George Square Garden
George Square Gardens open today for jazz with the first of the Jazz & Blues Festival shows taking place there, and next week on 21 July for the Edinburgh Food Festival.
This is of course just the start as there will be a month of music, shows and food to follow.
Edinburgh Food Festival has events taking place in the Treehouse Kitchen at Assembly George Square Gardens. Among the chefs turning up the heat this summer are Ka Pao Executive Chef Sandy Browning, and MasterChef alumni Sarah Rankin and Vijaya Kunaparaju who will each present a free cooking demonstration in the festival’s outdoor kitchen, from Friday 21 to Sunday 30 July.
This year’s programme will include demonstrations and workshops around Ethical Eating, Seasonality, Mood Impacting Foods, Plant Based Living and the Zero Waste Kitchen; with a different food focus for each day of the ten-day event, including free daily children’s activities to kick off each day’s line-up.
Saturday 22 July will be Spice Saturday, with a series of workshops and tasting events that’ll spice up your summer. Fife-based private chef and MasterChef 2023 contestant VijayaKunaparaju will lead a Children’s Curry Workshop at lunchtimebefore sharing her secrets on how to prepare the perfectdosa with a practical demonstration making the South Indian savoury crepes in the afternoon. The seasoning experts from BoTree Seasonings will take visitors on a Spice Voyage with a tasting event exploring single origin spices and the stories behind them. And Ka Pao Executive Chef Sandy Browning will be joined by founder Jonathan MacDonald to present a cooking demonstration on seasonality and how they blend the best of seasonal Scottish produce with Southeast Asian flavours to create signature dishes like their Arbroath smokie miang, with galangal, spinach leaves and peanuts.
Later in the festival, Edinburgh community garden Rhyze Mushrooms will explore the key role that mushrooms play in our planet’s eco-system and why the future is fungus with a variety of free mushroom themed workshops and cooking demonstrations, including a Children’s Mini Mushroom Alchemy Workshop, an oyster mushroom cooking demonstration, and a talk and discussion on How to Build Food Sovereignty in Scotland.
The final weekend of the festival turns its focus to Wild Food and Plant Power. Edinburgh Fermentarium will lead a double bill of masterclasses, teaching visitors how to prepare their own kimchi and kombucha; cookbook author and MasterChef 2022 Finalist Sarah Rankin will cook up a wild feast live in the Treehouse Kitchen; and award-winning author, wild food expert, and herbalist Mo Wilde will share her experience living on a foraged diet and lead a discussion on Scotland’s wild food biome.
The ninth edition of Edinburgh Food Festival will take place in the bustling festival hub of Assembly George Square Gardens. The ten-day event is an annual celebration of Scotland’s larder, placing Scottish produce firmly at the centre of the table. Edinburgh Food Festival 2023 will run Friday 21 July through to Sunday 30 July at Assembly George Square Gardens. For more information and to sign up to receive updates follow @edfoodfestor visit www.edfoodfest.com.
Superstar feline
We met Mr Spock the wandering cat of Marchmont and were honoured by his presence – somewhat fleeting it has to be said since he clearly had other places to visit.
But what a superstar he is – with his own Facebook page.
Artwork launch
On Saturday there will be a unique day-to-night event of ART / MUSIC / PERFORMANCE and the launch of brand new permanent artwork at Settlement Projects 34a Haddington Place Leith Walk.
WHERE IS YOUR PLACE IN THE STARS? A long artwork depicting the people of Leith Walk against the constellations and celestial bodies that surround them will be presented along with art projections depicting movement, astrophysics, neuroscience, and the metrics used to measure space and time.
With Live music by
TXTERT
PAPERMAN
CIARAN LLYRIC
SAMWOODOOWMAS
MANNEQUIN FACTORY
MICROWAVE MEAL FOR ONE
Performances by
JAS
CHLOE LAMONT
MARIOLA ALBINOWSKA
With
DEEJAY YOURSELF
And featuring a unique window installation by artist duo
CHRIS COATHAM and JOEL DAVIDSON
So pop in and find your place to enjoy art, music, performance, and visuals at Leith’s community junkshop, SETTLEMENT PROJECTS.
Fringe App
You may as well make your lives a bit easier if you intend going to any Fringe shows in August by downloading the app.
The new app has been sponsored by Scottish Enterprise, Playbill and Synatec and is now available on Google Play and on the App store.
The Fringe Society worked with Australian-based agency equ on developing the new app as the company had already worked with Perth Fringe Festival on their app.
There is an option to enable notifications about when your next show will start – and there is also a Shake to Search function providing you with a random show suggestion.
e-ticket QR codes will be stored in the app and integrated with your day by day show schedule – and will – according to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society – be a very easy user experience. You can also add tickets for several shows in one “simple” transaction.
There was resounding criticism last year when the Fringe Society said that they had no funds for the restoration of an app as it would have cost around £100,000 to redevelop what they already had.
Shona McCarthy, Chief Executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, said:”Developing an app required to support the scale and complexity of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe takes a significant period of time and resource, and we are delighted to be able to share the exciting features which will be launched within the app for this year’s festival. We recognise the app is a key tool for Fringe artists, with many audiences using it to explore new ideas and performances they may not have yet experienced, and the “nearby now” functionality is particularly useful for performers who offer free shows within the programme.
“We’ve ensured that the new app does all that and more, and while there’s still a few more weeks before it’s fully ready, I can’t wait for Fringe audiences to download it and support the thousands of artists performing in Edinburgh this summer.”
Subscribe to the Edinburgh Reporter
Please do consider subscribing to our monthly newspaper which comes out on the first of every month. If you do then it helps us to keep producing the paper and to maintain news for free for everyone online and in our newsletters.
Click on the image of our July front page below to sign up.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
