CAMPERVAN DAYS OUT: Wasabi, Smartphone Food and a Strange Incident

Last weekend Glyn and I had a fantastic time at the Abergavenny Food Festival in Wales. This festival happens every year in September and is a bit like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival except that, instead of the town being covered in comedy, it is covered in FOOD! We ate LOTS of good food and bought foodie items from some great local producers but there was a strange incident that still remains a mystery…

Abergavenny is a pretty town with an old castle and it was great to watch the fire pit food being cooked in the old ruins.

There was just about every different type of food to eat and we had a juicy venison burger one day and some open-oven pizza the other as well as trying some fresh-made Welsh Cakes (I’ve got to find a recipe for these that works in the van).

Welsh cakes small

We also had some Poffertjes which I love (these come from Holland and are little puff pancakes that are served with butter and icing sugar – goodbye waistline!).

Great Produce

Wasabi small

As well as eating, I bought some great produce and one of the quirky things was Wasabi plants.

It is the roots of these plants that are used to make the hot, green mustard that is served with sushi. The leaves and stems taste great too and I am going to grow them as a salad plant. If you live in your van or go away for a long time you could easily grow these in a pot and take it with you.

Check out The Wasabi Company here

Smartphone Photography

I was also lucky to get on to one of the expert workshops there and really enjoyed learning about creating good food photos on a smartphone from Rob Wicks at Eat Pictures

Rob Wicks

Eat Pictures.

For you foodies, the 3 key things I learned at his workshop were:

  • tell a story with your pictures
  • bounce light back on to the food with something white, even a piece of paper
  • my phone can do a lot more clever editing things than I realised

The Mystery…

On the first day we parked Trev-the-Prev, our campervan, in the event car park which was basically a field on the edge of the town. When we came back at the end of the day we noticed that the dashboard light was on that showed that one of the doors was open. This was strange as we are usually pretty careful about locking up the vehicle when we leave it as all our stuff is in there.

We noticed that the open door was actually the back hatch. Our hearts sank as we thought that we must have been broken in to especially as my laptop and our television were in the back. But strangely, nothing had been damaged or stolen but there was a key left on our back shelf!? It looked like a room key as it had a white fob on it with the writing ‘Room No 2’ on it.

We handed it in to one of the stewards at the gate and he asked us if we had made any ‘special’ friends (which we hadn’t) so we can only assume that somebody thought that our vehicle belonged to somebody else although Trev is pretty distinctive. Also we don’t know how they got in as there was no damage to any of the locks.

So to the person in Room No 2, I’m sorry if whoever you were expecting didn’t show up but we hope you had a nice weekend anyway!

Follow Summer on Instagram at thecampercookie