The 2nd, 3rd and 4th of July sees Roundhay Park playing host to the Foodies Festival, the Leeds debut of a major food festival which spans four sites over four weekends this year.
The festival is part of the wider Leeds Loves Food festival, which sees events taking place across the city.
Despite my low level hatred for the word ‘foodie’, the festival looks like it should be good, with a range of food and drink masterclasses, a produce market and a cookery theatre playing host to some proper local talent, including the brilliant Mohammed Aslam from the Aagrah and Harvey Nichol’s Richard Allen.
There are some masterclasses for kids lined up, too. Anything that ends up with kids getting their hands dirty in the kitchen is a good thing in my book.
Tickets are £10 on the gate, but you can print off a FREE ticket here, and there are more details on the Festival website, here.
Markets have been the social and cultural hubs of towns and cities for centuries, millennia, even. They’re meeting places, trading places, places to eat and drink, places that play a central part in the community they serve.
The traveler can gauge the temperature and mood of a town by heading straight for its market. Ambling between the stalls and looking at what’s on offer is a great way for anybody who’s vaguely interested in food to get the measure of a town or city, and it’s something I’ve done repeatedly over the years.
You can see what the locals do, what they grow and farm. You can see what swims in their seas and what grazes on their fields.
But most of all, you can see how they eat.
More photos below…
One thing about this blog makes me a little uncomfortable.
It’s not the writing, the cooking or the photography. It’s not keeping on top of it, and – believe me – I’m not laid awake at night worrying about visitor growth or statistics.
It’s reviewing restaurants.
This has always troubled me because I’m not sure whether or not I should do it at all. Every now and again, a proper journalist has a cheap shot at food bloggers, trying to demean and undermine them, and that makes me think a little bit harder about what I do and why.
This is just a hobby…should I be doing something that professional critics get paid a fortune to do much better than I ever could?
Read more…
Fellow Saltaire-based blogger Rob from the excellent HopZine asked me to do a little blog exchange thing with him, and here it is.
The premise is simple – I provided a recipe, Rob matched some beer to it. All very civilised.
Given the time of year, I chose something to do with asparagus. We’re right at the tail end of the English season but there’s still some around, and (shhhh! Whisper it…) you can pretty much always get it imported.
To my mind, the best thing you can do with asparagus is to serve it very, very simply, smothered in a Hollandaise sauce. Butter and asparagus are a match made in heaven, and with a decent beer on the side? Well…
Rob paired it with a Belgian beer from the De Glazen Toren brewery, Saison D’Erpe-Mere, which I was quietly relieved about because I had something Belgian in mind when I suggested the asparagus in the first place. Read Rob’s thoughts on the beer in his post.
HopZine is a brilliant read – do check it out.
Frank Camorra owns and operates a Spanish restaurant in Melbourne, Australia called MoVida.
It’s wildly successful and highly acclaimed. This book, MoVida Rustica, written in conjunction with Richard Cornish is Camorra’s latest evangelistic push for Spanish cuisine.
MoVida Rustica is an absorbing and captivating book, part recipe book, part travelogue, documenting Camorra’s culinary trips of discovery around Spain. Much of the food is simple and everyday, the sort of food that’s widely eaten in Spain. There should be nothing here to scare the budding amateur cook.
Camorra notes that his book focuses on “the simplest form of Spanish food – food that was particularly popular at a time when Spain was poor, and had to be prepared in a manner determined by poverty”.
He goes on to explain further;
But poverty meant resourcefulness in feeding the family. Spanish people, particularly in the country, still grow a lot of their own food – so Spanish food is also about the type of soil the food grows in, the water that is available for the food to grow, the time of year in which it is harvested and the long traditions of preparing food that stem from way back in time. I think the French call it terroir.
[continue reading…]
