I hoped right: the festival was absolutely amazing, a veritable feast. Kath, Andrew, Susan, you would have died and gone to foodie heaven.
The Real Food Festival is all about quality food, direct from the farmers. The food might be organic, free-range, humanely reared, concerned with sustainable farming, and talking to the farmers today, these were people who understood and cared about those labels instead of just slapping them on the packet. They were bubbly, enthusiastic, invited us out to visit the farms, to pick our own cherries, coming up with great ways of getting their produce from the farms to bobos like me in the city. It was extremely impressive, and extremely delicious.
As any food festival goer knows, first in, best fed. So we were there at 10am, getting woozy on sampling all the morsels we could. There was cheese, meat, cheese, cakes, oils, chutnies, cheese, salamies, juices, wine, ok, everything. And then some. It was huge, and took us over three hours to cover every delicious stall.
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Oysters are my favourite food in the world. After the World Cup in 2006 I went to Cancale in Brittany, home of what many say are the world's best oysters, just to try them. And I was satisfied in concluding that Sydney rock and Pacific beat them hands down. Today, there were a handful of oyster sellers and I sampled oysters from three different farms, and was blown away. I'm sorry Sydney, but the oysters I had today (details to come, I have an evening of brochure sorting ahead of me) were magnificent. The luminous pale grey bulbs were the taste of the sea. I can't describe them any better. They were faultless. Stunning.
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The prices were really good and I bought up big: melting mozzarella di buffalo, blushing beefcheek tomatoes, butter flecked with salt crystals, a scotch egg from Heston Blumenthal's pig supplier, pots of crab, pork and Stilton sausages, and a salt marsh rump of lamb for a proper Sunday roast tomorrow.
1 comment:
*turns green with envy* that looks like an amazing day out!!
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