Face the Crowd

Hungerford was at its busiest and best again yesterday - for Hungerford Food Festival.

HAHA had our usual spot upstairs in the corner of the Town Hall room as well as having a display on the landing.

This year, we were offering free samples of makes & bakes containing veg - it was a great addition to the stand as visitors stayed talking for longer while they tasted things with unexpected ingredients! Examples were Chocolate Aubergine brownies, Parsnip, Carrot and Orange cake and, my favourite of the unusual bakes, the Celeriac  & Lemon flapjack. Ted, Liz and Kerry even managed to win prizes in the cookery competitions for their offerings - that's how tasty they were!

Kerry's Cheese and Chive scones and Jamie's Carrot Lox (vegan smoked salmon) provided the savoury choice and Karen's Ginger, Lemon and Marrow jam was very popular. Elderflower cordial and Rhubarb cordial provided delicious refreshment. Here we are in our fancy HAHA aprons.

Downstairs, the Corn Exchange was so busy that they had to restrict entry for a while so that people could actually move round the hall.

But there was lots going on outside too.

We had a delicious wood-fired pizza when I took a break from the stand.

Such fun seeing food stalls lining the High Street. And the smells were very tempting!

I bought some tasty cheeses, an almondy croissant and some Oak-smoked Chilli oil and then back up to our stand for a few more hours. We were giving away dried bay leaves and wildflower seeds as well as the recipes - everyone definitely likes a freebie!

And at the end of the afternoon, we accepted donations for the veg. Of course, I came home with plenty - some was ours but other stuff I swapped - hooray! Now I have a butternut squash. And I have a beautiful bunch of dahlias which have done so well on the allotment this year.

I'm on annual leave today to recover. Using Ivan's enormous celery (which is very green and full of flavour) and a few of our carrots and shallots I've just made some soup, with added turmeric. 

I blitzed the carrots after removing the celery - it would have been too stringy as well as a bit sharp.

It's very tasty and should cover a couple of lunches even though I couldn't resist a bowlful of it whilst writing this. The whole flat smells of celery - delicious!

So that's this year's events finished - just normal ones like skittles and workdays now until next year. Oh, and of course we've got the plots to look after!

The song title is provided by Beady Eye.