Another year another BBC Good Food Show. For those readers unfamiliar with this event, go read about it first, I’ll be waiting.

For me, this is still one of the best days out of the season, some familiar faces (who actually EATS anything sold by Gourmet Med anyway?!) and some newcomers, such as oak smoked seeds and a chap from Durham selling very reasonable handmade chopping boards.

Making a list of the things you’d most like to see/buy(/fly) is the best way to make the most of any big show like this because motion tends towards the brownian. You can wind up seeing some bits 5 times and missing others out entirely.

Rick Stein

I’ve been quite a fan of Rick Stein’s for a number of years now. I’ve been rather keen to get his autograph since literally bumping into him at Newquay airport a couple of years ago and being left stuttering and double-taking like a starstruck eejit.

So the very first job on my list was to join the queue of other hopefuls to get my cunningly impulse bought copy of his latest book signed. He seemed genuinely happy to meet and greet the fans, signing all manner of books, dvd covers and carrier bags, smiling for photos etc..

I’m now surprisingly chuffed to be the owner of “Hi Dav, happy cooking, Rick Stein” scribed on my book and DVD covers. Win!

Cheese!

For me, one of the highlights of the show is comparative tasting. You don’t really appreciate the differences between various creameries until you’ve got 4 similarly labelled cheeses in front of you to eat one after the other, although actually getting hold of your favourite product is kinda tricky when all the supermarkets sell is their own brand or other producers with sufficiently high volume outputs. Also get some small quantity suppliers just getting going, we found some wonderful mustard seed encrusted goats cheese from Northern Ireland.

There’s also the opportunity to try things that you wouldn’t normally like to eat, such as various seafoods from Orkney (I’m still not keen on the smaller shellfish such as winkles, but it’s always good to check)

Rick Stein (again)

This time it’s into the Super Theatre for the daily show. This is an auditorium built out of scaffolding specifically for the show and is thoroughly recommended. It’s heavily dependant upon whoever’s on stage, but getting to watch Rick Stein cook a couple of good dishes in front of you (we were close enough to smell the cooking, mmmmmm meatballs) whilst talking about filming his latest TV series was well worth the trip alone. It also reinforced my idea that having a tajine would be A Good Thing.

We’ve also seen Jamie Oliver and Gary Rhodes in years past. Gary Rhodes was very similar to Rick Stein, cook a couple of dishes, do a lot of enthusiastic talking to the audience throwing in a few noteworthy tips to keep people alert. I remember laughing quite a lot.

Jamie Oliver was an extremely theatrical production with italian mentors and crowds of prepped volunteers to come make pasta etc.. A bit embarrasing in a reality tv kinda way, but very high energy.

…Continued in the next post because I’m too lazy to fix my front page’s HTML…