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Thame Food Festival

Beverley Glock and Phil Gayle on stage at Thame Food Festival

Thame Food Festival is, Saturday 28 September.  This year it was even bigger and taking up the whole of the high street….Annual fun fair eat your heart out.

I remember the first ever Thame Food Festival, there were around 10 stalls around the Town Hall, a very small cookery theatre that wasn’t much more than a cooker, table and a small marquee and as Splat Cooking we ran children’s pasta workshops throughout the afternoon.  I think we had a couple of hundred children through the doors and the queues were huge.

This year there are two proper, grown up, cookery theatres with comperes such as Ken Bruce on Apples stage (the one I’m on at 4.15pm) and Jams Davis on Pears stage and the star studded line up is a credit to the amazing job of organising the festival – Lotte Duncan as patron, Raymond Blanc as ambassador and Alison Isherwood who does a heck of a lot of work behind the scenes pulling it all together.

Beverley Glock and Phil Gayle on stage at Thame Food Festival

The festivities kick off at 10am tomorrow morning with Tom Kerridge on stage at 10.30am, incidentally the same time that my friends Matt, Claire and Phoebe are doing a ukelele set at the other end of the high street on The Thatch stage – tough decision there! Giancarlo and Katie Caldesi follow Tom and you have to catch them they are brilliant. Adam Simmonds from Danesfield House and Buckinghamshire Life and Berkshire Life’s Chef of the Year is straight afterwards – what a morning.  the gorgeous Lotte Duncan

After lunch Raymond Blanc himself is on stage at 13.45, followed by Lotte, David Mooney and me at 4.15pm, Frazer Sutherland follows me and finally it’s the fabulous cook off between Raymond Blanc Cookery School and Aylesbury College.

Then there’s shed loads on the other stage and a whole heap of foodie stands, workshops for children, book signings and delicious food.

Raymond Blanc and Lotte DuncanKatie Caldesi will be signing her books in the AGA shop following her dem and I’ll be doing the same after mine.

You so have to come, it’s an amazing day out with some inspirational chefs, fab entertainment and great food and drink, what else could you want?  Come and say ‘hello’ and heckle a little.