shewhomust | Food Festival

There was a food festival in Seaham this weekend: this tells you less about Seaham as a gastronomic hotspot (though it does have a perfectly satisfactory chippy) and more about the growth of the food festival as a tourist attraction available to any municipality. Since I already had my suspicios about this, I set off on Saturday morning with reasonable expectations, and had a good time.

The festival was on the green by the 'Tommy' statue: street food (and drink) around the outside, provisions to take home in the middle. Rather more of the former than the latter, and some very fancy mobile stalls - fried chicken from a red barn, cocktails from a very art deco trailer... Clearly people are making a living out of the festival circuit, and clearly they find it worth putting money into fancy presrntation. Some of the offerings were very tempting, and on a different day with different facilities I might happily have bought a platter of something deep fried and a glass of cider. But we were there to shop, so we ignored the cookery demonstrations in the open air stage, and we shopped.

We bought

salmon pirozhki from Russian pies - which we served to J. as Sunday lunch after church,, alongside the spinach soup I had already planned;

Weardale brie - a familiar favourite - from the man who makes it (at what was once the Harperley POW camp), plus a goat's cheese made by a friend of his;

Preserves from Rosalind's Larder: Grapefruit, blood organge and chai spoced marmalade; quince, orange and cardamom marmalade. the last little jar of quince paste (produced from under the counter because I was squeeing about the quince in the marmalade) and a jar of blackberry, rhubarb and liquorice jam. Her publicity material claims to be 'Italian inspired', but look at those ingredients: cardamom, liquorice, even rhubarb, what could be more Finnish? We don't eat much jam, and these should last us a while, but how could I resist?

It wasn't the preserves that felt like an extravagance, though, but the olives from Theon Nectar, a lady whose husband is a beekeeper in Sparta (that's what she said) and whose mother-in-law marinates olives seasoned in olive oil. I like good olive oil, but I'm not discriminating enough to appreciate the higher degrees of 'good', and these prices were a notch or so above my usual level. Which may be wasted on me - we shall see...

Plus some curry saunces from Really Indian, because they were charming, and some flapjacks because mmm, flapjacks, and have I forgotten anything? Don't think so.

But no-one was selling bread, or bottled beer - or other things on my list, but those were the ones I'd hoped to find. No problem, we went to Aldi and filled the gaps.