfully unrelated to the Beast and his lack of engine, there was not a great deal of press in attendance. Instead it was a cosy get-together of the local street food traders, who are without exception utterly lovely people and make me proud to be one of them. We got to share stories, chat to some very pleasant Brum-based blogging types and generally enjoy an afternoon amongst friends with snacks provided by ourselves and a few of the other traders.

Open faced cold miniature toasted sandwiches, also known as “a mouthful”, are not something we will ever be serving from the van at festivals, but they were useful for getting all the bits of a toastie out in the fresh air and letting people see them. Especially when Barny has cheffed at them a little and they both look and taste lovely, which I think made up for the fact that we had to keep explaining that was not what we actually sold, and that cooking miniature toasties to order would have been impractical in the back room of a pub.

Since then the buzz on twitter has been fantastic, with us congratulating one another on having been generally delightful if tipsy company on the day and the twittersphere at large excited to try what Kings Heath has to offer. It’s an exciting event to be a part of, right from the start. To scientifically quote the great poets D:ream, and therefore by extension Prof Brian Cox: things can only get better.

To those lovely folks who then came back and bought seconds whilst stopping to tell us how good it was, you are the ones that make this the best job in the world. But the deer season is almost over, so what was probably a firm keeper for the future will vanish for 6 months before we can serve it again.

To give it a decent send off I thought I’d share it with you, because it’s just too good not to. It’s also an excellent example of why it’s nice to have a trained chef stashed away in your kitchen for making toasties. This recipe makes about 15, because chef quantities are endearing and also the only way Barny will give me recipes. You will need:

Braised Venison:

Cumberland sauce:

• 350ml red wine
• 250ml ruby port
• 1 orange
• 1 tsp redcurrant jelly

1 Pack of Portobello Mushrooms
Salt and pepper
500g Double Gloucester
Butter
30 slices of fresh white bread

Method:

Venison:
Roughly chop the veg and garlic, add to a large pot with the venison and season well. Cover with booze (use veg stock to bulk out the booze) – your piece of meat should be covered.
Pop in a pre heated oven at 130 °C until meat is tender, meaning it can be broken apart with a fork. It takes about 5 hours.
Once tender pull apart while still warm and store the meat packed in its own juices. This will keep it tasting amazing.
NOTE: Meatlovers may be tempted to opt for beef stock, but this will overpower the venison, so stick with veg, or chicken if you really need the extra meatiness.

Slice the mushrooms, throw into a pan with a knob of butter, season with salt and pepper and fry until soft. Set aside.

Zest and juice the orange, then add all the Cumberland ingredients to a pan and reduce over a gentle heat, stirring occasionally. You’re looking for the consistency of runny honey. Cool and set aside as well.

Butter your bread on the outsides. Slice on the double Gloucester. Mushrooms next, try and squeeze or drain off any excess water. Then pile on your venison and add a drizzle of Cumberland sauce. I know it was a pain to make, but be gentle, you really only do need a decorative squirt: it’s potent stuff and will make the venison ferociously delicious.

Toast on both sides for two minutes each in a hot pan or toastie press, applying pressure throughout. It’s done when the cheese starts to leak out.

Serve. It should look a little like this. Only with double Gloucester. We ate that one before we took pictures.

Getting pictures while Barny is cooking is like trying to film a wildlife documentary on an endangered species. Cooking happens incredibly quickly because he’s a professional chef, so by the time I’ve got the camera out all the fun bits have happened. However luckily we research a lot of toasties, so sometimes I can catch a glimpse of an earlier one before it lands on the press and gets eaten.