Farmer's Market Harvest Battle

The first Farmer's Market Battle was good fun the other week.

At the head of the market, near the steps, a large stall was set up with two cooking stations. One of these stations was the base for Southside restaurant Cookie and the other The Sisters restaurant all the way from the Wilds of Glasgow's Westend. (The two places and host played up the rivalry between the South and West as much as they could and the whole thing was done in a great spirit.)

As the host announced, the aim of the day was three cook offs - one every hour - in which a chef from each restaurant would run round the market purchasing ingredients and then return to their station and magically turn these into delicious culinary delights in a Ready Steady Cook ten minute style. These were then dished up to lucky onlookers and a vote was taken as to which was the best.

We only caught the middle of the three events with Cookie needing to play catch up after an earlier win to the Westend invaders. It was all very well put together with small webcams and giant screens set up to allow everyone to get a good look at the fine detail of the dishes being pulled together. I heard one lady say it was "just like something off the telly" which I think was meant as a glowing compliment. The two chefs were good fun with the chef from The Sisters very good on camera, making lots of little jokes to the audience and clearly loving being involved. She was also very gracious in the face of a very strong southside biases. The host was great, I'm not sure who he was but it was to his huge credit that the whole thing ran so smoothly and professionally. He linked all the cookoffs together, introduced the dishes and asked lots of interesting little questions of the chefs teasing out the hows and whys of what they were doing. The only downside was the judging session with lots of people crowding forward hoping to get a bite but only a dozen or so managing to get a bowl. It might be an idea to pick 12 folk ahead of the dish up and have them sitting somewhere that the audience can see their reactions and allow these 12 to try both dishes and then vote in the old green pepper/ red tomato system.

All in all though a great event and one it would be fun to see repeated at future Farmer's Markets. It added a nice extra dimension to the market and as you can see from the above photo the place was mobbed. Maybe they should have one market a month with additional events?