Bristol Food Connections. With meat.

Look at all this meat. Look at it.

Much meat. Look.

But we'll get to that in good time.

Bristol Food Connections, the city-wide food festival held a couple of weeks ago, was a great example of something Bristol does really well. I've always enjoyed how cultural Bristol can be, as it always seems to have something going on. Since the 2014 Food and Farming Awards moved down here this year, naturally we'd want a ten day long celebration of the producers and chefs of the south west to go along with that. That's obvious. But it wasn't just a few restaurant tie-ins and a market here and there - oh no. The BBC got involved, there were food talks and specialist evenings, and local restaurants did one-off meals in teepees. Yes, teepees. No, I don't know why. As someone who knows from organising, I'm impressed with the undertaking. Just think of how many emails they would have needed. The emails, man, think of the emails. Like, so many emails.

It would have been impossible to go to everything on offer, but I think I got the best of it by going to the city centre event right at the start of the festival. This was spread out over a quite a large area, but since the weather was nice I was happy to wander. I kicked off at the Slow Food Ark of Taste market at College Green, then moved down to the Love Food Producers Market and BBC @ Food Connections at Harbourside, and the Street Food market at Millenium Square.

This is where the meat comes in. Look at it again.

Same as before, but bears repeating.

What we have here is a selection of cuts from The Lost Farm, specialising in forgotten and rare breeds of animal. This is all Manx Loaghton Produce, rare breed lamb with four horns. Funny looking chaps. Sometimes the horn number can go up to six, apparently. Six! That is too many horns. The meat is raised for a little longer and has less fat on it, and I'll let you know how it tastes when I write up what I've done with it (spoiler: good. It tastes good).

I got this haul from my very first stop at the Slow Food market. To be perfectly honest I had no intention of buying any meat, but I spotted a box with a '£1 a pack' sign, and, by law, I am obliged to look through anything that says that. The box had a fair amount of offal in it, which I'm not crazy about, but also some lamb neck. 'Excuse me', says I 'Is that right? A pound for this lamb neck?'. I was prepared for this to be an error, because there's no way you can get any sort of non-innards meat for a pound, let alone lamb neck from rare breed lamb with four to six flipping horns. But 'No!', says the lamb lady 'A pound a pack is right, and there's a box over here which is two pound a pack with even more cuts'. I went quiet at this point, as I saw that my trip to the market was going to go in a very different direction than I had anticipated.

I got down to business. I pulled out some neck, some lamb shanks, and while I was waiting for someone to bring more shanks from storage I browsed the offal, and threw in a pack of kidneys. As I said, I'm not a fan myself, but Pete likes 'em, and since they were only a pound I figured I'd treat him. To kidneys. A pound, though! Do you know what you can get for a pound these days? Diddly shit is what you can get for a pound these days. All told I spent £7, and came home with four shanks, two packs of neck (each with 4-5 joints in them), and the kidneys.

Now bear in mind, this was the very first stall in the very first market I had stopped at. I felt energised from a good business deal and set out to see the rest of the festival with renewed vigour, swinging my bag o' meat next to me. To be fair, I didn't buy too much else (some smoked trout pate, some cake. You know, the usual), but I did try a lot of things and had an excellent time doing so. The Caephilly from Caws Cenarth? Creamy and delicious! Dried seaweed used as a seasoning? Um, sure, I guess! Why yes, I would like to try some blood, wine and chocolate salami, thank you! It tastes weird! How delightful!

I didn't go to any of the ticketed events in the BBC section (where you could go see people from off the telly talk at you in real life), but I did enjoy wandering around their interactive bits. It was clearly designed for children in mind, like planting workshops, smell tests, milking a model cow, etc. It's just the sort of thing I would have loved doing as a kid myself, or as a fairly drunk adult. Like, a bit more than tipsy, but not falling over. Liiiightly smashed, that's about the level, I think. Yes. Perhaps a demographic the BBC would like to target next year.

I walked home at the end of the sunny afternoon having thoroughly enjoyed myself, with some bargains in the bag as well. Well played, Brizzle. Well played.

Meat.