Ladies and gentlemen, I give you huge, I mean really huge beetroot! Personally, I suspect they had been fed bits of special ‘stuff’, maybe a dram or two, otherwise how could they possibly get to be so BIG? These, you may gather, were not the usual entries in the beetroot category. They were in fact donated by one of our judges, just to demonstrate what we might aim for. They certainly would have won the giant beetroot category – if we had one! We donated them to the harvest festival so you might have seen them again at their second guest appearance in the village together with some equally large swedes.
This must have been a good year for apples, such was the number of entries we had. We had to keep moving the other produce entries around to make room for them. We also had a glorious array of tomatoes, but no shallots. It goes like that, some years it’s an ‘onion year’ or a ‘runner bean’ year, this year it seemed to be apples. We had a couple of good sized marrows and a good number of potatoes. I thought I identified some nice looking ‘fir apple’ variety – but they didn’t win – well, what do I know?
Our baking categories this year included curry flavour biscuits. How peculiar they were. The thing is, you don’t get a guide or recipe to work from so how the thing you make tastes is entirely up to you. One entry had a sort of curry and cheese flavour and one of the others was a sweetish curry flavour. They pretty much split the room in the way that Marmite does. Mind you, there were only a few crumbs of each left so I guess people were curious enough to keep coming back for more. I must say I was glad to see lemon drizzle cake in the categories this year as it’s probably my all time favourite cake, though my mate’s only came second – a decision which was such a travesty of justice, I don’t know what the judge was thinking. However, drum roll….. the Husbands machine bread came first, so at least some face was saved in the Williams house this year, phew. Our baking judge had a hard time of it to be honest, because I would have found it very difficult indeed to separate the entries into first, second and third. Sometimes however, it is made a little easier because the entry has got some additional ingredient – usually for embellishment purposes, or has gone off on a limb and used the wrong filling. So, for the record, Victoria sponge should only have strawberry or raspberry filling (and definitely no butter icing or cream) and butterfly cakes should not have raspberries or sprinkles on top, just icing sugar to dust. This does not in any way detract from how fabulous they taste, in my humble opinion.
We had a separate judge to do the jams, jellies, chutneys, drinks and eggs. Now, I don’t know how you judge the difference between fizzy elderflower champagne and beech leaf noyau (no, I have no clue either) – anyway both were alcoholic and I must confess that I had a little sip. I would have been happy to drink either to be honest, but I think that the cherry liqueur won and I can tell you it had the most wonderful colour.
We had a huge display of cut flowers this year – which brightened the room no end. I should mention that my father in law managed to come second with his flowers – despite the fact that he was lying on a sun-lounger on a cruise ship at the time. My skills at flower arranging are now famous!
We had some extremely amusing limerics which I cannot print here for lack of space of course, but I can tell you that my mate Al scored a first place – to his great delight. As is now traditional, our produce judge judged the limerics and wrote one of his own at the end of the show.
Our craft category went from strength to strength this year and we had a number of really good paintings. The winning one was still wet, so it’s never too late you know!
Children’s entries were down this year as the school entries got stuck in school. I do sympathise because the timing of the show was really tight for them this year – they would only have been in school for half a week prior to the show. It was a shame, so I do hope to see them next year. Finally, our photographic category was to the usual high standard. We are open to suggestions for entries and generally print the categories early in the year so there is plenty of time to get your pics printed off.
We had some new helpers this year, keen growers and makers of strange drinks (!). We have introduced them to Al’s marvellous computer entry system and they are keen to get involved next year too. This is really good news as you will have seen my plea for ‘new blood’ in an article earlier this year. Our next step is to meet up and review what went well, what didn’t and make a few early plans for next year. If you want to get involved, please do, we would love to have you and it is a lovely villagey thing to do. Oh, and this of course, includes our new residents at either end of the village. I know for sure that a few from the Redrow estate entered the show which is really great.
Finally, I must once again, thank all the judges who have a really hard task, the organisers and the entrants – the show would not happen without any of you.
