Mallow Food Festival

Glorious sunshine, lots of people (especially before the match kicked off) and stalls well-laden with a large variety of good food meant success all the way for yesterday’s Mallow Food Festival. URRU had a stall there so the Mallow Girl and I were kept busy, filling and selling pottles (note use of Kiwi term!) of URRU nibbles – paper cups filled with slices of Gubbeen chorizo, salami, chunks of their extra mature and oak smoked Gubbeen cheese, topped with a Gubbeen cheese biscuits. We were also selling a selection of afternoon cakes – lemon drizzle, flourless chocolate and almond and carrot loaf cakes – from Richard Graham-Leigh who, with his wife, Jane, supplies URRU with all variety of tarts, café bars, cookies and cakes. All of the cakes were pre-wrapped, fortunately, as the wasps were also attending in force and the Natural Foods Bakery next to us were inundated by black and yellow-striped fans of their sweet offerings.

Being so busy – hence no photos! – I didn’t get much of a chance to look around until much of the food was gone but at least I managed a coffee from John Gowan’s Cork Coffee Roasters, a selection of apple juices, crisp crunchy eating apples and chunky cookers from Philip across at the Little Irish Apple Company, and a few seed-laden pitta breads from the Natural Foods Bakery. Fellow organisers Essink and Lucey Butchers looked to be doing a great trade in lunches, cakes and vegetables, Arun was kept very busy at the Green Saffron stand and our usual Mallow Farmers’ Market traders were happily selling out of their smoked fish, cheese, pots of herbs and organic vegetables. It was great to meet Elke from the Dine and Wine Club and fortunately she called by to say hello at a time when we had a little lull so I had a few minutes to talk to her.

Now, back to normal life in URRU!