August 2020. I can’t remember the exact rules of the lockdown at this stage but what I do know is we weren’t going on holiday, we had just finished having our kitchen extension done and we had the impending doom of returning to teaching without being in our classrooms and having to sanitize glue sticks between lessons. It was an odd point in our lives!
A Netflix series called Street Food: Latin America featured a lady who was cooking for some builders who had been employed to work on a project in her local area. This lady was cooking out of a tiny kitchen with very basic amenities and yet was producing some incredible looking food. If she could cook from her kitchen for strangers, could we?
We had a lovely new kitchen but could have no one round due to Covid restrictions so we started swapping meals with our friends and family, Doorstep Dinners was born. This lasted a few weeks but I felt this could be bigger. We had always enjoyed cooking for large gatherings and we know people enjoyed our food, would people be willing to pay for it?
Scran began.
I did my food hygiene qualification online, rang the council to register the business, designed a logo and set up an Instagram page and posted our first advert to advertise our cheeseburger spring rolls (something we became known for!)
People wanted our food! Paying strangers were paying for our cheeseburger spring rolls. We purchased some packaging and started a spreadsheet. Our first night delivering was 28th August 2020, between then and Christmas 2020 we only missed 2 weekends- I got covid and Rob tore a ligament.
We got such a buzz from the prep on a Friday night and the busy service on a Saturday. The bags with all the names on were lined up on the table and the laptop was open with the orders on. Each week would be a different menu often themed on food from our travels- the katsu chicken sandwich with gochujang cheese sauce, lamb burritos, arancini balls, Christmas specials, Mother’s Day and Easter boxes.
The world returned to some form of normality in May 2021, we weren’t sure where Scran would go next but it was a great experience and we knew we would be talking about for years to come.