"What next?" is the question
I promised, a few days ago, that I would do a separate post about the food I ate at Glastonbury. In some ways, this wasn't a great year to do it. Hot weather and a slightly dicey stomach meant I probably ate rather less than usual - in ordinary years, the net effect of being surrounded by amazing food stalls is that I have about five meals a day.
I endeavoured to take a snap of everything I ate, but be warned! They really are snaps. Food photography is hard, and due to feeling like a massive idiot taking photos of my food, I tended to get it over with as quickly as possible. There are also a few where I only remembered half way through a meal, and it's pretty much impossible to make a half-eaten dish look nice.
We arrived on Wednesday evening and, having pitched our tent, went in search of dinner. The first row of stalls we hit contained The Isle of Wight Garlic Kitchen, or some similar name, and I had their beef chilli served with cheese, coriander, chilli and a big wodge of garlic bread (£8).
It was really good chilli, actually. ChrisC had 14-hour confit beef with some sort of fancy rice from the stall next door.
Thursday morning started with a trip to the juice stall. I ordered a green juice, because I like that kind of thing, and bloody hell was it green.
I blame the kale. It was nice, but actually a bit too green, even for me. If you look at the shadows, it seems ChrisC is holding my drink while I hold his and take a photo. I'm not clear why this is being done in such a cackhanded manner.
Subsequent mornings also started at the juice stall, but I don't appear to have taken any more pictures of juice.
I couldn't work out what I wanted for breakfast - a full English didn't appeal - until I was walking through the Greenfields and spotted a bloke walking the other way with a plate of amazing-looking bread. I demanded to know where it had come from, and he directed me to the row of "farmer's market" stalls in Greenpeace. Lydia's Loaf furnished me with an olive focaccia, still hot from the oven, for £4.50. Which sounds expensive for a bread bun, until you realise it was absolutely stuffed full of olives and was plenty for two of us for breakfast.
Thursday was very hot and sunny, so we enacted one of our favourite festival food plans and went to Leon in West Holts. For the curious, this is not the same as the UK highstreet chain Leon, it's a stall that does vegetarian and vegan hot dishes and salads. They used to do an amazing "banquet plate" which was a giant plate of (I think) 13 items of your choice from their buffet, but sadly that wasn't on offer this year. Sunny weather, so salad time. Could we have mushroom quiche and salad (£8)? Could he cut the quiche in two as we were going to share it? Oh, he said, in that case he'd cut us a bigger bit of quiche... nice man, not a great head for business, I'd say ;)
I still felt a little peckish, so added in a £2 samosa from a stall called Ghandi's Flip-flop ("Non-violent curries for the civilly disobedient"). Whenever I eat samosas they tend to be plastic-wrapped cold (or microwaved) affairs, usually from dubious corner shops in stations. This one was freshly fried, and it was incredibly tasty, and a whole different texture.
I was expecting to have another meal before bedtime, but apparently I didn't.
Breakfast on Friday was a galette, filled with cheese, spinach, tomatoes and mushrooms. A nice lady in a stall that wasn't as yellow as this picture makes it look made it for me as I fled the modern dance on the Pyramid stage.
A stall which has been at Glastonbury ever since we started going is No Bones Jones which runs on solar power and makes vegetarian and vegan food. I got myself a light lunch of vegetable fritters and salad while ChrisC was buying a salmon wrap from the on-site smokery.
Yes, yes I know, two days at this festival and I appear to have turned into a vegetarian.
While buying my fritters, I got chatting to the lady behind the stall. So while eating our lunch, ChrisC and I were standing by the giant pan of bread and butter pudding that No Bones Jones keep (coyly half-hidden by foil) clearly visible. The inevitable happened.
It was probably the best bread and butter pudding I've ever eaten (served with cream), and we'd motored through most of it before I remembered about the photo.
My tea came from the one stall I am always determined to visit: La Grande Bouffe. They serve tartiflette, another potato dish, and sausages cooked in wine and juniper. £8 for a sausage and some potato sounds quite extortionate, but it's all slow-cooked, complex-flavoured stuff that I have (repeatedly) failed to reproduce at home. Obviously, I'd eaten almost all of it before I remembered to take a photo. The "golden potatoes" were from the end of a batch and were covered in crispy brown bits. They were great, but as a result look just a bit grubby in the picture!
ChrisC manfully ordered the same meal later so I could photograph that, and I forgot then as well.
Saturday again involved not knowing what I wanted for breakfast. My choice was eventually tomato bruschetta, which turned out to involve a positively ludicrous amount of garlic.
I had a midafternoon snack of a mostly unremarkable fruit salad...
... and then vegetable and cashew nut korma (£6.50 with rice and chapati) from the excellent
Ghandi's Flip-flop. It's quite rare to eat from the same stall more than once, but I was curious to try their curries. Nice, and a little cheaper than main meals at most places, but not as outstanding as I'd hoped.
We had a later-afternoon top-up of more bread and butter pudding too :)
As you can just see, someone has already started eating it.
I sort of skipped breakfast on Sunday, due to still feeling a little fragile, then started looking for an early lunch. I first encountered the Buddha Bowls stall last year, and had forgotten all about it until I ran into it again. Brown rice, vegan mussulman curry (with potato, soya and pineapple), carrot and kimchi salad, steamed greens, and some seeds. I know it sounds weird and terribly worthy (it's vegan, gluten-free, nut-free..), but as comfort food for someone with a slightly sorry stomach it was absolutely ideal.
I took another picture after I'd eaten some space in the box to show the layers, but half-eaten food just looks a bit disgusting.
The closest we managed to the general idea of "festival food" all weekend was the Yorkshire pudding full of mashed potato and roast pork that ChrisC had for Sunday lunch.
Apparently it's quite hard to eat a giant Yorkshire with only a fork, while walking in a hurry across the site. Which is why it all looks a bit of a mess :)
It is possible, by the way, to purchase a festival death-burger at Glastonbury if you want one. Or a bacon butty, or a bag of chips. However, I treat the festival as one of my main holidays for the year, and that includes budgeting so I can eat from the stalls that I consider a much better bet. Although even I baulked a little at the prices of seafood chowder and crawfish gumbo. The crawfish looked good, though! There was even a stall selling fresh oysters, though I'm not a massive fan of oysters.
Late on Sunday, hanging out in the almost-deserted south-east corner, I found a gourmet hot dog stall and thought: you know what? I quite fancy a hot dog. So I had Da Boss Dog featuring pulled pork (I mean really, what doesn't feature pulled pork these days?), sweet-pickled onions, and something else I forget (£6, I think).
Hot dogs are one of those immensely satisfying things, like penguins and pints of Guinness, that look exactly like cartoon pictures of themselves.
ChrisC got some pizza from the place next door, and inadvertently ordered the vegan one. (He has a history of accidentally ordering pizzas without tomatoes, pizzas without cheese, pizzas without pizza... he maintains that on this occasion he just picked the one that looked nicest, which I then told him was vegan.)
By Monday, everyone was beginning to pack up. I just managed to catch the smokery before it sold out of everything, and had a smoked halloumi wrap to set me up for the journey home. (£7, I think, which is pricey - it's substantial but not that substantial. Mind you, smoked halloumi is awesome.)
I endeavoured to take a snap of everything I ate, but be warned! They really are snaps. Food photography is hard, and due to feeling like a massive idiot taking photos of my food, I tended to get it over with as quickly as possible. There are also a few where I only remembered half way through a meal, and it's pretty much impossible to make a half-eaten dish look nice.
We arrived on Wednesday evening and, having pitched our tent, went in search of dinner. The first row of stalls we hit contained The Isle of Wight Garlic Kitchen, or some similar name, and I had their beef chilli served with cheese, coriander, chilli and a big wodge of garlic bread (£8).
It was really good chilli, actually. ChrisC had 14-hour confit beef with some sort of fancy rice from the stall next door.
Thursday morning started with a trip to the juice stall. I ordered a green juice, because I like that kind of thing, and bloody hell was it green.
I blame the kale. It was nice, but actually a bit too green, even for me. If you look at the shadows, it seems ChrisC is holding my drink while I hold his and take a photo. I'm not clear why this is being done in such a cackhanded manner.
Subsequent mornings also started at the juice stall, but I don't appear to have taken any more pictures of juice.
I couldn't work out what I wanted for breakfast - a full English didn't appeal - until I was walking through the Greenfields and spotted a bloke walking the other way with a plate of amazing-looking bread. I demanded to know where it had come from, and he directed me to the row of "farmer's market" stalls in Greenpeace. Lydia's Loaf furnished me with an olive focaccia, still hot from the oven, for £4.50. Which sounds expensive for a bread bun, until you realise it was absolutely stuffed full of olives and was plenty for two of us for breakfast.
Thursday was very hot and sunny, so we enacted one of our favourite festival food plans and went to Leon in West Holts. For the curious, this is not the same as the UK highstreet chain Leon, it's a stall that does vegetarian and vegan hot dishes and salads. They used to do an amazing "banquet plate" which was a giant plate of (I think) 13 items of your choice from their buffet, but sadly that wasn't on offer this year. Sunny weather, so salad time. Could we have mushroom quiche and salad (£8)? Could he cut the quiche in two as we were going to share it? Oh, he said, in that case he'd cut us a bigger bit of quiche... nice man, not a great head for business, I'd say ;)
I still felt a little peckish, so added in a £2 samosa from a stall called Ghandi's Flip-flop ("Non-violent curries for the civilly disobedient"). Whenever I eat samosas they tend to be plastic-wrapped cold (or microwaved) affairs, usually from dubious corner shops in stations. This one was freshly fried, and it was incredibly tasty, and a whole different texture.
I was expecting to have another meal before bedtime, but apparently I didn't.
Breakfast on Friday was a galette, filled with cheese, spinach, tomatoes and mushrooms. A nice lady in a stall that wasn't as yellow as this picture makes it look made it for me as I fled the modern dance on the Pyramid stage.
A stall which has been at Glastonbury ever since we started going is No Bones Jones which runs on solar power and makes vegetarian and vegan food. I got myself a light lunch of vegetable fritters and salad while ChrisC was buying a salmon wrap from the on-site smokery.
Yes, yes I know, two days at this festival and I appear to have turned into a vegetarian.
While buying my fritters, I got chatting to the lady behind the stall. So while eating our lunch, ChrisC and I were standing by the giant pan of bread and butter pudding that No Bones Jones keep (coyly half-hidden by foil) clearly visible. The inevitable happened.
It was probably the best bread and butter pudding I've ever eaten (served with cream), and we'd motored through most of it before I remembered about the photo.
My tea came from the one stall I am always determined to visit: La Grande Bouffe. They serve tartiflette, another potato dish, and sausages cooked in wine and juniper. £8 for a sausage and some potato sounds quite extortionate, but it's all slow-cooked, complex-flavoured stuff that I have (repeatedly) failed to reproduce at home. Obviously, I'd eaten almost all of it before I remembered to take a photo. The "golden potatoes" were from the end of a batch and were covered in crispy brown bits. They were great, but as a result look just a bit grubby in the picture!
ChrisC manfully ordered the same meal later so I could photograph that, and I forgot then as well.
Saturday again involved not knowing what I wanted for breakfast. My choice was eventually tomato bruschetta, which turned out to involve a positively ludicrous amount of garlic.
I had a midafternoon snack of a mostly unremarkable fruit salad...
... and then vegetable and cashew nut korma (£6.50 with rice and chapati) from the excellent
Ghandi's Flip-flop. It's quite rare to eat from the same stall more than once, but I was curious to try their curries. Nice, and a little cheaper than main meals at most places, but not as outstanding as I'd hoped.
We had a later-afternoon top-up of more bread and butter pudding too :)
As you can just see, someone has already started eating it.
I sort of skipped breakfast on Sunday, due to still feeling a little fragile, then started looking for an early lunch. I first encountered the Buddha Bowls stall last year, and had forgotten all about it until I ran into it again. Brown rice, vegan mussulman curry (with potato, soya and pineapple), carrot and kimchi salad, steamed greens, and some seeds. I know it sounds weird and terribly worthy (it's vegan, gluten-free, nut-free..), but as comfort food for someone with a slightly sorry stomach it was absolutely ideal.
I took another picture after I'd eaten some space in the box to show the layers, but half-eaten food just looks a bit disgusting.
The closest we managed to the general idea of "festival food" all weekend was the Yorkshire pudding full of mashed potato and roast pork that ChrisC had for Sunday lunch.
Apparently it's quite hard to eat a giant Yorkshire with only a fork, while walking in a hurry across the site. Which is why it all looks a bit of a mess :)
It is possible, by the way, to purchase a festival death-burger at Glastonbury if you want one. Or a bacon butty, or a bag of chips. However, I treat the festival as one of my main holidays for the year, and that includes budgeting so I can eat from the stalls that I consider a much better bet. Although even I baulked a little at the prices of seafood chowder and crawfish gumbo. The crawfish looked good, though! There was even a stall selling fresh oysters, though I'm not a massive fan of oysters.
Late on Sunday, hanging out in the almost-deserted south-east corner, I found a gourmet hot dog stall and thought: you know what? I quite fancy a hot dog. So I had Da Boss Dog featuring pulled pork (I mean really, what doesn't feature pulled pork these days?), sweet-pickled onions, and something else I forget (£6, I think).
Hot dogs are one of those immensely satisfying things, like penguins and pints of Guinness, that look exactly like cartoon pictures of themselves.
ChrisC got some pizza from the place next door, and inadvertently ordered the vegan one. (He has a history of accidentally ordering pizzas without tomatoes, pizzas without cheese, pizzas without pizza... he maintains that on this occasion he just picked the one that looked nicest, which I then told him was vegan.)
By Monday, everyone was beginning to pack up. I just managed to catch the smokery before it sold out of everything, and had a smoked halloumi wrap to set me up for the journey home. (£7, I think, which is pricey - it's substantial but not that substantial. Mind you, smoked halloumi is awesome.)