Good Food Show

Wow, what a weekend. I headed to the Good Food & Wine Show with my friend S. If anything was going to cheer me up after being burgled this was the thing. This show is excellent. I had no idea just how large it was going to be. It was held at the Exhibition Centre at Darling Harbour and they made use of every inch of this enormous space.


This was my idea of Heaven. We started the day with the Donna Hay show. As we walked in we checked our tickets and noticed our seats were in the front row. So close we could have reached out and helped her with the stirring. I thought she was excellent. She was very funny and easy going. I have only seen pictures of Donna so I had no idea what her personality was like. Either she is a very good actress or else she is great fun to work with. Being an optimist I will go with the latter. She cooked a thirty minute dinner and made it all look so easy. I think having her helper Stephen made things a lot easier. If only we could all have a Stephen in the kitchen.

After coming out from the Donna Hay show we had big grins on our faces and headed straight to the Frangelico stand where they were giving out tasty little cups of Frangelico and lime on ice. These were so good that we made a few repeat visits to this stand. Now I won’t go into a blow by blow description of all the wonderful food and wines we sampled because we were there for almost 5 hours and we never stopped for the whole time. We bought some terrific oils, dressings, desserts, spices and wines. Our arms were almost coming out of their sockets with all we had to carry home but we loved every minute of it.

Most of the wine exhibitors rely on the venue to supply wine glasses for tasting the wines. Unfortunately for us they ran out of glasses just as we were ready to start tasting. We looked on with envy as everyone around us grasped their sacred glass. Our solution was to queue up and attend one of the wine tasting sessions. Our session was “Whites with a zing”. We were so desperate to get our hands on a glass we even considered ‘borrowing’ a glass from the wine tasting. We were saved from criminal activities because as we were queuing up to go into the wine tasting a guy walked passed with a trolley of wine glasses. S went running after him and battled all the other desperate punters who wanted to get a glass too. Once we had our tasting glasses there was no stopping us. I was very impressed with all the different wines we tasted. In fact we tasted so many wines that we had a rosy glow as we were leaving and hardly noticed the circulation in our hands being cut off by the heavy goodie bags we were carrying.

This is a great day out and was perfect for a stormy Saturday like we had. I will definitely be making an annual pilgrimage to this show. The only difference is that next year I will be encouraging every Tom, Dick or Harry who has the remotest interest in Food and Wine to join me.