Fun & Flavour for all the famiy at The Forest Showcase Food Festival

From the nutritional and healthy, to the indulgent naughty but nice, The Forest of Dean comes alive on 1st October with its Annual Food Festival.

The Forest Showcase is an event with a lot more going on than most food festivals…featuring the best fresh regional produce from over 100 top local & artisan producers, from gourmet burgers and handmade scotch eggs, to award winning preserves & chutneys, fine cheeses, farmhouse ciders and speciality wines, ales & plenty of flavoured gins!.

It’s a great opportunity to get a real taste of the best of the area.

Ian Barnes from Infamous catering will be exploring some Creepy Crawly Cookery in our Cookery Theatre this year! Edible insects, a crispy crunchy ingredient….come & taste & discover why this is becoming an important sustainable food source.
There will also be cookery demonstrations from the regions top chefs including Rob Cox, head chef from The Tudor Farmhouse Hotel, Yvette Farrell, owner & principal of Harts Barn Cookery School, and Stuart Spicer from The Speech House Hotel. The cookery theatre is sponsored by Hales of Drybrook, Esse stoves and Gloucestershire College.

Returning this year will be our very popular free Parent & Child cookery classes with healthy eating advisor & cookery teacher Glyn Owen from ‘Kids & Food’.
This year he will be teaching how to make a middle-eastern inspired mezze of salads with 2 or 3 different salads using seasonal ingredients , and how to make a beetroot leaf pesto, labenah cheese and flat breads  all using simple cooking skills which can then be replicated at home and can involve the children as much as possible.
The families would then take home all the salads, some pesto, some labenah and some flatbreads. You can book your place on these classes on the Forest Showcase website.

After you’ve done your foodie shopping, you can sit out enjoying tasty hot food & a refreshing drink (or two), with great live music including The Paris Jazz Café Swing Band bringing you acoustic music from the Parisian café era and the French jazz of Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt, with a taste of classics from the roaring 20’s and swinging 30’s and 40’s to the finest Hot Club Jazz. We also have music from Microjazz & The Ukes Uv Azzard will be performing.

The event will feature children’s activities with entertainment throughout the day from Jitterbug Circus. There are also plenty of free food related arts workshops. With a selection of arts & crafts on display along with green ideas on composting, an animal or two!, a vintage cider press crushing apples, tips on vegetable growing & keeping bees this really is an event worth visiting, so come with empty tummies & we promise you will be full to bursting when you leave.

The Forest Showcase will be held in the Speech House Hotel grounds, in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire,on Sunday 1st October from 10am, tickets can be purchased in advance to avoid the queues from the website http://www.forestshowcase.org