Good Food & Wine Fair 2006

I'm officially on holidays (for the next few days anyway) and we were suppose to drive up to the Central Coast for a long weekend, but after last year there was no way that I would miss the Good Food & Wine Fair for 2006.

The organisers of the event lined up more than 100 food stalls boasting names like Wildfire, The Bathers' Pavilion and Longrain. They expected over 40,000 people and hoped to top last year's efforts of raising f $277,000 for the AIDS Trust of Australia.

I arrived early to see which restaurants were present and to work out what I wanted to buy before the popular items sold out.

Hyde Park got crowded pretty quickly

We bought $90 worth of vouchers ($50 for Jacky and I and the remaining $40 for Mum and Sophia). The girl selling the vouchers thought that we had made some mistake and kept saying "that's 36 vouchers!" and we were like "yes we know...".

One of my favorite items from last year was the mushroom beef burger by the Australian Mushroom Growers. After trying their burger, I ended comparing every single other burger that I had during the year to theirs and nothing came close. I ended up craving for their burger (in particular their creamy mayonnaise) for the rest of the year.

I was so pleased to see that they were doing burgers again this year. The beef had been replaced by chicken and the patty was topped off with a generous serving of pesto mayonnaise (just the way I like it). I thought the burger was excellent and my craving was satisfied for another year.

Next we moved on to Longrain for a Thai Noodle salad with BBQ Pork

Followed by a salad by a salmon salad by Scolarest

The description at the stand read: 'A nicoise salad of herb crusted salmon carpaccio served with oven roasted potato, asparagus, tear drop and grape tomato, kalamata olives, eggs, a roast garlic dressing and dijon mustard dressing'.

How do you say no to that??

Whilst lining up for the salad we noticed people walking past with a delicious looking seafood risotto. We headed in the direction that they came from and soon arrived at Industrie-South of France. The line was massive and got longer as we waited, it was obvious that it wasn't just us who wanted to try their risotto. Jacky gave it the big thumbs up.

Lucio's marinated bbq Quail ....finger licking good!

Jacky was still hungry so he bought a 'Famous Thai beef noodle soup' from

Arun Thai Restaurant.

I on the other hand was ready for dessert and had learnt a big lesson from last year i.e. if you see something you like buy it straight away or risk it selling out by the time you come back. Bill's had a joint stand with Delicious Magazine and were selling Bill Granger's raspberry & mascarpone tart. This was the perfect dessert for me because everyone knows my love for anything creamy (yummmm...). The dessert was divine; I knew it was bad for me and with each bite I could feel my cholesterol creeping up (high cholestrol runs in my family) but I just couldn't resist. I figured that if I died, at least it could be said that I died doing the thing that I loved.

There was also a passionfruit pavlova that I had my eye on, but we were running out of vouchers and by now some of the lines were crazy.

I had 2 vouchers left and wasn't quite sure how to use it...I eventually settled on a bottle of Sangria by iDrinx. Personally I thought this drink tasted nothing like Sangria and I wish that I spent my last vouchers on a sparkling grapefruit juice instead.

I also came home with a Delicious show bag, it was such a bargain! It had this great dessert cook book filled with the favourite dessert recipes of all these famous chefs (I think it retails for $30 in the shops?). Mum also scored a healthy drink ideas cocktail book from the Breville's stand.

I'm so sad to see good food month coming to an end, but what a great way to end it! Till next year...happy eating!