All posts tagged: melton mowbray

Unforgivably neglected Old Fashioned Puddings

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Last Autumn we visited the Melton Mowbray Food Festival, one of the few food festivals in this region that is really worth the effort to visit and doesn’t charge you a small fortune for the privilege of traipsing around a few stalls by the usual suspects, many of them resentful at giving out free samples (I have a thing about this, dear reader).  Anyway, we came home with bumper haul and some of it, inevitably, ended up in the freezer. Fast forward to last Sunday and a traditional family Sunday lunch. Having got up at the crack of dawn to get my pork shoulder in the oven to slow roast for 5 hours, I felt justified in not doing a pudding too and instead rooted around in the bottom of the freezer for the two Old Fashioned Pudding Company puddings I knew had been languishing there since September. The puddings (once defrosted) can be steamed (40 mins) or microwaved for 2 mins. I went with the 2 mins I’m afraid. They did look a bit …

Food Festival Porn in Melton Mowbray

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As you know, I love a good food festival. The trouble is, so few of them are, in fact, any good. Almost every weekend there is a food festival somewhere, I don’t mean Farmer’s Markets or Food Markets, but events described as “food festivals” and usually held in some rather nice location, an old Market Square, a stately home, a country park, a lakeside location. Each one that appears on my social media, lures me in with promises of artisan foods and new foodie treats. I find it hard to resist, and I have been to loads. A lot of them are, though, pretty rubbish. I know it takes time for things to become established, for audiences to build up and for traders to think it worth their while, but still, Food Festivals that charge £6, £8 per head before you can enter to spend more money, and/or are in the middle of nowhere (petrol money, bus fares) and only have 6/7 stalls with traders who resent giving out samples, really, really annoy me. You …

Kiss-Me-Quick Hats, Rock, Chips, Donkey-rides? Nope, Artisan Cheese.

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I love cheese and this weekend I discovered a new cheese. Well, it’s not that new, I know it won an award in 2012, but that is still pretty new as far as cheeses go and definitely new to me. It is local, made near the Lincolnshire Coast in a small village in East Lindsay –  Thorpe St Peter –  a stone’s throw from the very traditional British holiday resort of Skegness. Skegness is famous for many things – and for those of us who have grown up in the East Midlands or Yorkshire it has probably been one of our regular day-trip destinations since childhood (I have a photo of my Great Grandmother walking arm in arm along the front from 1931!) The long stretches of sand, the donkey-rides, the “Pleasure Beach”, winkles, cockles, buckets and spades, “Kiss-me -Quick” Hats, End of the Pier shows, sticks of rock, the Illuminations and hot chips burning your mouth on a breezy walk along the prom, bring back happy childhood memories for many of us in this …