As a child, bonfire night was one of the most exciting events of the year. It meant wrapping up warm, stepping outside to eat hot dogs and mushy peas with mint sauce and oooing and aaahing at the marvelous colourful sparks that popped and whizzed over my head. I have lived in London for five bonfire night’s now and spent three of them in Chichester at my boyfriend’s parents bonfire party. Every year they hold two parties at their house, one in summer and one around 5th November, each with over 100 guests. I now know that a Hemingway party means good food because Jack’s mum is a fantastic cook and spends two days preparing food for the parties that they hold.

As autumn is the perfect time of year for warming pies and comforting crumble, she made an array of different pies from sweet potato and bean to beef, chicken, cheese, lamb and chorizo – it is entirely by coincidence that she likes to use Jus-Rol pastry, it’s her ready made pastry of choice and good for vegans. Not to mention the bonfire cake – a giant bomb of chocolate cake with a whipped cream, cornflake and malteaser center with more whipped cream smothered on top and orange flavoured Matchsticks and Cadbury’s flakes sticking out.

Unfortunately this year it rained… and rained… and rained, which ruined a few of the fireworks that were brought by the guests. There was, however, an astoundingly large bonfire (for which we made a guy), which was still alight in the morning after a nights rainfall.

Naturally I tried all of the pies, my favourite being the chorizo.  Sunday brought us a day of more pie and a welly-clad trip to the local beach at West Wittering. It was overcast and cold so there weren’t many other people on the beach bar a few families walking their dogs. We made the walk fun by playing beach Olympics, which included tripple jump, discus played with a large shell and high jump (hard in wellies!)

I always love a relaxing weekend break to Chichester and last weekend was certainly no exception – although now my new jeans are starting to feel tighter already. I’ll probably be laying off the pies for the next few weeks.

Sarah

Tags: Bonfire Night, Chichester, Jus-Rol Pastry, West Wittering beach

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Events, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.