For the last ten years there Foodies Festival has held an annual food festival in Edinburgh. This is the third year that we’ve been and it has completely changed this year. This year there seems to be more of an emphasis on street food and less restaurant food but there’s also a lot more space this year and even more alcohol than previous years. This year was also completely different for us as we got free tickets as a result of Liv Wan Illustration doing all of the illustrations for the Foodies Festival advertising materials nationwide. The first picture above shows just a small handful of illustrations that she created for them.

I’m not normally a fan of cider (I personally love a good Peroni) but they were handing out both apple and pear tasters near the entrance to the Foodies Festival and I absolutely loved the apple cider. I’m sure we will be getting some pear ciders in our fridge very soon.

Giant Pimm’s jug. We got there quite early so didn’t really check it out but I saw someone walking into it on the other side.

One of many really cool looking vans at the festival.

Just one of the many tents at the festival

A lot of ducks, more below…

This stall was called the Crispy Duck Rotisserie. We arrived at the festival quite early (10.30ish) and they were still cooking the majority of their ducks for the day. We really wanted to try some duck but the lady behind the counter said the ducks would need five hours to cook but they might have some ready. Confusing! So we ordered some chips cooked in duck fat largely to keep our daughter happy and they were delicious.

Kebabs. Ok not a great photo as I was wrestling my daughter at the time but Liv ordered a kofta kebab and it was absolutely delicious. The bread was also fantastic, soft on the inside, a little crunchy on the out. Yum yum yum!

Salad to accompany the kofta and other kebabs. I’m not much of a salad person myself but it looked fresh and if ordered I would definitely eat some. As a note we bought some feta cheese from a stand around the corner and it was delicious.

Typical stall at the festival. This one aptly called “The Spanish Hamper” was selling all kinds of things like chorizo, sangria, champagne cider etc. I really love Spanish food but ultimately I went to the festival to eat BBQ food.

Cheese! Lots and lots of cheese! I love all kinds of cheeses, except the stinky blue kind, but again we were there mainly for the BBQ.

First real thing I ate today was this hot dog. I think it was called a Churchill hot dog. Pretty simple but the sausage was really good. Next!

Paella! Paella is one of my very favourite things to eat and this looked damned tasty but whenever we go to our local market on Sundays we nearly always eat paella so we wanted to eat something different.

Vegetable noodles. This looked pretty epic and smelt
good but we didn’t try. Ultimately we would probably like to have gone to the festival a couple times but time didn’t allow and we might kid ourselves we would try something else but we would have ended up eating BBQ food both days.

Meat! Barbecued meat! This is the kind of meat I could happily wander off into a corner and spend the day doing nothing but eating. Looks beautiful, smelled beautiful, tasted beautiful.

Bit of a crappy photo on the right but second favourite thing I had all the day, the lamb kofta. Absolutely delicious. On the right is our favourite thing a lamb box. We have this every year without fail and it fails to disappoint.

Many of the stands do live food preparation presentations. This is really cool and we’ve seen some really interesting products over the last couple of years but we’ve yet to buy anything.

Chutneys, jams and marmalades. I’m not a huge chutney, marmalade person and occasionally have jam (usually home made stuff) so I didn’t try any but the point of this picture is lots of stands are giving away free samples.

Another typical stand this time run by Angus & Oink. They appeared to be selling lemonades, hampers, sauces and more

Macaroons. Call me miserable, cynical or whatever you want but I’ve always thought macaroons are vastly overpriced for what they are. However I do like eating them and find them really pretty but we didn’t buy any.

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream. Cool! Literally! But we were really full by this time.

Beef sandwich. Tasted really good but a bit like eating old rubber boots unfortunately.

Ticket office for the foodies festival. Only really took this picture to show off the posters Liv worked on.

The above shows the full poster as shown on their leaflets, advertising boards etc at a local shopping retail park. I couldn’t take a straight on photo as I would have to stand in the road and it’s way too busy during hours I’m willing to go over there but I think it looks cool regardless. So what did I think this year? Great, really enjoyed the whole show. We were there for around 2.5 hours, ate lots of really good food, had some nice drinks and it was nice to meet up with friends, have a chat and have a walk around. In all honesty I would have liked to have gone a couple times so I could have sampled more food but timeless this just wasn’t possible this year. I was really proud to see Liv’s work all around the site. She put a lot of work into her illustrations and as you’ll see from the billboard advert above they look really good. You can find her work at: http://www.livwanillustration.com I was impressed by the amount of space the festival had this year and was also happy some of our favourite things were cheaper. Our favourite food by far was the lamb box, absolutely delicious, I could a few of these, the kofta was also really delicious and we had some freshly cooked doughnuts that were yum. We didn’t watch any of the live cooking shows but we’re not really interested in those (I cook rarely and Liv was a professional chef for many years). You should also check out the Foodies Festival website Foodies Festival Edinburgh. Lots of information and gives you a great overview of what’s going on.