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Regular readers will know how much I enjoy helping my kids develop an appreciation for food. We regularly shop at farmers’ markets and specialty grocers, pick our own fruit, go foraging and fishing and cook together.

So I was glad to see all the great family-friendly activities at South Bank’s annual food & wine festival in Brisbane a few weeks ago. This year the theme was Regional Flavours and the creative minds behind the festival had come up with a number of fun ways for both adults and kids to learn about food.

I’ve previously blogged my favourite photos from the two-day festival, and a lengthy post about 20+ food producers from all over the state who exhibited at the festival. This final post covers some of the festival activities and some of what I ate there.

The Food Imaginarium

I started my Saturday at the Food Imaginarium, a colourful setting for a number of children’s workshops and classes.

Children could take their pick from drawing, craft (making a windmill), creating an apple person and cupcake decorating.

Friendly staff were on hand to guide and instruct and the tables were soon full of kids happily giving it a go.

Parents got in the act, too, helping their little one with the trickier bits.

The thought of dozens of kids with squishy bags of icing makes me feel a little light-headed so I was impressed by these super-convenient and squeezable icing containers. These make decorating cakes a relatively mess-free activity. Where can I get my hands on some?

The finished cupcakes – ta dahh!

After the cupcake workshop I watched Alice Zaslavsky (MasterChef Australia 2012) begin a ‘Pooh’s Crunchy Honeycomb’ dessert session.

Her cheerful and no-fuss approach went down well with the kids.

Unfortunately, technical issues — in this case, a non-working stove — meant that Alice had to ad-lib as they tried to sort out the problem but she managed a tricky situation very well.

Technical issues aside, the Food Imaginarium was a brilliantly designed and programmed venue for kids – I’d love to see something like this at every food festival.

Pop Up Garden Displays

After the Food Imaginarium I came across this fantastic garden installation outside the Epicurious tent. This interactive display was designed by Plant Up, who also did the amazing strawberry wall in The Hunting Club.

It was fantastic to see both big and little kids playing with the wheels and water cans and studying the plants.

Instead of being told not to touch the display, kids were encouraged to get their hands dirty.

How cool would it be to have one of these at home. Plant Up – do you do interstate orders?

Epicurious Tent

For bigger kids and adults, watching cooking demonstrations was an extremely popular activity.

Inside the Epicurious tent, Adam Liaw (MasterChef 2010 winner and fellow Adelaidian) proved to be a a gracious and hard-working host, presenting session after session with Chefs and cookbook authors including Paul West, Spencer Patrick ,Annette Fear, Damien Styles, Hayden Quinn, and Annabel Langbein (below).

Here he is with Nick Street Brown from COAST Hervey Bay.

Later on, I caught Anthony Puharich from Ask the Butcher present a session on lamb.

Anthony broke down a side of lamb, explaining how each piece should be cooked to make the most of it.

As a general rule,  expensive cuts like lamb back straps should be cooked quickly, while the more inexpensive cuts like the shoulder should be roasted, slow-cooked, stewed or braised for tenderness and to really bring out the flavour.

River Quay

A short walk away, River Quay was the setting for another stage for cooking demonstrations and some pop up stalls from the local restaurants along the river.

I keep spotting South Aussie wine everywhere.

Each of the pop up stalls has a few different tasting plates on offer. All plates are a reasonable $8 so you can mix and match.

This is the Confit duck a l’orange pithivier (slow cooked duck pie) from Aquitaine Brasserie. It’s pronounced great if a touch salty by the food writer eating it.

I sample the Balinese chicken sate skewers with roasted peanut sate sauce by The Jetty Southbank. The flavours are subtle and the seasoning is mild – it’s actually a little too mild for my tastebuds.

However, these Indonesian-style fish cakes with pickled cucumber and sambal tomat also by The Jetty Southbank really hit the spot. I’m loving the vinegary chilli dipping sauce and the salt flake garnish.

Wild mushroom arancini with reggiano veloute from Popolo Italian Kitchen and Bar also prove to be fantastic – full of unami flavour and extremely moreish.

The next two dishes from Stokehouse Q are pretty as a picture. Above we have the Citrus cured ocean trout with horseradish crème fraiche and shaved radish and below is the Grilled mirror dory with pickled Jerusalem artichokes and chimichurri.

Beautiful presentation and super-fresh fish make for two lovely dishes.

Cove Bar and Dining offer two dishes – these popular Appleton rum and cola pork belly sliders above and the Tequila lime prawn salad below.

I have no more room in my stomach for savoury food but somehow I manage to fit in dessert. Stokehouse Q offers a two-hander for dessert: salted caramel ice-cream and pistachio mousse profiterole.

The pistachio mousse profiterole is flavoursome and beautiful presented but perhaps an odd choice for festival food. Any kind of filled pastry is best served close to room temperature for optimum flavour and texture: served straight from the fridge, the mousse is cold and clammy in the mouth and the pastry is a little dry. However, the salted caramel ice-cream — an upmarket version of a mini Magnum — is insanely good, with a gorgeous inner ribbon of caramel running the length of it.

River Quay Tent

After my appetite is sated I wander into the River Quay tent to watch Gary Mehigan (MasterChef) and Po Ling Yeow cooking together and discussing the current season of MasterChef.

Gary and Poh know each very well and they’re both engaging, passionate and knowledgeable so this is a really interesting session. At the end of it, Poh presents the finished dish to the crowd and people eagerly line up for a taste.

Like them, I’m feeling inspired and energised about food and cooking. Regional Flavours has been a fantastic, eye-opening event. I’ve experienced so much and yet I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of Queensland’s amazing food scene.

I guess I’ll just have to plan a longer visit to Brisbane soon. You should, too.

Regional Flavours

Regional Flavours was the theme of South Bank’s two-day festival in 2013. Held every year in late July, the festival is Brisbane’s signature food and lifestyle event. This is my third post on this year’s festival. Check out my previous posts below:

1. Inspired by Regional Flavours; and
2. Discovering Queensland’s food producers at Regional Flavours.

Disclosure: I visited Regional Flavours as a guest of the South Bank Corporation and Brisbane Marketing. I stayed at Rydges South Bank, which is conveniently located around the corner from the South Bank precinct. As always, all opinions are my own. 

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Prior to visiting Brisbane a couple of weeks ago I was only vaguely aware of a few Brisbane food producers and had only a sketchy idea of the different food regions in Queensland.

Luckily, the theme of South Bank’s two-day food and wine festival was ‘Regional Flavours’ and the festival featured over 100+ food producers exhibiting from 13 different regions: Brisbane, Gold Coast and Hinterland, Sunshine Coast and Hinterland, Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim, Wide Bay Burnett, North Queensland, Granite Belt & Southern Downs, Taste Paradise – Tropical North Queensland, Darling Downs and Toowoomba, Redlands, Central Queensland and Moreton Bay.

Who knew Queensland had such a diverse food scene?

Over the weekend I joined the crowd happily wandering around the stalls, learning about different regions, sampling food products and chatting to the the producers.

These were some of my favourite stalls:

Like the bag says, I love feijoas but in Australia they’re hard to find unless you have a tree or know a friendly market gardener. I’ve only ever eaten them freshly picked and when I mention this to Peter Heineger at Hinterland Feijoas he tells me that there are only a handful of commercial growers in Australia. Hinterland Feijoas have around 750 trees and are actually Australia’s first commercial grower of organic feijoas.

Apart from selling the fresh feijoas they also produce a number of products using the feijoas, including jams, Balsamic glazes, chocolates, gelato and muffins. Later on I try their Feijoa and Rosella jam (gifted) on warm buttered toast and its lovely, full of flavour and sweetness. I imagine it’d be even better on freshly baked scones.

Next I sample some buffalo mozzarella made by Trevor Hart at Cedar Street Cheeserie, an artisan cheese maker specialising in soft cheese. It’s exquisite – full of delicate flavour with a texture that is the culinary equivalent of slipping into silk sheets. Stunning.

I then try the pan-fried buffalo halloumi and have a moment of sheer joy. Unlike some halloumis I’ve tried, the brine doesn’t overwhelm the magnificent flavour. This is the kind of cheese to build a meal around – all killer, no filler. Later on I discover that Trevor won Best New Product in Australia for his buffalo haloumi at the 2012 Delicious Produce Awards, as well as Best Artisan Dairy Producer.

If you’re a cheese lover you owe it to yourself to try this cheese. Cedar Street Cheeserie don’t have a website so head over to their Facebook page and harrass Trevor into building a site so we can all order his magnificent cheese online.

Based on The Sunshine Coast, The Noosa Chilli Company produces a range of award-winning chilli sauces ranging from mild chutneys to their X-Rated sauce  that is dispensed using an eye dropper. I loved this fantastic display of chillies on their stall – check out those  little round chilies, those unusual purple and white chillies and that massive beauty on top. Size doesn’t count when it comes to chillies – bigger is not necessarily better. I try some of their Mustard Chutney and it’s bursting with flavour – it’d be perfect in a ham and chedder cheese sandwich. Well worth a look.

I’m wandering through the crowds thinking about what to eat next — something that I do way too often — when someone calls out my name. It’s Lizzie from local blog Strayed from The Table who I met in 2012 when she visited Adelaide for Tasting Australia. Today Lizzie is helping her parents from Bunya Red Farm who are celebrating their first crop of chemical-free capers – see below.

I sample a caper and am struck by its delicate flavour. Many bottled capers are drowned in vinegar and salt so that the actual flavour of the caper is lost. But Allan and Mandy from Bunya Red gently salt their capers and serve them rinsed so that the true flavour of the capers shines through. I’ll be making something special with these. You can buy them online.

I continue my wander, snapping this lucky woman who is about to chow down on this totally delectable version of cheese on toast. I’m hungry again just looking at this.

It’s fantastic to see so many people talking to the producers and learning about Queensland’s food and wine.

I’m not a big wine drinker myself — Asian gene fail — but there’s plenty of wine companies — like 2nd 2 None above — exhibiting  for the serious oenophiles.

Don’t these canapés look exquisite?

They’re the lovely work of Champ Kitchen and Bar, just one of a dozen ‘food trucks‘ by local restaurants.

Next, I come across My City Garden, a company which sells native and solitary bee hives, cheese making kits, yoghurt making kits, and soap making kits. Check out their bee hotels below.

With alarming declining bee populations across the globe it’s nice to see a company encouraging people to support bees in their own backyard.

You can also buy a native bee hive with 5000 stingless, native bees including an active Queen. I love the idea of having a bee hive in the backyard and will work this into my garden plan.

Now while I love chocolate brownies, I’ve always thought of them as a happy home-made  treat – they’re like the jelly slice or lamingtons that my mum used to make for us. At Dello Mano, however, the humble brownie has been elevated to the high-end sweets arena, with gorgeous foil packaging and gift box presentation. (Incidentally, why do so many chocolate companies use brown and gold packaging? Is there some kind of psychological or sciential basis for this?)

Part of me loves the idea of a high-end brownie while part of me can’t get my head around it as the brownies I eat are usually served in the baking paper they were baked in. In any case the Dello Mano the stall is swamped with happy foodies. Perhaps the prominently displayed news article about Ashton Kutcher being a fan of their brownies is doing the trick? I try a peanut butter brownie to find out the truth. It’s pretty darn fine actually. Now that I come to think of it, I know plenty of people who’d prefer a box of brownies over a box of chocolates.

Moving on, I come across some lovely vanilla pods at the amusingly named Broken Nose Vanilla stall.This company uses no sprays or artificial fertilisers and their pods are priced by grade: A grade (17cm and longer) single beans $5; B grade  (13-17cm) single beans $3; and Extract grade (smaller, with high vanillin content) single beans $1. Broken Nose Vanilla also sell vanilla extract, syrup, sugar, tea, honey and coffee – see their online shop.

Next I come across the Buchi stall. Buchi sell a line of raw organic Kombucha elixirs using locally sourced turmeric, ginger, limes, galangal. Apparently the Kombucha is a living beverage that is fermented using a blend of organic tea, organic raw sugar, bacteria and yeast. I’m not sure what the health benefits are — improved digestion at a minimum I’d guess — but I try the Ginger Turmeric elixir and it’s delicious.

These delectable looking raspberries and cream pots are from My Berries, a new company based in Moreton Bay that grow their berries using chemical-free pesticides.

Now I’m not allergic to gluten but I do find adopting a gluten-free diet regularly seems to suit me. So I was interested to learn more about Zehnder’s range of gluten-free breads and cakes. Gluten free breads and cakes are notoriously hard to get right as they often come out chalky and dry. But I try the Chocolate Brownie and it’s superb – rich and gooey, with a fantastic texture and mouthfeel. Nice work.

Aren’t these fresh green peppercorn at the Sallt store gorgeous? Sallt specialise in beautiful Himalayan pink salt and a variety of pepper products – you can buy them from their online store.

Amongst from all the cooked and manufactured food and wine products, it’s also lovely to see that some regional food boards are selling produce from that region. Don’t these rhubarb bunches look fantastic?

Some beautiful pumpkins from Southern Queensland.

Next, I come across Alchemy Cordials, who produce a range of cordials, syrups and hot chocolates. Regular readers will know that I’m a chai nut so was eager to try their two Chai cordials that are designed to be mixed into warm milk – Chai Elixir, a more traditional Chai blend, and Chai of the Tiger, which is souped up with ginseng, guarana, ginger and black pepper.

When one of the owners find out I’m from interstate he insists on gifting me a bottle of each. Back home I try them with regular, soy and rice milk and quickly become addicted to both. They’re remarkably different but both unmistakably Chai in tone with lovely, well balanced flavours. I can see why Alchemy is doing so well with food service and retail – these products are great.

My last stop is at the Noosa Chocolate Factory which sells, yep, you guessed it, chocolate in all its glorious forms.

Their Rocky Road is promoted as being ‘Australia’s Best Fresh Rocky Road’ – see below.

I’m always skeptical of claims like this so back in my hotel room I examine the sizeable slab of Rocky Road in my media sample bag. The Noosa Chocolate Company’s version of Rocky Road sees pillowy raspberry and vanilla marshmallows layered with a delectable raspberry gel and covered with a thin layer of dark chocolate.

I break a piece of Rocky Road off and munch on it. Then I break off another piece. And another piece. It is, hands down, The Best Rocky Road I’ve Ever Eaten and I can barely restrain myself from eating the whole slab – it’s that good. Buy some. You’ll thank me later.

It’s been a wonderful, non-stop weekend of learning about Queensland’s diverse food scene and yet I feel that I’ve only just scratched the surface. I guess I’ll just have to visit again soon.

Next Regional Flavours post: what I ate at the Festival. It’s a long post (duh). With lots of photos. You can also check out my previous Regional Flavours post – Inspired by South Bank’s Regional Flavours.

Disclosure: I visited the Regional Flavours festival in Brisbane as a guest of the South Bank Cooperation. All flights, accomodation and transfers were courtesy of the host. Some meals and products were provided while I paid for others. As always, all opinions are my own.