Campsie Food Festival 2006

We headed straight from our monthly shop at the Good Living Growers Market in Pyrmont, to Campsie in Sydney's inner west for the Campsie Food Festival.



As always for this event, Beamish Street was closed off to traffic, although the hungry hordes created plenty of traffic jams amidst the myriad of stalls.


It's Geoff!

We arrived just as Geoff Jansz appeared on stage for his first cooking demonstration of the day. He explained the sponge-like nature of eggplants, did tricks with Vietnamese rice paper sheets, and had soon won the entire audience over with his cheeky charm.

The food stalls beckoned though, and here's a little of what we saw:


Korean pancakes
(to the left are pig trotters which were surprisingly tasty)


Gimbap (Korean sushi)


Korean fried rice


Barbecue seafood skewers


Gozleme stall

Why is it that they only appear at food festivals in Sydney?


Gozleme on the grill


Fried noodles


Indonesian appetisers


Spring rolls

At four for $3, these spring rolls were too much of a lure for one of us to resist. The stall was frying these in tiny litle household pots so the queue took a while, but the smiling workers fried their little hearts out, and soon we had our bounty.


Spring roll innards

These were made with pork mince and cabbage in a thick viscous sauce. At first it was strange, but like most fried foods, these soon won me over. It was a cold day too, which warranted a trek back to the stall to get another order!


Tteokbokgi (Korean rice cake in chilli sauce)

After some deliberation, I finally opted for the tteokbokgi, an intriguing looking-dish which I figured I should try.


The dish featured fat starchy rods of glutinous rice cake simmered with fish cake slices, cabbage and served with a whole boiled egg. The sauce (made with Korean kochujang sauce) was sweet, peppery and packed a fair bit of heat.

I love my starch so this went down a treat. It's stodginess and heat (both physical and chemical) made it perfect winter comfort food.

Back to the stage to watch a troupe of Korean performers, dressed in gorgeous vibrantly coloured traditional costume, perform a dance with fans...



and then do a quick costume change and drum their little hearts out. I loved the drumming, which most Westerners tend to associate as being blokey and rock n' roll. This drumming was graceful, harmonic and almost hypnotic in its soothing rhythm. The girls at the back did some very funky moves too as they jumped, spun and rotated their torsos to strike all three drums in complex patterns.



And then it was over.
Until next year, that is.


Related GrabYourFork posts:
Campsie Food Festival 2005
Campsie Food Festival 2004