Guiting Festival I

It is Guiting Festival time of year again and this year is its 40th year.  My father is the chairman with the amazing, talented Joanna MacGregor as president and Duncan Westerman is the music director who delighted my wedding guests with a bit of Alice Cooper after we had left the church with his amazing organ playing.  The festival gets better and better every year. 

http://www.guitingfestival.org/

Last year Zoe and Idris Rahman played an electric set together which was a fusion of contemporary jazz, snake-hip clarinet sounds, a guy called Sammie on the electric violin (who we later saw playing with Natasha Atlas at the Hay Festival this year) and Kuljit Bhamra on the bhangra drums.  It was ELECTRIC!!!  I have never heard such intoxicating music and I have been hoping that they will come back in 2011.  In the meantime their sister Sophia Rahman played this year, a wonderful collection of Bach, Mendelssohn, Bartok and Liszt.  I only made the second half as I was whizing back from a friend's wedding in Essex but despite being a such a classical music novice, I was suitably blown away.

Last year the food was so awful at the lovely Hollow Bottom pub in Guiting Power (come on guys, can't you sort it out so that I don't have to cook next year?) that we decided we would have to open a canteen at home for a week to feed all the musicians and the sponsors.  It was too awful to have such uplifting, moving music followed by such dreadful fodder.  So on Saturday I was home for the first one.  I made a barbacoa, which is traditionally cooked in a pit in the ground in MExico for feast days and celebrations, ancho marinated lamb, mutton or goat, wrapped in banana leaves.  The slow-cooked meat is served with a fresh cabbage, radish and coriander salad and a searing hot chile de arbol salsa.  Recipes in my book!  Here are some of the gaggle having fun.

Now I must get on with cooking the barbacoa for tonight...Eclipse playing.  Neal's Yard Dairy cheese for pudding and my tomato, chilli and ginger jam.

xxx