Local chef and PACO volunteer Brady Muller has scheduled a series of workshops with local chefs offering their experience and delicious recipes to showcase the range of food you can cook in our community oven in the park.  Attend a workshop and learn how to cook a delicious meal and you get to enjoy the product.  Register for workshops via EventBrite.

Due to the persistent rain there will be no training or Open Oven this Saturday. See you next week!

**Updated May 1st to change the date of our first Open Oven**

With warmer weather on its way and some small touch-ups to the oven scheduled to happen any day now, PACO is excited to host our first Open Oven of the season on Saturday, May 11th.

Provided there’s no torrential downpour or freak snowstorm, the day’s agenda is: training, then cooking.

We’ll be on site to light the oven at 9:00 a.m. sharp and invite those interested in learning to fire the oven to attend from 9-12 and receive training. (If you’d like to eventually light the oven yourself and host events, training is mandatory. Read more on training.)

Training is typically pretty relaxed and provides a chance for anyone to learn about the structure, care and proper use of the oven. We encourage anyone to come by and hang-out for curiosity sake too. For those interested, training will run until the oven is hot enough to cook—we aim for 12:00 noon. If all goes well, we’ll be ready to cook and will do our best to accommodate food-stuff brought by for cooking. The oven is incredibly hot and while we try to honour the first-come-first-bake order of things, certain items cook best when the oven is hottest while others fare better at lower temperatures. Small pizzas cook in minutes while more dense concoctions like it slow-and-low. There’s always some standing around, so dress for the weather and bring your food in proper containers to ensure it keeps until ready to cook.

Planning to come by on May 11th? For training or just a cook-out? Drop us a line via email at paco@dartmouth-oven.com or leave a note on our Facebook page to help us get a sense of how many people to expect.

Watch this page for updates and a proper calendar as we continue to ramp up for PACO’s first full season.

On February 2 we will participate in the Christ Church Sunday School Children’s Carnival. This celebration is in honour of a number of mid-winter traditions described below. The oven will be hot from 2-4. All are welcomed and encouraged to attend the Children’s Carnival. As always, anyone in the community wishing to do some baking can stop by as well.

Children are invited to shape flat loaves in the kitchen of the Christ Church Parish Hall at 1 pm (corner of Ochterloney and Wentworth Streets). We will make candles while the loafs rise and starting at 2 pm bring the loafs to the Park Avenue Community Oven to bake. The loaves can be eaten, laid under your first furrow or left on your window sill as you see fit. After the bread is baked we will return to the Hall for carnival and king cake.

Please note, if weather looks stormy or cold we may not be able to fire the oven. If this is the case we will post on our website and on our Facebook page by 10am Feb.2.

Christ Church, Dartmouth

Traditions

February 2 is Groundhog Day to many, but it’s also Candlemas on the Christian calendar. It’s the day when the Church celebrates Joseph and Mary’s presentation of the baby Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of ritual purification and redemption of the firstborn.

Prior to Candlemas there was a Roman holiday, Lupercalia, and a Celtic holiday, Imbolc. February 1st is the feast day of St. Brigid, who began her life as a pagan fire and fertility goddess and ended up a Christian saint.

February 2 falls midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox and in many traditions it is associated with hibernating animals beginning to stir and the beginning of the agricultural year. The promises of the return of the light and the renewal of life which were made at the winter solstice are now becoming manifest.

Medieval Anglo-Saxon farmers took a loaf of bread, kneaded it with milk and holy water and laid it under the first furrow.

To celebrate St. Brigid’s day, people put out a loaf of bread on the windowsill for the Saint.

Fires were built in Armenian church courtyards. People danced about the flames, jumped over them and carried home embers to kindle their own fires from the sacred flames.

Candles are blessed at Candlemas and then taken home where they serve as talismans and protections from all sorts of disasters.

One traditional ritual associated with this time of year is to clean out your hearth and then light a new fire. Sit around the fire and reflect on the seeds you wish to plant in the coming year.