Free tickets came up on offer once again for Taste of Christmas so Sandra and I decided we had nothing (but time) to lose by taking them up. You can easily spend a whole day at the Taste festivals but by mid-afternoon the events start to really get crowded by which time I’ve normally had enough! Still, Sandra and I still made the most of our time at the festival which included being only metres from Heston as he officially cut the ribbon on the day’s opening (I couldn’t believe how rude some people were – there was a couple off to my side who still had a pretty good view of Heston, particularly considering how short I am, but was still pushing us around to get even closer)

Heston’s appearance in the Taste Theatre was scheduled second on the bill and learning from previous events we made sure to get to the Taste Theatre extra early (before even the first chef appeared!) to line up. There were two lines, one for the VIP ticket holders and one for regular ticket holders (us), and both lines ended up being even longer than they were last year. We were worried that all the VIP ticket holders would take up the seats but actually they are only guaranteed seats in the first five rows, and that included seats off to the side, and once they’d started filling the rows they let us regular ticket holders in … as a result we ended up nearly smack bang in the middle with better positioning than some of the VIPs! Although too bad about the camera!

But first up in the Taste Theatre was Silvena Rowe. What a character. This Bulgarian born on the Turkish border chef has been all over London and written a few cook books and even consulted on the movie Eastern Promises. Currently executive chef with the Baltic Restaurant Group she treated us to a very entertaining and sexy session (it’s her accent and her hair that does it …)

So Heston’s session was less about his cooking and more about other people’s cooking! He was actually judging a contest which involved members of the general public having a stab at a Heston-esque Christmas dish (Christmas with a Heston Twist.) There were three finalists who I must admit came up with some interesting creations. But before the finalists came up Heston discussed with us his cooking style and talked about exploring fully all of our senses.

We then got to sample his special Christmas mince pie and also this other thing which we were instructed to eat whilst holding our noses, which was a play on changing the flavour without bias of expectation.

The finalists were all clearly chuffed to be up on stage sharing it with Heston. One guy in particularly kept talking and talking and talking. I think he talked his way into winning. Ha ha! The first guy created “snow”, the lady Christmas cake themed cup cake (the Heston twist being the dry ice on the bottom creating a mood I guess) and then the winner created a re-visiting of an Eton Mess. At one stage Heston was like, uh, can I have the mike back now please? Ha ha.

After the Heston session it was off to try some of the food before the crowds got too ridiculously out of control. Pork belly was the order of the day for me – I can’t resist it!

Modern Pantry: Vietnamese Style Duke of Berkshire Pork belly, mash, pickled bean sprouts, crispy shallots. It may not look like much but it was pretty tasty.

Roast: Slow Roast Wicks Manor Pork Belly with Bramley apple sauce, root vegetable mash and port reduction. Delicious and perfectly tender.

Club Gascon: Foie gras popcorn. The popcorn didn’t really work too well with the foie gras but otherwise a nice dish.

Hotel du Vin: Braised Donald Russell Ox cheek, hickory smoked pommes puree. Getting very full at this stage – the ox cheek was melt in your mouth tender though a bit rich considering how full I was starting to feel.

I couldn’t resist more pork belly though with Hotel du Vin: Pugh’s roast porchetta, pommes lyonnaise and charcutterie sauce. Mmmm …

After lunch we headed off to the Waitrose Cookery School to burn off some of our energy, but I think we had a net gain instead of calories from the dessert we made (which we eventually ate!!)

We were partly through making our dessert when one of the assistant chefs came along and did this to our egg! Entertaining but don’t think Sandra was too impressed as it made a mess of our table and of our separating the yolk from the white! Ha ha!

Think the assistant chefs were more interested in having fun with us than anything else – but I didn’t mind! The whole session made me laugh!

The finished products

Its not often that you get to see a whole load of top chefs appearing live on stage all in one day. Sure they make their appearances at foodie festivals etc. but this was a whole day dedicated to chefs shuffling on and off the stage to both entertain and cook for us. This inaugural Love Cooking Festival was held at Royal Festival Hall. There as plenty of auditorium space … but it was rather random which tickets you would get. Its apparently first come best dressed … and we ended up with front row seats though off to the side. This was quite good as we were right up there with no one the block our view … but it was sometimes awkward as the camera man would often get in our way! Still, that didn’t stop us enjoying our day.

After each cooking session the chefs were then available to sign their books. Laney and I got into a rhythm of running outside as soon as the session was finished to line up for the autographs. There was an hour in between screenings but this wasn’t nearly enough time for the chefs to get through the queue! It was quite hard work today – literally from 12 until 9.30, except for a small break for dinner, we were running to and fro. Very funny. It would have been a longer day but unfortunately Gary Rhodes, who was scheduled for the first session, couldn’t make it 🙁

First up on the bill was Richard Corrigan and Mark Hix (for the cooking) & Oz Clarke (for the drinking)

Gino D’Acampo, known as Hot Stuff, was the next session. What a beautiful man in both looks and personality … shame he is already married! Gino got out the pasta making machine and went back to basics just to show us how easy it was to make pasta. He also bunged some tuna on to the grill … for which he got the help of a lucky lady from the audience. Strangely rather than being excited to be both on stage and being up close to Gino the girl was oddly unaffected and barely even cracked a smile!

We make a nice couple huh? Heh heh.

Ainsley Harriott was up next. Ainsley is just a totally adorable man. The cynic would expect that such a big personality who comes across as bubbly and friendly on television might not really live up to this perception. We were really pleased to see that Ainsley is a genuinely lovely man.

Ainsley cooked up some soul food for us and Laney was lucky enough to get to go up on stage to sample. She looked after us though by bringing down some snacks for us tool. Good looking out Laney!

Rick Stein then took us into the dinner break. What I love about Rick is that he is just so very down to earth. Its really all about the cooking for him. There is no pretention and no pretending he’s this big superstar with an attitude. I really like that about him. He had us giggling about the first time he went on tv and cut his finger. The fact the video man kept flashing up the scene of the cut finger behind Rick at random intervals (so that we would all be laughing and then Rick would turn around to see what was going on but of course the scene was gone from the screen) had us laughing even more.

The laughs of the night had to go to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who hosted the last session. Hugh is best known for his “grow your own” philosophy and his commitment to eating seasonally, locally and ethically. He was another really down to earth chef. I don’t think he was drunk tonight but he was moving around the stage like a mad man – but in a really endearing fashion. He very self-deprecating and this really was quite charming. I don’t really remember much of the cooking but I remember it being a really good way to end the day. There was the cutting of the pumpkin moment …

There are all sorts of random events being held revolving around food recently. The last one we went to was the Bompas and Parr: The Complete History of Food which was truly interesting. Today it was the inaugural Experimental Food Society Spectacular.

The Experimental Food Society was started at the beginning of this year as a front for showcasing gourmet artists interested in more than just swallowing food. Bombas and Parr are members of this group.

It was crazy crazy busy when we turned up and you could hardly move for all the people inside. If it wasn’t for the fact I was keen to see what kind of genius creations people could come up with I would have bypassed the event altogether. Here are some pics of the things I saw today:

lovetocake’s Gorilla cake

Sharon Baker’s Body and Breast bread casts

Carl Warner working on his Lobster Landscape

Chocolate from Paul Wayne Gregory was just plain gorgeous. They were giving out sample lollipops which I nearly got stampeded over from girls trying to get their grubby mitts on them. This was one part of the event that I really hated – all these pushy people who didn’t care who they were pushing around.

This suckling pig look pretty rested …

Some sugar and butter sculptures

Oh, and look who we came across. Sam Bompas.

And some of their creations (in ethanol) in conjunction with the Robin Collective.

You got to play this ring toss “game” and then you’d get to sample some ethanol jelly … think it was nicer in concept than in taste. Very strong!

You’ve probably seen this guy’s work in an email forward somewhere. Takashi Itoh. Pretty brilliant carvings in watermelon.

Malcolm West’s Paul O’Grady in Jelly Bellies.

And finally, some live art. This dude started painting random people in the audience in chocolate. A brown guy in white chocolate, and a white gal in brown chocolate. Really funny.

PS Don’t you just love the pictures in the background!

We didn’t cough up the £75 for the banquet (which was basically grabbing whatever you could and eating it) afterwards but I’m sure it would have been interesting dining on the food that we’d all been looking at all day. I mean, imagine hacking at Sharon Baker’s Body of Bread. Ha!

Bompas and Parr are known best as the jelly mongers, molding jellies into interesting shapes such as well known buildings (like the Gherkin) and even glow in the dark jelly (this one for a Mark Ronson birthday party.) You can tell that these guys are all about innovating with food – but not just what you consume but how it smells, the textures, the tastes etc. For a few days only their latest venture is The Complete History of Food.

Pat and I had no idea whatsoever what to expect – all we knew was that we had to turn up at a particular time, that we’d get some food and, being sponsored by Courvoisier, a fair amount of alcohol!

The event was being held in a house on Belgrave Square. It turned out that every floor represented some decade in the history of food. The first room was our introduction. There was a guy there who was going to assess our “humours” – which apparently dictate whether your body was in harmony.

He would assess which humour was more dominant than the rest and based on this he would prescribe you a restorative. If you were:

Choleric you would get Cabbage (white wine, caper, artichoke) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif Rose Water.
Melancholic you would get Popsicle (lemon, sorrel) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif pear and Cardamom Sidecar.
Phlegmatic you would get Popcorn (truffle, porcini) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif Apricot Martini
Sanguine you would get Fig (Beetroot, port, vanilla) paired with a Courvoisier Exclusif Spiced Meade with celery bitters

The mixologists and chefs from Saf were responsible for the restoratives and was served to us in a flooded Banqueting chamber. I tell you I hadn’t even started drinking yet and it was a challenge to walk into the chamber without losing balance – the threat of the water was real! But no one fell in which was good.

This was the Medieval period by the way. The next was the Contemporary where we took a lift all the way to the top floor! Actually the lift was a good thing because it basically broke up the group so Pat, myself and two other people (who where from New Zealand and were very friendly) had the top floor to ourselves for the next experience. Up here the treat was representing the current bounty of good food that we have in the world today. The Rocher a l’Or (Michelin starred chef Aiexis Gauthier of Gauthier Soho’s take on a “Ferroro Rocher”) was a port reduction centre, surrounded by duck foie gras, coated with caramelised almond and rolled in gold leaf. This was paired with a flat champagne cocktail with a fizzy grape (from mixologist Paul Tvaroh of Lounge Bohemia.) I really liked the idea behind the fizzy grape which was a surprise to the tongue and mouth.

From Contemporary we headed down to the Early 20th Centry where we were faced with a bouncy castle designed like the inside of a stomach! It was very funny! The message here was about the increasing consciousness about the effects of food on the body. The stomach showed someone who had eaten a TV dinner … which was our next stop.

The 1950s and the world of mass production and technology. This was really cool – no food here but a scratch and sniff TV dinner! Chicken, Chips, Peas and Generic Strawberry Pudding. It was very effective!

After this TV Dinner and our work out in the bouncing stomach we were starting to work up quite an appetite so we were very happy to see that our next meal was the Iguanadon dinner. The stories goes that on New year’s Eve 1853 Anatomist Richard Owen and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins teamed up to recreate life-size models of dinosaurs, the first in the world, at Crystal Palace to which 22 leading scientists were invited to dine in and around.

The food from Bistrotheque was lovely: duck confit with lentils, beetroot, black champagne sauce. The duck was cooked perfectly. Accompanying our meal was Josephine’s Tea Garden by Ben Leggett: Courvoisier Exclusif with green tea, apple juice and elderflower cordial, garnished with fresh mint leaves and citrus wedges. Refreshing but I’d had too much alcohol at this stage and passed it on to Pat!

Finally we entered the Renaissance. We walked in this room which was overwhelmingly pink and fully of dessert! This was inspired by the time the Earl of Leicester tried to woo Queen Elizabeth I with an entire garden full of dessert (over 300!) This was also of the introduction of sugar hence our dessert of candied Orange, iris Jellies and Ambergris Posset with Courvoisier XO. The Ambergris is actually the vomit of sperm whales and is a highly sought after ingredient in the perfumery world – as it ages it gets more fragrant. Apparently it makes a good flavouring in food too with some claiming its an aphrodisiac! Oh – I forgot to say there was a “biometric jelly” in this room where you put your finger into this electric monitor and once it picks up your heartbeat the jelly above it starts to jump around. Quite funny.

The experience tonight was extremely cool. It takes ordinary dining to another level and gave it an interesting twist. For the alcohol lovers you get quite a bit of alcohol and for the foodies there’s quite a representation from various fine dining providers in the London so you get a bit of both worlds. Great fun.