Hastings Seafood Festival and Happy 1st Birthday Blog!

Well, amazingly it's a year since i started this blogger blog which means that my little laptop is a year old too. So here's a nice cheerful post to celebrate with.

It was the Hastings Seafood Festival on the 20/21st September and after attending last year i quite fancied going again. Last year the sun was shining, there was no breeze and the place was buzzing. There were restaurant doing sample dishes, mini portions so to speak. I think my favourite last year was a cuttlefish risotto cooked using the ink.

There was nothing else i fancied on offer in the way of hot food so i wandered along to the fish huts where one of the fishmongers was selling cold fish/shellfish. Last year i finished lunch by having some smoked eel and crevettes (oh and a glass of Pimms!)

I sat on a bench round the back of the fish huts soaking up the sea air, being watched by some greedy gulls.

This year mum mentioned she would come with me, and then D decided he'd come as well. So we all set off on the Sunday, travel was fine until we hit the part of the A21 where it narrows down to single carriageway, but the Sun was shining and we still made it there by about 12.30pm. The number of stalls and the size of the festival seemed to have almost doubled since last year, with the crafts stalls and produce stalls in a separate area to where the restaurants and catering stall were. The number of people seemed to have grown in proportion with the size of the festival. As by the time we'd walked from the multi-storey carpark, it was lunch time we decided to find some food for lunch first, so wandered around the catering area. The restaurant that did the risotto last year, had sadly sold out of their only squid dish already, so D and i had a beautiful King Scallop each, complete with the coral i'm pleased to say, while mum had a little boat of battered/breadcrumbed whitebait.

After walking round the rest of the stalls to have a quick look, i couldn't see anything i faniced. Not for lack of choice - there was a fish dish of every type; Indian, Japanese, African, French, BBQ, In a bun, on a Kebab skewer, soups..... But for me the plain cold seafood like i had last year was more appealing, so we walked on to the fish hunts where once again they were selling cold and unadulterated seafood. Mum and D decided they didn't really fancy anything there, so walked back to the main market and got a devilled mackeral each. They then came back to meet me on the bench where i sat last year, however it was in the shaddow of the fishhut so i suggested moving into the sun as there was a bit of a breeze which made the shade a bit too cool to be sitting still in, so we wandered down onto the beach which was busier than i thought it would be.

So we settled on the beach and tucked in. I had chosen a small dressed crab and some crevettes. They were selling the crabs on plates with a slice of lemon and piece of bread for £6 which i though was a little too much, so i decided to look inside the fishmongers at their produce counter. Inside they were selling similar dressed crabs wraped in clear film, the smallest for £4.20 which wasn't too much smaller than the ones they were selling on their catering stall, so it made sense to get one from there as i already had a piece of bread and lemon and a plate from buying the crevettes.

However i was feeling under a little pressure to hurry up and finish my lunch towards the end....not from mum or D......but i had someone else watching over my shoulder, just in case i should decide i couldn't finish my food.....

I don't know why but it didn't seem as exciting as last year, maybe last year it was because it was a spur of the moment thing and a lone adventure that i took on my own. It was still a lovely day though, nothing beats seafood in my books for a meal during lovely day out.