Yesterday dawned lovely and sunny and we all breathed a sign of relief as it was Thame Food Festival and we’d waited a whole year for this amazing food festival and were desperately hoping that it wouldn’t rain.
I was kicking off the first dem of the day in the chef’s theatre at 10am with a 40 min slot and 5 min turnaround before the lovely Laurie Gear from The Artichoke in Amersham took to the stage.
When I arrived at 8.30am the chef’s theatre wasn’t built, ho hum, no need to panic, this is cooking at the frontline, after all it is a glorified tent so as long as we remember that when we agree to do these food festivals we’re OK. Difficulties occur when chefs or TV personalities are booked to do dems at food festivals and they have high expectations of hot and cold running Home Economists to do their prep for them and champagne on tap, never happens guys, well, maybe if you’re Nigella or Gordon but not for the rest of us mere mortals…..there’s a Costa across the road, go get a takeway. By 9.55 it was mostly built with a bevvy of lovely chefs from Le Manoir running around cleaning everything, wow…Manoir slaves at my beck and call – joking guys, but seriously I’d like to take one of you home especially with 3 of you doing my washing and drying up, what service, thank you chaps.
Only 5 minutes late but on stage with Phil Gayle from BBC Oxford, bless him he had no idea what was in store for him when I asked him to whisk the egg whites, how do you know if egg whites have reached stiff peak, watch the video and you’ll see, I didn’t warn Phil about this, fortunately he has a sense of humour. http://youtu.be/W_hif4AIYME
I then had a slightly crazy interview with Paper Sissors Stone, Thame TV’s channel where we ended running around the high street trying to do an interview avoiding background noise of the many generators and the 30+ year olds making stupid faces, I can understand kids but come one, some of you were old enough to know better. I’ll blog when the piece is up.
Then the real fun started with the Whizz Bang Workshops run by the Splat Cooking Team at Thame Town Hall. This was brilliant, we had over 100 children throughout the next couple of hours doing foodie experiments such as:
Deconstructed chocolate powder
Exploring where our sense of taste comes from whilst having to taste chocolate, that was hard
Eggsperiments – can a raw egg bounce? can you make green eggs and ham? The answer is ‘yes’ to both but you’ll have to watch the video to find out how.
Jelly – spaghetti jelly (my favourite), caviar pearls, instant setting jelly shapes, jelly brains
The day was a great success with hundreds of children hopefully inspired to keep cooking at home.