Shrewsbury Food Festival

The sunshine was very welcome on Saturday 29^th June as it saw the opening of the Shrewsbury Food Festival in Quarry Park. With only a £5 entry fee we couldn't resist, so we got the train up there nice and early.

We had a look at pretty much every stand, and tasted some delicious goods! Some really brilliant companies selling great products. If only we could have bought more…

We couldn't resist the Chicken by Mother Clucker which was coated using butter milk! And came with artisan roll, leaves and ranch dressing, it was a beast of a sandwich…

 

MOTHER CLUCKER SANDWICH - CLUCKIN' GOOD £5

When one ½ of us spotted “Vegetarian Heaven” we made a beeline. Kuskus Foods served up some delicious wheat free falafel with Lebanese salsa and naked hummus, with SO much delicious seasoning! Kuskus Foods also attend Moseley market, which we MUST go to and experience the falafel goodness again. Taste explosion! Very friendly too! 

KUSKUS FOODS - £4 FALAFEL WRAP 

We also went for a couple of the gourmet sausage rolls by Coopers, opting for Shropshire blue and caramelised onion and a sweet chilli and mixed pepper howler. Smooth pork filling with such a punch of flavour, they contain only the “best local ingredients”. We might have to hunt them out and fill our freezer, they were so delicious! Been dreaming about them since…They are actually stocked at Harrods and Selfridges…Must be good! (£1.95 each – bargain too!)

COOPERS GOURMET SAUSAGE ROLLS - £1.95

Also sampled was the pork baps from the Severn Valley Roasts, which was juicy and very generous! (help yourself to stuffing and apple sauce! Lovely…) They must have got through a good few pigs through the day, the queue was huge all day!

SEVERN VALLEY ROASTS - PORK BAP £4

After all that food, we just had to have a taster of some delicious perry! After trying a couple, we  decided to go for the perry from Gwatkin Cider which was lovely, clear and quite a bit sweeter than the ciders and perry’s on offer around the show. Could have drank it all day! In fact one of us bought a flagon of it! (bargain at £12)

GWATKIN CIDER - FLAGON OF PERRY £12

It was nice to see Wrexham Lager attending the show, Britain’s oldest lager brew, after they were re-opened 2011. We always have it when visiting Wrexham, so was nice to enjoy a pint in the Shrewsbury sunshine!

The Juice Shack were also there serving up pure fruit juices and fruit juice cocktails, and they were already running out of vodka by about 2pm!! Very popular and tasty…And we’d like to also think healthy! (ignore the booze!)

We had a taster of some impressive gin from Warner Edwards. Not even very big gin drinkers, but it was flavoured with so many botanicals, in comparison to some big name brands, it definitely very aromatic!

Marshmallow Madams had some beautiful cakes on offer, and sold out of a lot of the goodies we wanted to buy early on (Couldn’t quite manage cake for breakfast –GAH!!) So we settled for some salted caramel and dark chocolate mini tarts, which were soooo good anyway, wish we’d bought lots more! They had a beautiful wedding cake on show, and all their desserts looked devine!

MARSHMALLOW MADAMS

A stand of much interest to us was the chilli stand!! Capsaicinoia had some brilliant products on sale…We especially liked the chilli flavoured jelly sweets, which we managed to trick a few people into thinking were cherry MWAHAHA! Several chilli chocolates, chilli fudge, chilli jewellery! We opted for some Eatons Jamaican Rum BBQ sauce, pathetic we know, but insanely delicious and moreish. But we tried almost everything, and left with our mouths suitably on fire!

CAPSAICINOIA

And onto one of our favourites – CHEESE! There was so much on offer at the show! But brought home some deliciously smoky Newport 1665 made by Moydens Hand Made Cheese, all their cheeses were so full of flavour, but we love a good smoked cheese, and this was indeed very smoky! You can smell it through the vacuum pack…Mmmm…

Overall the day was great, the sun was shining, the live music was playing all day, and the choice of vendors was unbelievable! We had to keep putting off buying food because we were worried about missing something else, but on return would find them sold out! 30% of the vendors sold 2 days worth of stock in the 1 day!! Next time we may have to take Tupperware and stock up on food for the week…Bravo on a great event Shrewsbury Food Festival - Lets hope the sun is shining for the next one too!