Get your name up in lights - Sydney Festival

Idea: Get your name up in lights!

With a tag line like "For the 23rd Kaldor Public Art Project, US artist John Baldessari is giving more than 100,000 people the opportunity for their name to appear in lights on the side of the Australian Museum. Will you be one of them?" Who could resist? I couldn't! I got my name up in lights! My time was 6.50pm tonight!

So it's official people - I'm famous! And anyone else can be too (so long as you get in on time!) It's quite an interesting experience to see your name up in lights, but more than anything, it's all a bit of fun and another bit of the Sydney Festival to engage in.

Pub lunch, Wildfire, followed by a dash of Smoke & Mirrors

 Idea: A day of eating and playing

The boy met me at work today and we were in the mood for a pub lunch. I ordered what I always do at the Hero of Waterloo: Lambshanks and the Boy ordered the Bangers and Mash. Good proper pub food. It's not the cheapest, due to location: The Rocks, but it's good tasty, hearty fare. The lamb always melts off the bone, the gravy is thick, salty and goes perfectly with green beans and mash. Apart from a random, appetising, sad looking bit of tomato of the Boy's, his meal is exactly the sort of pub food that we were craving.

A Wildfire style Wagyu flat iron steak 200g, burnt eggplant, variations on onion, aerated potato ‘veloute', rosemary and oxtail jus and a glass of Stoneleigh Pinot Noir wine for $30. Yes Please. I love these Fast Festival Feasts and have tried to go to as many as possible during Sydney Festival this January.

I've been meaning to go to Wildfire for ages now and thought that this would be the perfect chance. I know that in the past, Wildfire's reputation for rude staff has gotten the better of it, but on our visit the service wasn't bad at all. Although, there was a minimum level of service required for us seeing as we had one meal on our menu: wagyu, which they didn't even ask how we wanted it cooked. The meat was tender, the aerated potato veloute was essentially pureed potato and cream, which was an interesting take on the idea of potato mash being served with steak. The rosemary and oxtail jus had depth and theingredients complimented each other nicely.

Wagyu flat iron steak 200g, burnt eggplant, variations on onion, aerated potato ‘veloute', rosemary and oxtail jus.

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Quite a few of the sides looked like they were worth trying and we settled on a crunchy spinach side of some kind (that doesn't appear to be on their online menu). It was crunchy and refreshing. The views were of course to die for and the Boy and I were both happy with our Wildfire experience.

Next up, we were off to see Smoke and Mirrors:

Having a nice cold bottle of white wine

In the Festival Garden - it was very packed by the time the sun dipped down.

We needed another quick bite to eat so the Boy got a Chilli Dog, which he said was satisfactory.

I got some dumplings, which were fab!

Walking through the faux vineyard

Time for Smoke and Mirrors to begin!

The strong men were my favourite act

If it wasn't sold out already, I would highly recommend going to see Smoke and Mirrors. So instead I'll say that it deserved its many awards and try to get tickets next year! What a great night!

Sydney Food & Wine Fair: get your eat and drink on

30^th October 2010 from noon to 5pm Sydney Food & Wine Fair @ Hyde Park

Good food, good wine, sunshine, picnic rugs and entertainment. It must be the Sydney Food & Wine Fair, which was celebrating turning 20 this year. I often think that there is nothing better than sitting somewhere in the sun, either beach or park and devouring loads of tasty food and delicious wine with good people. This is why Sydney Food & Wine Fair always appeals to me so much. Especially because I haven't been able to go to many of the Crave International Sydney Food Festival events, bar the night noodle markets. Although this may have been because tickets to the progressive dinners sold out in hours.

There were cooking demonstrations by Masterchef contestants, some dance lessons by some reality dance show contestants (can you tell that I don’t watch much tv?) and music that surely the older people there would have enjoyed. But that wasn’t why we were there. We were there to drink, eat and lie in the sun digesting. Which we did. And there was plenty of space on the grass to do so.

Tempus Two’s wine was perfect for the mood. I had the fruity Moscato, which made me think it was summer already. We settled down with this and Wildfire’s lamb, peas and cannelloni with goat’s curd and a Thai style salad (from I can’t quite remember where?)

This was followed up by some serious lying in the sun, reading the free Sydney Morning Herald weekend paper and devouring pavlova from Bill’s. The pavlova was a definite highlight, crunchy and chewy with yoghurt and strawberries, so that it wasn’t too rich, and was served in a generous portion. Much larger than most of the other serving sizes, some of which could have been eaten in one mouth full.

Four in Hand’s offering of fish looked great, but we didn’t quite get around to trying it out. Fish being on the list of foods to avoid by my fellow food lover in crime. I did however, manage to sneak Café Sydney’s  trout, orange, beetroot, salmon roe salad past his eye. This was perfectly light and fresh to suit Saturday’s weather. (See image below).

I’ve been dying to try out Lucio’s hatted restaurant and their hot and spicy barbeque wings looked tempting, but we already had a BBQ planned that night. So it will have to wait until another time. Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream (not exactly a hatted restaurant) proved to be extremely popular, due to the strong sun and everyone was in a relaxed chilled out mood. The only suggestion I would have for the event organizers would be regarding the positioning of the coupon sales, as they blocked the pathway. The only negative comments heard all day was about this, because everyone knows that Australian’s don’t like queuing and walking through and potentially squashing plants in parks.

We had a few more glasses of wine and then headed off home to start preparing our BBQ. A great day of food, mild heatstroke, wine and oh did I mention the fab food?