Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Morpeth Fiery Food Festival

Back in April Mel and I attended the Morpeth Fiery Food Festival.
We both like chilli, not too hot but we do regularly cooking with them, so were very much looking forward to trying all sorts of different types of food involving different types of chilli.

Morpeth was established in the early 1800's, being located on the Hunter River, it was an important river port during the early days of 'European Settlement'.

Located about 10km North East of Maitland, or approx 50km North East of Pokolbin, Morpeth
 is a beautiful little town with shops and café’s lining both sides of the main street.

(photo source)

It is the home of the famous Morpeth Sourdough bread that can be bought throughout the Hunter Valley. Well worth a visit if you are in the area.
We were expecting street stalls selling different types of food, music and real festival/party type atmosphere but driving down the main street looking for a parking spot it would have been hard to know that it was anything other than a normal Sunday at Morpeth.

We walked the length of town thinking to ourselves we must have the wrong weekend. So we grabbed a coffee and noticed the café had 3-4 specials on the menu that did involve chilli’s so thought we could still be on track but weren’t convinced.

Eventually we get to the other end of town and find a sign saying welcome to the Fiery Food Festival outside of the Ginger Beer Factory.

To our surprise the Fiery Food Festival was 40-50 different types of sauces, oils, jams and other bottled goodies that you could taste with broken rice crackers. We did the circuit and tried a few things that appealed but it was nothing that you cant do at any of the many markets that are scattered all over the Hunter Valley, and many of the wineries also stock these sort of items and have them available for tasting.  

The Woodfire Pizza café put on a special chilli pizza for their contribution and the nut shop had some hot nuts and some spicy condiments, but they looked as though they would always be available in the shop every week of the year.

The Morpeth cellars had Chilli wine to taste but we’d lost a bit of interest by now after looking forward to so much more.

Not sure how many years this festival has been running for but hopefully it develops a lot more over the years as we were left quite disappointed.

9 & 10 April 2011
Morpeth, NSW
Tel: (02) 4933 1407


1 comment:

  1. My brother would LOVE this festival. He's a fan of fiery food!!
    - Scather @ scathingweekly.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete

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