Gourmets on the footy oval

Today was Taste Of The Huon day, at Ranelagh. During the week Elf emailed me at work to ask "Do you want to go to the Cygnet Regatta this weekend?" (Cygnet is a small town south of Hobart). This morning as we packed to go, I asked for a few details. It turned out my wife didn't have any, but she was sure there was some sort of regatta, boat race, raft rally or possibly billycart derby on down there somewhere, so hey, let's just drive around.

Fortunately, in the course of the morning our Carlton River correspondent pointed out that the Taste was happening at Ranelagh (halfway to Cygnet) today, so we just headed for that and ended up giving all aquatic contests a miss.

The Taste Of The Huon is a scaled down version of the Taste Of Tasmania. The Huon Valley has always been the apple centre of Australia (in fact the whole British Empire, once upon a time). Now there is salmon farms, berries, gourmet hand-reared rare breed pork and ham, cheeses, boerwurst (not sure what that is) and a specialist dog biscuit bakery.

I am just trying to remember what we ate. Money is a bit tight, to the extent that if the plan during the week had been "let's go to Ranelagh and eat gourmet food" I probably would have said no. As such we were a bit unadventurous. We ate this and that, nothing too amazing. We watched a band called Groove Ganesh, a 4 piece rock combo fronted by a sitarist who sang mostly in Hindi. They did a cover of We Will Rock You. Michael ran around like a loon to the Indian beat. We left halfway through a tune that the sitarist introduced by saying "this one's kind of pensive".

We watched a Punch and Judy that was OK. The pulcinellist was pretty lucky he had a very good bunch of toddlers front and centre, shouting out all the right things at the right moments to keep it moving along, as his PA kept dropping out. One after the next a sausage machine turned the characters into sausages. First the baby, then Judy, then a policeman, then the inventor of the sausage machine who popped in to make sure things were going along OK. The kids roared with laughter every time.