Big Feastival

A couple of weekends ago we headed into the Oxfordshire countryside to attend the Big Feastival, a collaboration of food and music by Alex James and Jamie Oliver.  The festival was held at Alex James' farm and on site there was a big stage playing a nice mix of music throughout the day, a big stage for cookery demonstrations and then food stalls scattered throughout.

We couldn't wait to try out all the food though I have to say we struggled with what to eat.  I went for paella for lunch and an Indian style chicken salad later on.  Mark went for pie and mash and later on had one of Mark Hix's Fish Dog (I found a blog post about this here).  

When the sun went down we watched Paloma Faith while tucking into some amazing churros, I really must learn how to make them...

We had a really nice day and if you didn't know from my About page I really do enjoy a good festival.  However, I don't think we will be going back to this festival and if we did we would never consider a weekend ticket I'm so glad we hadn't planned this in advance and got those tickets while they were on sale.  The food selection was pretty average for a festival.  If there's something I've found in attending music festivals it's that the food is overpriced but usually pretty tasty and the options we had weren't dissimilar to what you would find.  Because it was predominantly a Jamie Oliver festival, the music was second class so what we were faced with was a mediocre music line up with the usual festival food options.  I was expecting a mediocre line up with amazing food options.  The cookery demonstrations were good but they had no big screens and of course when you have the likes of Jamie Oliver doing demonstrations you're going to expect a big crowd so this should have been dealt with.

There was a big family section to the site so it may be something we consider going back to when we have children running around as they are really spoilt there with a circus tent of activities and fairground rides.