Sunday and the rain held off for a while so we took the time to go into Liverpool and spend a couple of hours at The Liverpool Independent Food Festival. This took place in an old warehouse building in the Baltic Triangle area of town..

The middle of the warehouse was filled with rough hewn wooden benches and tables and down each side there were a series of stalls put together with more wood and scaffolding poles each of which was given over to some of the best young places to eat in Liverpool.

The starting point was of course the stall selling Liverpool Craft Beer. We took advantage and settled ourselves down with a pint of Love Lane Pale Ale and a pinchos from the Roja  Pinchos stall which was a piece of spiced chicken on bread. We then wandered round and I was left to think – if I had a stall what would I be cooking on it. it is of course all very well being the king in the kitchen at home but setting out to try sell some of that food to the outside is a whole other matter and then what would you cook for that outside world.

I have vague ideas of a stall selling nothing but mackerel and lobsters cooked on an open flame. The trouble with this, apart from it being a vague idea, is that the mackerel would need to be fresh and just out of the sea and unless I was buying the lobsters off a pier in West Cork they would be too expensive – so two things that could render such an enterprise impractical in Liverpool.

Having put those thoughts to bed we ventured onto another pint and some more food. as we were heading into lunchtime we went for more solid sustenance and a lamb burger with sweet potato chips (not a fan – there is nothing wrong with chips made from a potato that is not sweet – sweet does not make them better) and pitta stuffed with falafel. The falafel were good although I had to stuff the pitta myself.

We were sat down by this stage and my incipient deafness kicked in battling against the David Bowie that seemed to be on constant stand-by in the background. Somewhere along the way a margarita slushy had been purchased. Apparently this had something to do with it being a margarita and some confusion on the part of the 14 year old who thought  she was just buying  a slushy. It got drunk whilst we tried to talk about who was driving home the conversation being helped along with me being deaf and David Bowie.

it transpired that I wasn’t the driver as soon there-after another pint of the Love Lane Pale Ale was put in my hand and we trucked into a plate of food from Roja Pinchos including some particularly good croquettes made with chicken and chorizo and bread smeared with an anchovy, olive and mushroom cream and topped with a whole silver anchovy.