Since we opened we’ve been trying our hardest to turn you into green fingered chilli growers with free chilli seeds for over 4 and half million people and counting. The response has been so great with hundreds of you getting in touch to tell us of your tales of growing glory, bountiful crops and the satisfaction of a fully home grown salsa. We even appointed a Chilli Expert from amongst you, to help out with any growing pains and his videos have proved invaluable support for chilli novices around the world.

Now we have the perfect opportunity to celebrate the most artistic horticulturalists in our growing fan club. We want to use your chilli plant photos in our new Wahaca cookbook.

Yes you heard, a new Wahaca cookbook, hitting the shelves in June and you can be a part of it.

So if your image library is an homage to Percy Thrower with all the style of Rankin, email your chilli plant pictures (in as high a resolution as possible) to us at ola@wahaca.co.uk. We’d love to see everything from your first shoots, through to your first chillies and your bumper harvest. We’ll pick our favourites, who will be featured in the book and will each receive a copy when it’s published. One to show the grandkids for sure.

You’d better be quick though, the competition closes on Monday 13th February. Good luck!

Oh, we almost forgot, here’s the serious bit: By submitting your photograph you are granting Hodder & Stoughton and Wahaca a royalty-free, non-exclusive right to use the photograph in print and online, and to archive the image for future use. Got that? Good.

On Monday we went along to the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s first ever awards ceremony and picked up the Sustainable Restaurant Group of the year trophy.

We are over the moon to have received this award, not only in recognition of all the hard work we put into sustainability across the board, but also when there are so many other great restaurants working hard in this area too. Have a look at the article from this Sunday’s Independent to read about the other restaurants that took home awards.

We think the SRA’s awards are going to be a great annual event for shouting about what restaurants are doing, and can achieve, with all things green and want to thank the SRA for voting for us. Ever since we opened, sustainability has been a vital part of how we run our restaurant. It’s not always easy and it’s often quite a bit more expensive, but we think it’s worthwhile and when we receive awards like this one, it shows that work has paid off.

Throughout January we’re holding an amnesty at Wahaca. A Mexican Spoon Amnesty. It’s a chance for all of those people (you know who you are), who have pocketed one our 20,000 missing spoons to clear their conscience by bringing our spoon back without fear of reprisal.

To thank you for the safe return of our specially designed spoons, we’re offering a plate of tacos to anyone who does the right thing and comes forward. Just hand your spoon to your waiter when you sit down. He won’t judge you. Our forgiveness knows no bounds.

Always been too honest to pilfer one of our spoons? Good on you. You’re our kinda customer and to show our gratitude if you come along we’ll let you borrow a spoon. Just make sure you bring it back in January.

So, what are you waiting for? Start 2012 off with a renewed sense of inner-calm, a belly full of tacos and a grin from ear to ear.

This January we’re sending Matt White, of Wahaca Covent Garden infamy, off to Mexico for a 3 week excursion into the wilds of the Yucatan on a mission to help a conservation group in their quest to protect Mexico’s wild jaguars.

In the summer we offered up a Scholarship fund of £2,000 for one of our managers to travel to Mexico on a trip that would expand their understanding of the country and indulge their passion for travel (and adventure). They were all given the chance to pitch their ideas for a trip to discover something new about the country. From all of the entries we had Matt’s plan had the biggest potential to really make a difference and allow him to achieve a lifelong ambition. Harking from South Africa, he’s always been fascinated by this illusive big cat’s African cousin, the leopard, but despite numerous attempts, he has never managed to spot (haha) one. We hope this will be his chance.

He’s going to be heading to Calakmul, home to Mexico’s largest population of jaguars, but even in this area there is an average of only one jaguar per square 25km, so the chances of actually seeing one here in the dense jungle are pretty slim. Calakmul is also home to the chicaleros, which you may remember being featured in an old edition of Ola London – These are the guys who tap the rubber trees for resin which they make into biodegradable chewing gum, all by hand and Matt will meet up with them deep in the rainforest.

The culmination of his trip will be meeting conservationist Mircea Hidalgo on a ranch in Laguna de Terminos in the Yucatan Peninsula, where he’ll be spending four days working with him downloading footage and replacing battery packs in the motion sensor cameras which they use in tracking the jaguars without disturbing their everyday prowling.

If you want to find out a bit more about Mexican jaguars, check out the Northern Jaguar Project, who have helped Matt get in touch with Mircea and organise the trip.

We look forward to hearing how it all goes with Matt’s expedition into the jungle, and be keeping our fingers crossed that he manages to catch a glimpse of the “beast that kills its prey in a single bound”.

In the past 5 years, 20,000 of our specially designed spoons have mysteriously (a-hhem) dessert-ed us and this January we’re giving all those who bring one back to us the chance to clear their conscience without fear of retribution. In fact, we’re such a forgiving bunch at Wahaca that in return for that spoon you “borrowed” we’ll also give you a free plate of tacos. No questions asked.

We’re hoping that this amnesty will be our big chance to stop our spoons ending up into the wrong hands and being used for malicious means – As makeshift percussion instruments, serving taramasalata, or heaven forbid, being bent by Uri Geller.

If you’ve been resisting the temptation to pocket one all this time, we admire your honesty and in return, we’ll let you borrow one, so long as you bring it back in January. That way you can get a piece of the action without your values being besmirched in any way. If you ask, we’ll also give you a hug.

You know who you are, if you’ve got one of our lovely spoons hiding in your cutlery draw, bring it along and grab some tacos.

Tell your friends, The Mexican Spoon Amnesty is coming and reform never tasted so good!

Rules to control the fun: One plate of tacos per table, but don’t let this stop you bringing back the 5 spoons you have, our forgiveness is unlimited. You’ve got to hand your spoon in to your waiter at the beginning of your meal to claim your tacos. We’ll take the cheapest plate of tacos off your bill and at this point, we’d like to recommend how tasty our winter vegetable tacos are. Wahaca do not encourage theft of any kind, it’s very bad for your soul. Borrowing is OK though.

If you’ve been into Wahaca recently, you might have spotted the first of our new Dash of Wahaca salsas which have landed on the tables in the last few weeks.

Designed to be splashed on liberally

It’s been a labour of love but for the last year Tommi has been working tirelessly on the recipes with a specialist company who has created the great looking bottles for us. To give you an idea of the amount of effort that has gone into each one, just check out the list of ingredients – All of which are totally natural with no nasty preservatives anywhere in sight. In fact, if you have a look, you can see all of the little bits of chopped up herbs and spices swimming around inside the bottle.

Tommi has made 3 salsas for us to start off with. A brand new searingly hot chile de arbol sauce and new (and even tastier) versions of our yellow habanero and our smoky chipotle chile salsas that have been used on the tables in the last few years. So now there are 3 very different flavoured salsas each with a different level of spicines for you to choose from.

The brilliant news is, if you want to take some with you to give your home cooking a dash of Wahaca (see what we’ve done there?), you can buy them in our restaurants for £2.50 a bottle, just ask one of the waiters. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post a couple of recipes on the website so that you can discover some new ways of spicing things up in your own kitchen.

As always, we’d love to hear from anyone who’s tried them out already. What do you think of the new bottles? Do you have a favourite? Would they make the perfect Christmas present? (Yes they would).

Wednesday 2nd November see’s the culmination of Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations and we wouldn’t want to miss out on the fun, so we’re joining the party by giving away a free glass of tequila and sangrita to anyone who comes in for lunch or dinner tomorrow.

In Mexico, Day Of The Dead is a festival to celebrate the lives of friends and family who have passed away, and often sees groups of people partying on down at their family cemetery. This festival’s incredible colour and imagery is a great example of why we love Mexico quite so much. In fact, you can check out some more about it here.

Everyone who wants one gets a free tequila, the only thing we ask is that you sip it, and don’t shoot it down in one. This isn’t your average tequila – We’re giving you a measure of multi-award winning El Tesoro de Don Philipe, one of the world’s finest. To complete your full introduction to the world of top tequilas, we’ll be giving you a glass of our homemade sangrita to accompany it – Just as it’s drunk in Mexico.

We hope we’ll see you down here to join in the fun.

This weekend sees the opening of Miss Bala, Mexico’s official entry for the 2012 Oscars, and yet another film that has got the critics going absolutely crazy form Mexican cinema. And because we love you all very much, we want to send you to see it and then invite you along for a meal round at ours afterwards.

Miss Bala tells the true story of Laura, a young woman from Baja California who dreams of becoming a beauty queen but instead finds herself delivered into the hands of a violent gang of Mexican drug smugglers. Combining explosive bursts of brutal action with mesmeric sequences of balletic beauty and searingly vivid imagery, Miss Bala has taken worldwide festival audiences by storm.

We’ve teamed up with the film’s UK promoters and have 5 pairs of tickets to go and watch it at the Odeon on Panton Street (just off Leicester Square) during its opening week, and they’re ripe for the winning. If that’s not enough, each winner gets a £50 Wahaca cheque to come for a meal too. Not a bad night out at all. To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is email us at ola@wahaca.co.uk with the answer to this rather tricky question:

Which Mexican state is the film set in?

We’ll be picking our 5 winners at random on Friday 28th October, so get your entries in ASAP. The 5 winners will receive a pair of tickets to be used at the Odeon on Panton Street before the 4th November and a £50 Wahaca cheque to spend on a meal for 2 at any of our restaurants.

¡Buena Suerte!

We were sent an email recently by Sara Worley, a customer who had come across this amazing community project in the small village of Agustin Gonzales located in the central Mexican highlands near San Miguel de Allende – The region that produces a harvest of the amazing nopales cactus that we use in our queso fundido.

20 of the ladies from the village spend their free time make rugs, inspired by the village life around them, and are selling them online to raise funds to send the girls in the village to school. You can find out more on their website. www.rughookproject.com

We thought it was a nice view into the life of rural mexico. Go girls!

Just when you were starting to think that the end of the summer meant an inevitable slow and depressing decline into wintery doom, along comes Mexican Independence Day to cheer us all up. To celebrate, this Friday 16th September, we’re doing what we do best, street food for free! But hold on a split second, surely we can’t give free food to everyone. You’re right. We can’t. That would be madness. It’s only for people in the know. People like you.

This year we’re keeping it nice and simple. All you have to do is bring a picture of a Mexican flag with you to any of our restaurants on Friday 16th and we’ll give any dish from our street food menu for free. It can be a picture that you’ve found on the t’internet and printed out (here’s a couple to get you going), one that you’ve had hand-stitched for you, or one that you’ve drawn with colouring pencils. Anything that vaguely resembles a Mexican flag and you’re in. But, we’re nice people, so please don’t abuse us, it’s one street food dish per person who brings a flag with them. Sorry, you can’t bring 2 flags and get 2 free dishes. That would just be greedy. If you do fancy more than one street food dish (and to be honest, who would blame you), we’ll buy the least expensive one. It’s only fair.

So what are you waiting for, round up your friends and your flags and get yourselves down to Wahaca on Friday.