Calling All Foodies: Want a Wild & Slow Weekend?

Festival season over? Not if you’re a foodie it’s not!

This weekend brings the second Wild & Slow, the National Wild Food Festival, to Co. Wicklow.

This Saturday and Sunday, the 10^th and 11^th of November, Wild & Slow 2012 will showcase and celebrate everything that is good about Irish food - fresh, local, traditional and wild.

Macreddin Village in the heart of Wicklow is the host location for the weekend’s activities. The winter-themed festival will run from afternoon into crisp dark evening, with “plenty of wood-burning braziers, mulled wine and roasted chestnuts”. Anyone else feel like bursting into a Christmas song?!

Wild berries, fruits, flowers, mushrooms, game, fish and our traditional methods of preserving them, whether pickling, preserving, smoking or salting and curing…Wild & Slow 2012 will showcase these foods.

In addition to the fantastic foods on sale from the many stallholders, there will also be wild-food workshops, tastings, talks and demonstrations taking place around Macreddin Village. There will be something to spark the interest of everyoneacross a wide range of subjects including; mixing and infusing Wild Irish foraged ingredients into seasonal cocktails, mushroom harvesting and the top ten Irish edible wild mushrooms, a master class in game handling and stalking and photographing wild deer herd and feathered game in the wilds of Wicklow.

In its inaugural year,Wild & Slow 2011 attracted over 1,100 guests to sign up and attend the various workshops.  The Wild & Slow 2011 Street Market footfall was in excess of 2,800 and nearly 200 people enjoyed Irelands first ever complete Wild Foods Dinner.

 

Wild & Slow - A festival for food lovers, taking place this weekend in Wicklow

Some of the workshops across the weekend include:

Photo-stalking in The National Park This will involve hiking several miles in and around Wicklow, to stalk and photograph the resident wild deer herd and feathered game with photographer Frank Doyle on Saturday. There will be a photo competition of participants work, with judging on Sunday.

Blackberries and beyond Ireland has 327,258 km of common Irish grass verges and hedgerows. In this workshop, Evan Doyle, Ed Hick and Biddy white Lennon will concentrate on what is available there for free, where to look for it, and when it is best harvested, using the Wild & Slow templates to bring participants through each season.

Furred game tasting workshop Of our native game. A tasting of rabbit, hare and venison. Three classic game meats, prepared for evaluation. Derry Clarke, l’Ecrivain, with Evan Doyle leads the attendees through this workshop, highlighting their differences in taste and texture.

Black and Blue. And Red all over Matching game with wines workshop. Gregory Alken, Director of Febvre Wines with Evan Doyle, serves tastes of Irish Game, accompanied by some of the worlds “gamiest” wines.

Connecting with Wild plants Presentation by Herbal medicine academic, Judith Hoad, member of the IAMMH, (Irish Association of Master Medical Herbalists). This workshop will explore information gathered and used in mainstream medicine and holistic medicine concerning human relationships with plants.

Back to the Basics A workshop where Darina Allen, Ballymaloe, will focus in depth on the traditional methods of preserving, as used by our grandparents. Pickling, drying and potting that gave them tastes of summery fruit in jams well after the trees were bare, cured meats and fish in the darker months, and allowed them have vitamins and minerals while nature slept. 

 

Wild & Slow 2012: Saturday 10th & Sunday 11th November from 12pm – 8pm at the BrookLodge Hotel, Macreddin Village, Aughrim Co. Wicklow. 

For more information, see www.wildandslow.com, www.slowfoodireland.com and  www.brooklodge.com