Anniversary

11 Years ago this place was known as The Baltic Tavern and I watched a game of football between England and Germany which England won 1-0 with a headed goal by Alan Shearer from a David Beckham free kick in the 53rd minute. More notably I bumped in to Jen and at some point around 10pm decided that I was going to kiss her, right between those brick pillars. 6 Years later to the day we married at The Vermont Hotel, a few hundred yards up the hill at the end of the street. This weekend we are staying at an apartment a few hundred yards in the other direction with the express purpose of eating and drinking as much as we can for the EATng! food and drink festival.

We drove down via Jedburgh for a change from the usual choice of either the A1 or the Coldstream route. I'd forgotten how much more picturesque this route was, though it's a fairly slow road compared to either of the others. I also failed badly with navigation at the Swan House roundabout and we ended up in Gateshead briefly, not a pretty diversion to have made, which meant in total the journey was three and a half hours.

Our apartments are nice though, my high hopes for the Staybridge Suites did not disappoint and we have nearly everything e need for a weekend of eating and drinking, though we did pack a set of kitchen knives as we're quite particular about the quality of our cutting implements.

A light meal of rib-eye steak and mushrooms and a bottle of rather tasty valpolicella preceded our trip to the launch party of the festival. This consisted of a small local beer festival, a load of Lindisfarne oysters, the north-east finalists of last years Masterchef: The Professionals making canapés, a local sausage bbq and John Collingwood mixing up some cocktails.

It was great fun, though I'm not sure it warranted the £18 ticket but having bought those months ago i'd largely forgotten we'd paid to get in. Highlights were, for me, the Laphroig Manhattan that John Collingwood made for me at Jen's request, it was very sweet which I wouldn't normally do in a Manhattan but with the Laphroig it was a good match and stood up to the power of the peat and smoke. Whilst I was drinking that someone plonked a small tub of blackcurrant and licorice ice-cream on my table which put me firmly in taste heaven. The Lindisfarne oysters were also very good though there were some problems with getting some of them open due to lack of experience on the part of some of the staff, Jen even elbowed in and opened herself a couple, mainly to give the man a break. On the canapé front there was something on a small plastic spoon that looked a bit like tuna mayo with peas in it and the peas were absolutely gorgeous! I've only recently started to buy fresh peas, having used frozen garden peas for a very long time, and these were big and firm and bursting with flavour when they popped under your bite.

Lowlight was, unfortunately, the bbq. It was a crying shame to see such a fine array of sausages murdered in front of us on a grill that plain didn't work. The guys behind it said that one half had no heat whatsoever and the other instantly incinerated anything you put on i so they wee having to try and juggle the bangers back and forth. It must have been hard work for them to try and cook 300 sausages under those conditions.

Our taxi driver on the way home delighted us with a tale of taking some out of towners down to The Stadium of Light in Sunderland to see The Kings of Leon. When asked if they could book a return journey he told them that he was sorry but two trips to Sunderland in one day was not possible and they would have to find someone else, priceless :)