Yorkshire Welcome festival

This Sunday didn’t start off great as the day before Talldarkme was admitted again to hospital and I’d only managed to scrape together about 3 hours sleep. I knew I had to be in Thirsk for a butchery demo at lunchtime and frankly I wouldn’t be able to do anything at home other than sit around consuming my own body weight in tea and toast so this was a welcome distraction until visiting time. 

I’ve never actually been to Thirsk in the daylight as I usual go there for the Q Guild meetings of the North East region which are always in the evenings so this was my first chance to see it in daylight and I have to say the market square is well worth a visit for its traditional pubs and great shops selling local produce.

Dodging the summery showers I made my way across the historic square to Johnson’s butcher shop to meet husband and wife team Andrew and Sarah. The shop has been on the same site for over 100 years and the inside still has its charming glazed tile Victorian style interior. Not only was their counter impressively well stocked with a wide variety of meaty treats they also had a comprehensive cookbook library behind the counter for customers who want to know what to do with their meat.

As we talked about all things meat related, in particular their range of award winning pies and sausages, we could see the Yorkshire Welcome festival taking place in the market square. Even better a lot of the festival goers were coming into the shop to pick up their Sunday dinner on the way back to the car. This for me just proves how great these kinds of events can be to encourage people to go back to their local shops.

Soon it was time to head to the market square and watch Andrew do his thing, he’d chosen a lamb carcass to demonstrate on.  He started out by talking about how he takes great pride in sourcing meat from the local area so that he knows it has had a good quality of life, and then he went through each section of the lamb all the cuts and how to cook them. 

The meat was then auctioned off in batches of six and I was one of the lucky bidders so expect to see few lamb recipes on here soon! In total £270 was raised for Macmillan so it was time well spent for the soul and the belly. I spent the time after the demo perusing the stalls and picking up a few treats for me to try out on here later, there was an impressive amount of stalls offering everything from barbecued local meat to cupcakes. Impressively the event was organised by a group of Yorkshire loving locals who wanted to show off how great Thirsk and its produce is.  They did an excellent job and I hope they’ll hold the same event next year.